A=432 Hz Tone for Guitar, anyone?

Concert A is supposed to be 440.

Bob Bone

Yeah, but synths and such are tuned to 440.

Bob Bone

It has varied over time and in different places, but to avoid the endless debate over it all, I use the one that the synth manufacturers have agreed on, which is 440.

Lots of albums were released with slightly different tunings, some done by ear, and playback speed was often slightly adjusted as well, resulting in released recordings that were slightly different than 440.

The international standard has been 440 since 1939.

Here is a nice article on various tunings over the years:

http://www.piano-tuners.org/history/pitch.html

Bob Bone

From the Wikipedia: 
In 1939, an international conference recommended that the A above middle C be tuned to 440 Hz, now known as concert pitch. As a technical standard this was taken up by the International Organization for Standardization in 1955 and reaffirmed by them in 1975 as ISO 16. The difference between this and the diapason normal is due to confusion over the temperature at which the French standard should be measured. The initial standard was A = 439 Hz (info), but this was superseded by A = 440 Hz after complaints that 439 Hz was difficult to reproduce in a laboratory because 439 is a prime number.[7]
[edit]Current concert pitches Despite such confusion, A = 440 Hz is the only official standard and is widely used around the world. Many orchestras in the United Kingdom adhere to this standard as concert pitch.[8] In the United States some orchestras use A = 440 Hz, while others, such as New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, use A = 442 Hz.[9] The latter is also often used as tuning frequency in Europe,[2] especially in Denmark,France, Hungary, Italy, Norway and Switzerland.[10] Nearly all modern symphony orchestras in Germany and Austria and many in other countries in continental Europe (such as Russia, Sweden and Spain) tune to A = 443 Hz.
In practice the orchestras tune to a note given out by the oboe, and many oboists use an electronic tuning device. When playing with fixed-pitch instruments such as the piano, the orchestra will generally tune to them—a piano will normally have been tuned to the orchestra's normal pitch. Overall, it is thought that the general trend since the middle of the 20th century has been for standard pitch to rise, though it has been rising far more slowly than it has in the past. Some orchestras like the Berliner Philharmoniker now use a slightly lower pitch (443 Hz) than their highest previous standard (445 Hz).[11][2]
Many modern ensembles which specialize in the performance of Baroque music have agreed on a standard of A = 415 Hz.[2] An exact equal-tempered semitone lower than A = 440 would be 440/21/12 = 415.3047 Hz; this is rounded to the nearest integer. In principle this allows for playing along with modern fixed-pitch instruments if their parts are transposed down a semitone. It is, however, common performance practice, especially in the German Baroque idiom, to tune certain works to Chorton, approximately a semitone higher than A-440 (460–470 Hz) (e.g., Pre-Leipzig period cantatas of Bach).[12]

I like Dave's quote from wiki where we see that there actually is no standard. 

Some people state there is a standards organization and that there is a standard... but only some people use that standard while other people use other standards and some even have other standards organizations.


Physics doesn't care about integers, fractions, or irrational numbers... so it's probably gonna be ok no matter what you choose.

Sometimes a softsynth sounds sharp to me so I adjust it a bit flat until it sounds right.  Then the next day it sounds flat, so I adjust it back again.

Sometimes when I think a note sounds off-pitch, I check it with the tuner and find that it is correct after all.  However, I have not been taking into account the possibility the different instruments may be using different tuning standards.