MUSIC TOOLS

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The Essentials of Music.

Reimagined as a Native Part of iOS.

On your Home Screen, Lock Screen,

Dynamic Island, and in Control Center.

The gorgeous full-screen metronome allows performers to easily control tempo and time signature.

The upcoming instrument-specific tuner indicates pitch in beautifully glowing colors.

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Utility at the system-level.

Music Tools is the first iOS app to take essential musician utilities and free them from the container of the main app. A Live Activity metronome that stays in the Dynamic Island as you look for sheet music online. A Control Center toggle to instantly take you to the full screen piano. A pitch player that lives on your Home Screen.

Together, the utilities are part of Music Tools form an ecosystem of access points. Seamlessly integrated and designed with one coherent visual and functional language. Behind every interaction is a simple principle:

The closer a tool is to your fingertips, the more seamless your musical workflow becomes.

Music Tools on the App Store →

The Tools, Up Close.

Keyboard

Metronome

Pitch Players

Tuners

Keyboard

Metronome

Pitch Players

Tuners

Tool Focus

Keyboard

In App

Full Screen

Widget

Control Center

The "Keyboard" or "Piano" Tool is the first tool that musicians see when opening the app. It's available as a full screen variant, as a Home Screen widget, and even as a Control Center toggle that takes you straight to the full screen piano from wherever you currently are.

The tool also introduces musicians to a fundamental design principle of Music Tools: The way tools look inside the app mirrors the way they look in other places, like on the Home Screen.

The sound patch switcher showcases available instruments through beautifully crafted, custom, isometric 3D renders. The Irish Harp sound patch will be available soon.

The full screen keyboard pioneers an intuitive way to navigate around the keyboard's 88 keys with a rubber band that doesn’t require users to switch between scrolling and glissando modes.

Tool Focus

Metronome

In App

Full Screen

Widget

Control Center

Live Activity

Use It Like Your Music Player

The Metronome Live Activity enables musicians to control the metronome from anywhere. You can change the current BPM from the iPhone's Dynamic Island or set a different time signature from your Lock Screen. You can even control the metronome from your Apple Watch. Music Tools makes using the metronome as easy as listening to music on your phone.

Start It From Anywhere

With Control Center integration, you can start and stop the metronome from anywhere. You can even switch out one of your Lock Screen buttons (which default to the flashlight and the camera) for a button that starts the metronome!

Tool Focus

Pitch Players

In App

Widget

The Pitch Players mirror their respective real-life counterparts, without leaning too far into a photo-illustrative style that would feel out of place on a Home Screen widget. In app, the Pitch Players are arranged in a horizontal scroll view and grouped into different instrument categories.

Tool Focus

Coming Soon

Tuners

In App

Full Screen

Widget

Control Center

Tool Focus

Coming Soon

Tuners

In App

Full Screen

Widget

Control Center

A Smarter Approach to Tuning

Music Tools' tuner is the result of an intensive feedback process with musicians. Its design directly addresses the two most common frustrations musicians have with today’s tuners:

Instrument-Specific Tuning

Current tuners have a tendency to jump around wildly because they're instrument-agnostic. They determine the target note by finding the nearest pitch on the chromatic scale. When you’re tuning the A-string of a violin or guitar, they may suddenly lock onto G♯ instead.

Music Tools' tuner is instrument-aware. It remains anchored to the correct string. The tuner display stays stable and predictable, even when the note is still far from its target.

How Volume Affects Accuracy

A tuner can only measure pitch accurately when the microphone receives a strong enough signal. If the note is too quiet, the reading becomes less reliable because there isn’t enough acoustic information to work with. Most tuners don’t show this. They either jump around unpredictably or simply turn off below a certain volume threshold.

Music Tools solves this with a simple visual cue: The tuner's capsules get brighter when the microphone receives a strong signal and dimmer when the note becomes too soft. This lets musicians immediately understand when the reading is trustworthy and when they should play a little louder.

One Tap to Tune

Before a performance, every second counts. With its Control Center integration, Music Tools lets you open the tuner directly from the Lock Screen, so tuning becomes as simple and immediate as checking the time.

Together, these design choices make the tuner easier to read and more predictable in real use. As you play a note, the capsules brighten and resonate with the note you just played, before they settle in a way that resembles the way real strings vibrate and come to rest. The tuner doesn’t just show pitch; it behaves like a musical object, giving performers a clearer, more intuitive sense of what’s happening as they tune.

From the Workbench to the Home Screen.

What is Music Tool's place in history? What does it contribute, and what sets it apart?
The app opens a new chapter in the story of musicians' tools, building on centuries of craftsmanship.

What is Music Tool's place in history? What does it contribute, and what sets it apart? The app opens a new chapter in the story of musicians' tools, building on centuries of craftsmanship.

What is Music Tool's place in history? What does it contribute, and what sets it apart?
The app opens a new chapter in the story of musicians' tools, building on centuries of craftsmanship.

Legacy Tools

For generations, musicians have relied on mechanical devices to keep time, find pitch, and tune their instruments. Metronomes, tuning forks, and pitch pipes were tactile and precise, but also fragile, bulky, and increasingly impractical. Today, most have fallen out of everyday use or declined in quality; modern plastic pitch pipes, for instance, often vary so widely in pitch that few ensembles still trust them.

Other Apps

App stores are full of apps marketed to musicians. Typically, these apps only perform a single function well, and are otherwise full of advertisements and bright branding. Because these apps monetize the time that musicians spend looking at their screen, they have little incentive to make their tools easy to reach; and every incentive not to.

Music Tools

Music Tools presents a new chapter; the modern-day equivalent of a musical Swiss Army Knife. It's a true utility that breaks with the paradigm of locking features away behind an app icon. Instead, these features are available to users alongside other utilities like the phone's flashlight or calculator. Even the app’s name is intentionally understated. It's easy to remember, easy to find, and focused entirely on what matters: the tools themselves.

Tools evolve. Music endures.

Dec 31, 2025

Smartphone Sets Tempo in Rehearsal Room

Original Article

English Version

Nov 18, 2025

When Design Strikes the Right Note: How a Young Violinist Helped Shape an App for Musicians

Original Article

English Version

A Musician's Take on a Music App.

I'm Kilian, the creator of Music Tools! I designed and coded this app for fellow musicians like myself. Music Tools is for everyone. No matter if you're just getting started learning an instrument, if you want to figure out what key your favorite song is in, or if you're a professional musician who needs a reliable and powerful app for rehearsals and performances; Music Tools is designed to be inclusive.

The Story.

I grew up making music, taking photos, and working on science projects. When I finished school at 18, I founded the social start-up "Aletho" to house refugees in private accommodation. Eventually, I decided to study law to be able to see projects like this through end-to-end.

Left to right: (1) A photo of Kilian at the "Jugend forscht" science competition, taken from a newspaper article; (2) Kilian presenting at CeBIT 2016 trade fair for his social start-up "Aletho"; (3) Kilian recording a piano track for a Christmas album he produced with his friends.

My law studies took me to Oxford, where I joined the a cappella group "The Oxford Commas". Music Tools started as a way to make our rehearsals easier.

The Oxford Commas on Instagram

The Oxford Commas Website

See what happens when you click or tap on the polaroids.

In Oxford, I also joined the Chapel Choir of Wadham College and organized a joined tour of the choir and The Oxford Commas to the Rhineland region in Germany in the summer of 2024, together with my good friend Quinton Lee. Stephen Taylor served as conductor.

0:00/1:34

An audio recording of the ending of "O Radiant Dawn", taken during one of our concerts on the Rhineland tour

Inspired by the People Who Use It.

Music Tools has grown through constant dialogue with musicians of every kind, from choral singers and pianists to instrumentalists like violinist Juli Bazzazi, who tested and helped shape the upcoming tuner. Her feedback inspired features that make the app feel more personal and precise, like having instrument-specific tuner configurations, or visually communicating pitch reliability through light intensity. Collaborations like these are what keep Music Tools alive and evolving.