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Bespoke Tone

Name: Bespoke Tone
Brand: Vagal
SKU: VT-BESPOKE
Price: 39.00 USD
Availability: InStock

The tone you specify, not the one we picked. Set every stimulation parameter yourself - from a paper, from a clinician, or from what you have learned works for you - and it is written to your device exactly as entered.

6Settings you set

1-100Hz frequency range

2x10Char device label

$39.00

Every parameter written exactly as you set it

Instant delivery to your Vagal Tones app

One-time purchase, yours forever

Configure yours

The configurator on this page is where the tone is built - there is no default to buy.

Share it with a Tone Code No subscription Secure checkout

Signal

1 to 100 Hz. 25 Hz is the most studied frequency for vagus nerve stimulation.

Pulse width

15 - 1000 us. Wider = stronger sensation.

Interphase gap

15 - 500 us. Gap between pulse halves.

Pulse shape

Each waveform interacts differently with nerve tissue. Symmetric is the most comfortable and works on every device.

Symmetric

Equal phases both directions. Charge-balanced, comfortable, well-studied.

All devices

Alternating

Flips leading polarity each cycle. Balanced nerve fibre recruitment.

Buddy or Oh

Asymmetric

Full active phase, sub-threshold return. Higher per-pulse efficiency.

Buddy or Oh

Monophasic

Active phase only. Maximum per-pulse efficiency. Watch skin contact.

Buddy or Oh

Session

Duration

minutes

1 to 60 minutes.

Target current

0.1 - 4.0 mA.

This is a ceiling, not a fixed level. During your session you adjust intensity on the device itself until it feels right. Most people settle well below the target.

Duty cycle

On-off cycling

Instead of stimulating the whole time, duty cycling alternates between active and rest periods. This gives your nerve time to reset and can reduce habituation over longer sessions.

No cyclingAlways on

5s / 5sBreathing-synced

30s / 30sStandard clinical

60s / 60sExtended rest

sec

Off

sec

The 5/5 pattern works well timed to slow breathing: inhale during stimulation, exhale during rest. Sclocco et al. (2019) found that respiratory-gated vagal stimulation produced stronger brainstem responses than continuous delivery.

Your device label

Give it a name

This is what appears on your device screen. Two lines, ten characters each. Leave blank for an auto-generated label based on your settings.

0 / 10

Call it whatever makes sense to you: your protocol name, your clinician's shorthand, a reminder of what it's for.

OLED preview

Ready to load to your device.

25Hz 250us 20min

Bespoke Tone

25 Hz symmetric · 250 us · 20min

$39.00

Bespoke Tone

Any frequency from 1 to 100 Hz

Frequency is how many pulses reach the nerve each second. It is the single most studied variable in vagus nerve stimulation, and the one most likely to be specified in a protocol. Bespoke lets you set it exactly, to the hertz.

1-10 Hz

10-30 Hz

30-100 Hz

1 10 25 50 75 100

Hertz. The band boundaries are conventions, not walls.

1-10 Hz

Low and slow

Widely spaced pulses. People who find stimulation sharp or intrusive often prefer this range, which is why our Gentle Rhythms protocol sits at 8 Hz and Recover at 10 Hz. Low frequencies feel more like a slow tap than a buzz.

20-30 Hz

The studied middle

If a paper specifies a frequency for transcutaneous auricular stimulation, it is most often in here, and 25 Hz most often of all. Our Nightshift, Balance, Calm and Uplift protocols all sit in this band. Start here unless you have a reason not to.

50-100 Hz

Higher and denser

Pulses arrive close together and the sensation smooths out into something more continuous. Our Digestion protocol uses 75 Hz. Higher frequencies leave less gap between pulses, which becomes a real constraint once you widen the pulse itself.

Why we stop at 100

The hardware will accept far more than 100 Hz, and the Research Edition exposes the full range. We cap Bespoke at 100 because published transcutaneous auricular protocols essentially all live below it, and because frequency and pulse width compete for room inside each cycle. At 100 Hz a cycle is 10,000 microseconds wide. Ask for a 1,000 microsecond pulse at that rate and it still fits. Ask for much more and it does not, and the device physically cannot deliver what you configured. The builder checks this arithmetic as you change the settings and tells you before you order, rather than letting you discover it on your ear.

New in Bespoke

Set the shape of the pulse, not just how often it arrives

My Tone let you pick a frequency. Bespoke lets you set the pulse itself: how long each phase lasts, and how long the gap between the two halves is. These are the settings that change how stimulation feels at the same intensity, and they are the ones research protocols are most likely to specify alongside frequency.

Phase · 50 to 1000 us

Pulse width

How long each half of the pulse lasts, in microseconds. A wider pulse delivers more charge per pulse, so at the same current it feels stronger. If stimulation is uncomfortable at the current you need, narrowing the pulse is often a better move than dropping the current.

Our own protocols range from 100 microseconds on Nightshift to 500 on Uplift. That fivefold spread is deliberate, and it is a big part of why those two tones feel so different.

Interphase · 50 to 500 us

Interphase interval

The pause between the positive and negative halves of each pulse. Our stimulation is charge-balanced by design, meaning what goes in comes back out, which is what stops charge accumulating in tissue. The interphase interval is the breathing space between those two halves.

Every Vagal protocol ships at 100 microseconds. Widening it separates the two phases further; narrowing it brings them closer to a single continuous swing.

The arithmetic that constrains you, shown live

A pulse has to fit inside its own cycle. At 25 Hz each cycle is 40,000 microseconds long, and a 250 microsecond pulse with a 100 microsecond interphase occupies 600 of them, leaving 39,400 microseconds of gap. Comfortable. But raise the frequency to 500 Hz and the cycle shrinks to 2,000 microseconds. Ask for a 1,000 microsecond pulse there and it needs 2,100. There is no room, and the device cannot deliver it.

The configurator computes this on every change and tells you the period, the pulse width and the remaining gap. If a combination will not fit, it says so plainly and will not let you buy it. This is not a warning buried in documentation, it is arithmetic the hardware enforces, so we enforce it first.

New in Bespoke

Four waveform modes

Until now every tone we sold was symmetric biphasic, because that is the only shape the hardware exposed. Vagal Buddy and Vagal Oh! now expose four, and Bespoke is the first product where you choose. This is the control most likely to appear in a research protocol and be impossible to reproduce on consumer hardware.

Symmetric biphasic every device

Equal and opposite halves. Charge in exactly balances charge out, which is why it is the safe default and why every Vagal protocol has used it. Works on every device and every firmware version we have shipped. If a protocol does not specify a waveform, this is what it means.

Alternating Buddy & Oh!

Still balanced, but the leading polarity flips on every pulse: positive first, then negative first, then back. The intent is to avoid the nerve settling into a fixed response to a fixed direction. Sensation is usually described as slightly less pointed than symmetric at the same settings.

Asymmetric Buddy & Oh!

A short tall phase followed by a long shallow one. The areas still match, so charge stays balanced, but the peak is concentrated into the first half. Used where the aim is a strong leading edge without increasing total charge. Often reported as sharper at onset and quieter after.

Monophasic Buddy & Oh!

One direction only, with no returning phase. It is the shape most often used in older literature, so you may need it to reproduce a published protocol. Be aware that it is not charge balanced, and that is the entire reason biphasic became standard. Choose it deliberately, for a reason, and prefer shorter sessions.

Which device you need

Symmetric biphasic works on every device we have ever shipped. The other three modes need a Vagal Buddy or a Vagal Oh! The older tVNS Stimulator has no waveform control at all, and there is a right and a wrong way to handle that: the wrong way is to accept a waveform the device cannot use and let you believe you got what you asked for.

So we do not. When a Bespoke tone loads, the device is asked what it actually supports and the answer is read from the hardware itself, not guessed from the model name on the box. If your device cannot deliver the waveform you chose, the load is refused and tells you why, rather than quietly substituting symmetric biphasic and calling it done. A protocol that renders differently from the one you specified is worse than one that visibly fails.

New in Bespoke

On and off duty cycles

A continuous session runs from start to finish without pausing. A duty-cycled session alternates: stimulate for a while, rest for a while, repeat. Nerves adapt to unchanging input, so a pause is not wasted time, it is what keeps the next burst meaningful.

Continuous

One unbroken 20 minutes. Balance, Digestion, Recover, Nightshift and Gentle Rhythms all run this way.

60s on / 60s off symmetric

Half the session is stimulation. This is what Calm uses, and it is the most common cycling pattern in the literature.

60s on / 30s off asymmetric

Two thirds stimulation, shorter rests. This is Uplift. More total charge than 60/60 over the same session length.

5s on / 5s off breathing pace

Fast enough to breathe along with. Our app treats a 5/5 cycle as a breathing guide: in on the pause, out on the pulse.

Why pause at all

Give a nerve the same input for long enough and its response drops away. That is habituation, and it is the reason a long continuous session is not automatically better than a shorter cycled one. Pausing lets responsiveness recover, so the stimulation that follows lands on a nerve that is still listening.

Duty cycling is also simply more comfortable for many people. A rest every minute is easier to sit through than twenty unbroken minutes, which matters more than it sounds: the protocol you actually finish beats the one you abandon.

Any legal pair, checked as you type

The device has one rule here: on and off must be either both zero or both non-zero, and anything non-zero is five seconds or more. There is no such thing as a session that stimulates for sixty seconds and rests for nothing, and nothing below five seconds exists on the hardware at all.

So the configurator gives you two free number fields and enforces that rule as you type. Following a paper that cycles 7 on / 13 off? Enter exactly that - it is as valid as 60/60. Type a pair the hardware cannot run and the order button switches off with a plain explanation until the numbers describe a real session, so an impossible combination never reaches your basket.

Session length is set separately

Duty cycle is the rhythm; session length is how long the rhythm runs. Set anything from one minute to an hour - to the second, so a 22.5 minute protocol is entered as 1350, not rounded - or continuous for a session with no scheduled end. The two settings combine: 20 minutes at 60s on / 30s off gives you roughly thirteen minutes of stimulation across about thirteen bursts. The device screen shows the resulting spec so you can confirm what loaded is what you configured.

Community

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Real configurations from real users. Load any of these into the configurator above, adjust or order as-is.

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Load a Tone in 60 Seconds

No cables. No complicated setup. Purchase, sync, stimulate.

Purchase

Buy a Tone here. It appears instantly in your Vagal Tones app account.

Sync to Device

Open the app, connect via USB or Bluetooth, and transfer the Tone to your stimulator.

Stimulate

Select your new Tone on the device and begin your session. That's it.

Using Tones with Buddy

Pick your Tone with one thumb

Buddy holds three Tones at a time and lists them on its screen. Once this Tone is loaded, switching to it takes a second, and you never need your phone to do it.

1
Load it
Sync the Tone to Buddy in the Vagal Tones app. You decide which three Tones Buddy carries.
2
Nudge to highlight
Push the joystick up or down to move through your Tones.
3
Press to choose
Push the joystick in. Buddy goes straight to the session timer, ready to start.

How to sync a Tone Meet Vagal Buddy

Close-up of Vagal Buddy as the joystick is nudged and the highlight moves from Balance to Gentle Rhythms — 2Nudge to highlight

Vagal Buddy screen scrolling through three Tones, then opening the 15 minute session timer after the joystick is pressed — 3Press to choose

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Tones FAQ

Everything you need to know about Vagal Tones

Why has the app changed its name? Do I need to reinstall it?

We have completely rebuilt the app in Flutter with a focus on Bluetooth connection stability and a smoother overall experience. As part of this, the Android version has a new listing on Google Play under the name Vagally Better. If you are on Android, you will need to install the new app -- it will not update automatically from the old version. We recommend uninstalling the old app once you have the new one set up. If you are on iPhone or iPad, the iOS app will update through the App Store as normal -- you do not need to do anything. The iOS version will also be renamed to Vagally Better in a future update, but the app will continue to work exactly the same regardless of the name shown.

Will the app work with my existing device?

How quickly do I receive a tone after purchase?

Tones are digital products delivered instantly after purchase - there is nothing to ship. Once you complete checkout, the tone is immediately available in your app (called Vagal Tones on iOS and Vagally Better on Android).

Because tones are digital and delivered instantly, they are non-refundable once downloaded. Please check device compatibility before purchasing.

Can I set a custom frequency on my stimulator?

Yes. The Bespoke Tone is built to order: you choose the frequency (1 to 100 Hz), the pulse width and the timing (1 to 60 minutes, continuous or cycled). If you have a specific setting in mind - from a research paper, a clinician's recommendation or your own preference - this is the tone for you. It works with Vagal Buddy and Vagal Oh!, and it replaces the older My Tone.

If you own the Research Edition, you also get access to the Tone Portal at vagal.com/portal, which gives even more granular control over pulse parameters.

Do I need to buy tones to use my stimulator?

No. Your tVNS Stimulator works perfectly well with its built-in default tone. The default protocol covers general vagus nerve stimulation and is what most customers use day to day.

Additional tones are for people who want to experiment with different frequencies or target specific wellness goals. They are entirely optional and your stimulator will continue to work without them.

How do I load a tone onto my stimulator?

After purchasing a tone, open the app on your phone (called Vagal Tones on iOS and Vagally Better on Android) and connect to your stimulator via Bluetooth. The new tone will appear in your library ready to load. Tap the tone, then tap Load - the transfer takes a few seconds.

Once loaded, the tone stays on your device. You do not need your phone or the app during stimulation sessions. You can switch between loaded tones at any time.

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