Tone check
Check your guitar tone with your phone
Settings on a page are a starting point. Your amp, your speaker and your room decide how they sound. The tone check listens to 8 seconds of your amp through your phone's microphone and tells you what stands out: too much low end, muddy low mids, scooped mids, harsh upper mids or fizz on top. Then it tells you which knob to try first, and you play again to hear whether it got better.
Check your tone with your phone
Play for 8 seconds near your amp and your browser tells you what stands out in the sound. Free, no account needed. The audio never leaves your device.
Hold the phone about 30 cm from the speaker, pointing at it. Play chords or a riff at the volume you normally play.
This reads the balance of the sound in your room, not the record's settings, and it gives a direction rather than a knob position.
What does the tone check listen for?
It splits the sound into five bands, from 80 Hz to 10 kHz, and looks at how the energy is shared between them. Five things can stand out:
Too much low end
The bottom of the sound booms and covers the notes, most of all on palm mutes.
Bring the bass down before anything else.
Muddy low mids
Chords blur together and single notes lose their edge.
Take some bass out, and some gain if it is high.
Mids scooped out
It sounds big on its own but the notes get lost, and it will vanish next to a band.
Bring the mids up before you touch the gain.
Harsh upper mids
The sound bites hard and gets tiring to listen to at volume.
Lower the presence first, then the treble.
Fizz on top
There is a buzzing, sandy layer over the notes, like a bee in the speaker.
Lower the gain a step, then the presence.
What is free, and what comes with a plan?
Free, no account
- A check that the recording is good enough to read
- The one thing that stands out most, and the knob to try first
- One second take, compared with the first
With Stage or Headliner
- Every finding in the take, not just the first
- The knobs to turn for each one, on your own amp's panel
- As many takes as you like, each compared with the last
How do you get a good reading?
- Hold the phone about 30 cm from the speaker, pointing at it.
- Play chords or a riff you know, at the volume you normally play.
- Keep playing for the whole 8 seconds.
- Turn one knob, then check again with the phone in the same spot, so the two takes compare.
What can a phone not tell you?
The tone check reads the balance of the sound in your room. It gives a direction, like “less bass”, not a knob position. It does not judge gain, because a clean tone played hard and a driven tone played softly look alike to a microphone. It does not say the bass is too low, because phone microphones lose the lowest notes. And it does not say your tone matches a record. Use it to hear whether a change made things better, not as a final verdict.
Is the recording uploaded?
No. The 8 seconds are read inside your browser and never leave your device. Tonelify does not store or hear the audio. Your browser asks for the microphone once, and you can turn that off again in its settings.
Need settings to start from?
Find a song in the tone library, or have the tone matcher write the settings for your own amp. Then come back and check how it sounds.