Drone & Tanpura
A steady pitch to sing or play against: a tanpura (a recording of a real one, or one made by your browser), a held shruti-box drone, and single reference tones. The recorded tanpura loads a short loop from this site when you press Start; the other sounds are made by your browser.
Drone
Four plucked strings in a slow cycle, like a real tanpura.
Settings
Pure is the beat-free interval you get by tuning by ear: Pa is 3:2 above Sa (702 cents). Equal-tempered matches a keyboard or harmonium: Pa is 700 cents, about 2 cents lower.
On a phone
While a sound plays, this page asks your browser to keep the screen on.
Plays the sound through your browser's media player, so a phone may keep playing with the screen locked or the silent switch on, and may show play and pause on the lock screen. Not yet tested on real phones: if you hear nothing with it on, switch it off.
On iPhone and iPad the sound may stop when the screen locks or you switch apps, so keep this page open in front. If you hear nothing at all, check the silent switch.
Reference tone
One steady note, like a pitch pipe, at the reference A4 above. Tap to hold it; tap it again to stop.
Phone speakers cannot play the lowest bass notes; you will mostly hear their overtones. Headphones help for bass guitar and cello.
How to use it
- Pick your Sa, the note you call "home". If you use the tuner, your Sa is already set here.
- Press Start tanpura. The four strings are plucked in turn: the first string, the two middle Sa strings, then the low Sa an octave below.
- Sing or play against it. If your instrument is slightly off the standard pitch, move Fine tune until the drone matches it.
The recorded tanpura is a real acoustic tanpura, with its jawari: the curved bridge (with a thread under each string) that makes a tanpura's overtones bloom and slowly move. It plays in a loop of about half a minute, so you will hear it repeat. Other keys use the nearest recording played a little faster or slower. The computer-made tanpura imitates the jawari with measurements, not yet checked by a musician's ears.
Recorded tanpura: “Acoustic Tanpura” 4, 5, 10 and 12 by sankalp (Sankalp Gulati), recorded at Dhrupad Sansar, IIT Bombay, from Freesound, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Trimmed, joined into loops and played at other speeds here. Full credit and licence.
The plucking speeds are a musician's choice, not a standard. Settings are remembered on this device only.
Keyboard shortcuts
- Spacestart or stop the drone
- ← →move Sa down or up a semitone
- [ ]fine tune down or up 1 cent (hold Shift for 10)
- Escstop every sound
- ?all shortcuts, and the tour again
- Ggo to the tuner (M goes to the metronome)
Shortcuts pause while you type in a field or use a slider.
Letter, number and punctuation shortcuts can be turned off: use the Keyboard shortcuts switch in the footer, under Display. Space, Enter, the arrow keys and Esc keep working.