The present disclosure generally relates to a tape drive comprising a tape head and control circuitry. The tape head comprises a plurality of data elements, each data element including a write transducer and a read transducer. The control circuitry is configured to control the tape head to write at least three different frequency preamble tones prior to writing data to data tracks of a tape. A different preamble tone is written to adjacent data tracks of the tape. The data elements of the tape head are each configured to read one or more preamble tones prior to writing data to or reading data from the tape. The control circuitry is then configured to extract a signal content from each preamble tone read by each data element, and determine an optimized positioning for the tape head with respect to the tape to reduce alignment errors.