Online Guzheng Tuner

21 strings, one repeating five-note pattern

A modern guzheng almost always ships tuned to D-pentatonic: D, E, F♯, A, B — do, re, mi, so, la, with no fa or ti — repeated across roughly four octaves, from D2 at the lowest string up to D6 at the highest. Once you know that five-note shape, all 21 strings are just the same pattern climbing: string 21 is D2, string 16 is D3, string 11 is D4, and so on, five strings apart for every octave.

Where the pitch actually comes from

Each string crosses its own movable bridge — a small wooden or plastic support, sometimes called a “goose foot” for its shape — before running on to a tuning peg at the far end. The peg sets fine pitch, the same way a guitar peg does; the bridge positionsets the string’s working length, which is the bigger lever and the one guzheng players reach for first. Sliding a bridge toward the peg end shortens the speaking length and raises pitch; sliding it away lowers it.

Tuning by microphone, string by string

1. Start with string 8 (A4) if you have nothing else to go on. It matches concert pitch exactly, so it is the easiest string to check against a piano, another tuner, or your ear alone. Everything else follows the same D-pentatonic pattern from there.
2. Pluck one string at a time, a normal playing pluck, and let it ring. Check the octave number as well as the letter — B2 and B4 both read “B”, two octaves apart, and a string that slipped a full octave in shipping or storage will still show the right letter.
3. Adjust the peg first for small errors. Only reach for the bridge if a string is so far off that the peg runs out of safe travel — moving a bridge changes string tension more drastically and is the tool for bigger corrections or a full key change (below).
4. Work outward from your reference string — low to high or high to low, whichever direction you started in — rather than jumping around. Each string you settle slightly changes the tension across the soundboard, so a second pass after the first is normal, not a sign you did it wrong.

Changing key: it's mostly a bridge job, not a peg job

Guzheng players change key far more often than they retune from scratch, and they do it by moving bridges, not by walking every peg to a new pitch. Shifting a handful of bridges — commonly the ones under the B and E strings in each octave — a step in one direction retunes the whole instrument from D-pentatonic into an adjacent key (G or C pentatonic, for instance) while keeping the same open, unfretted playing technique the instrument is built around. The dial above reads whatever the new target notes are just as well as it read the D-pentatonic ones; only the chart changes, not the tool.

Equal temperament vs. traditional pentatonic tuning

The frequencies above are standard 12-tone equal temperament — the same reference every other instrument on this site uses, and the version that matches a piano or any other fixed-pitch instrument you might play alongside. Traditionally, guzheng was tuned by ear in a pentatonic just-intonation that spaces some of those intervals slightly differently. Both are “correct” guzheng tuning; equal temperament is simply the more practical default for checking pitch against a tuner or another instrument, and the gap between the two is small enough that most players never notice it outside a mixed ensemble. Our guide to cents covers why tuning systems can disagree by a few cents and still both be right.

Frequently asked questions