How to Tune the Baritone Ukulele

Baritone ukuleles are a little bit like the black sheep of the ukulele family, as they are tuned so differently. If you pick up a baritone ukulele, often it can be very frustrating finding the right advice and the right resources to help you learn to tune it as the vast majority of ukulele stuff is designed with GCEA tuning in mind. The baritone ukulele has the tuning of: D3-G3-B3-E4

However, there is a trick to the baritone ukulele which will make tuning much easier for you! You may have heard that the baritone ukulele is, in fact, tuned exactly the same as the four highest-pitched strings on the guitar. This is helpful as it means that our Online Guitar Tuner will work just as well for tuning your baritone ukulele! Ignoring the lower E and A-strings, the D-G-B-E tuning notes are exactly what you need in order to tune your baritone ukulele. It gets even better - our Adjustable Online Guitar Tuner allows you to change the notes you tune to, which is super-handy if you are using alternate tuning for your baritone!

If you are not keen on using our guitar tuner to tune your baritone uke, you can use our Online Chromatic Instrument Tuner instead. This tuner will guide you to tune your baritone ukulele to the right note, and you can use it if you have a microphone connected to your computer. It might also pay to check out our guitar tuning articles, to pick up some handy baritone-applicable hints about tuning too.

Alternate Baritone Ukulele Tunings

The standard tuning of the baritone ukulele is non-reentrant. The strings are tuned D3-G3-B3-E4 from low to high, which is exactly the same tuning as the top four strings of the guitar. Some ukulele purists don't think the baritone should be classified as a ukulele for this reason. This is perhaps the main reason why the baritone is alternatively tuned to re-entrant tuning. The baritone can be alternatively re-entrant tuned to G-C-E-A (in accordance with the other three ukulele types), or to D-G-B-E, with the D string an octave higher than non-re-entrant tuning. The G-C-E-A tuning of the baritone ukulele requires a different set of strings to the baritone strings used for standard-tuning, and the high-D tuning of the baritone ukulele requires a different D-string. Some models of baritone ukulele are sold with re-entrant tuned strings, however these models are much rarer than those baritone ukes that are sold tuned to the standard D-G-B-E tuning.