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Doublereed Archive - Posting 000083.txt from 2003/12

From: "William R. Brohinsky" <onlyocelot@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [DR-L] Tuning Trivia (warning: long!)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 13:40:55 -0500

I tried writing this yesterday, and lost it in a mailer-crash. Amazing
how frustrating it is with a frozen program with a few pages of typing
in it.

Anyway. I just turned 50 (on the 11th), and the tuning fork thing
brought back a half-century of experiences with tuning. I'm now a piano
tuner, making a business of it and learning the craft of repair and
regulation of pianos. But I've been playing musical instruments since
about 1960.

When I started out, we used pitchpipes. I know they're still out there,
because I've seen them advertised recently. Cheap, relatively reliable
(if you don't use them right after a meal too many times) and about as
stable as Aunt Minnie, the one who thinks she's a camel. My first one
had a pearl-ish looking plastic moulded to hold four small tubes,
arranged offset with two on one side and two on the other, one pipe for
each string of the 'cello. I've had others over the years, including the
one I got from CF Peters in NYC, round and with holes for each of the 12
pitches. I used to use them all the time to check up on ourselves when
we sang...until it was forcibly pointed out to me that barbarshop tuning
(just intonation) didn't lend itself to being 'checked up on' by an
equal-tempered standard. After that, I used it to get a pitch, usually
the bass pitch, and sang the other notes myself. (I even did this with
bands I've conducted over the years.)

When we had classes or whatever, we'd tune to a bar. This was about 1.5"
by 10" or so, and looked like one bar from a vibraphone. It was mounted
on a box that was about 3" deep and a little larger than the bar, and
struck (occasionally) with a rubber-tipped mallet that no one could ever
find when you needed it. It took a few years for someon to think of
tethering it to the box with a cord. We also used the A5 of a piano if
it was available, often in preference to the other "real" standards that
might have been available. To this day, I don't see the logic in that,
but hey.

I didn't actually see my first tuning fork for a number of years. I
noticed that every oboist that Mr. McDougal taught had one. When we got
together as an orchestra, we tuned to the oboist, who would slap their
oboe together, set the reed a carefully-learned depth and stand and
deliver. Apparently he did something right with them, btw, since they
were as accurate as the stroboConn.

Of course, the stroboConn wasn't all that accurate. There's one that
goes in the wheelbarrow category: it's likely that none of the young'n's
have run into one, although Peterson now makes a one-wheel tuner
(actually quite a few different models) and even one 12-wheel model. Of
course, they're all much smaller than their predecessors. Our highschool
had a 12-wheel StroboConn that was at least 2' on a side. (Well, it
_might_ have been smaller, I sure was then!) When the wheels spun, they
were geared and driven by a feedback-controlled motor (it even had a
small adjustment so you could change the standard, or if you had a real
standard, 'tune' the tuner!) and the strobe was a light that flickered
according to the vibrations it received from its microphone. Each wheel
had concentric bands, the innermost being half-and-half light and dark.
Each succeedingly larger band had more divisions, representing octaves
above the innermost band. You'd play a note, and the proper wheels would
have the light and dark divisions become visible. If you were spot on,
one of those bands would freeze, indicating note and octave. If you were
sharp of a band, it would seem to rotate to the right, if you were flat,
it'd rotate to the left.

I remember being a calibration freak even back then: I was constantly
testing the thing against a large aluminum A=440 fork. I was pretty
upset at how variable this superstandard machine was turning out to be,
when a music teacher mentioned that the fork itself could be off a fair
amount depending on temperature and how well it had been treated. (Maybe
this was prophetic, since I spent most of my time in the Navy as a
calibration technician ET?)

It's worth mentioning that there is another standard we used: the
daughter of the band leader of another highschool had perfect pitch. She
was interesting to walk with, because if a car drove by and honked,
she'd bellow at its receding rear end, "Get it tuned!!!" She played
oboe. She didn't own a pitchfork. Couldn't find one that was in tune
enough. She was, though: we could always tune to her. (I never had the
balls, if you'll excuse the expression, to actually test her against any
trustable standard. I never had to change my bassoon reeds to play with
her, so it wasn't worth the war.)

In band, by the way, a clarinetist (almost always the one holding first
seat in the first clarinet section) would stand and give a Bb. They
almost never used a fork or pipe or standard. The notes were also pretty
variable. All bands tuned to the clarinet then. When I was in senior
high school, Earl North brought his New Hampshire University At Durham
symphonic band to our school for a glorious weekend of workshops and
concerts. He tuned his band from the basses up, starting with his line
of eight-to-ten miraphones (a tuba variant that looked like an Euphonium
on stearoids!). The miraphone's overtones were reliably harmonic
(overtone or partial referring to both the sine components of a complex
sound and the complex sounds derived from overblowing a tube, usually a
brass instrument, but present in all of them. Harmonic means something
specific: partials that are integer-multiples of the fundamental tone)
so he felt that the entire band could tune beatless to the overtones of
miraphones and they'd all be in tune. By golly, it proved out everytime
he raised his baton, too!

Electronic tuners didn't become useful to individuals until after
electronic calculators had been around a while. You could get small
electronic oscillators attached to speakers which ran off a 9-volt
battery for about 50 bucks (if this inflation program is correct, about
the equivalent of $235, now!) and they'd be fairly consistant, as long
as the battery was good. But it took until the likes of my old Korg
tuner, with the needle display and the auto-detect of the note played
and all before they qualified as serious. That cost me $125 in
1980-something. Even then, I had forks. It put out a sound you cold tune
beatless against, as well as trying to read you and give a display.

Bruce Bellingham, head of the musicology dept. at UCONN has a tuner that
he uses all the time. It was made by someone in western NY, whose name
I've forgotten yet again. It only makes tones, but it can be set to all
the 'normal' historical standards, and produce many scales for putting
frets in the right places and things like that. We always use that to
tune to when we play with him (viols, mostly) and it has the benefit
that you can tune each and every string to the machine and it works
better than trying to tune that third in the middle of the viol by some
other method! Prior to his getting this tuner, by the way, _he_ was the
pitch standard. He'd sing the notes, relying on his perfect pitch sense,
we'd tune to his voice, and we'd be spot-on!

When I started tuning pianos, I bought an aluminum A=440 fork, and
received a blued C=523.3 fork with my first Hale tuning kit. That was in
the early-mid 80's. The idea is that you set the bearing octave on the
piano starting from one of these two standards. I now use an older
version of the Sanderson AccuTuner (the Hale Sight-o-Tuner, if you must
know). Like the stroboConn, it uses a phase-comparison system, although
it all happens in the 'tronics (rather than a strobe light and a
sectioned disk spinning). For display, there are 8 LEDs which are lit to
make a display that spins left for flat, right for sharp, and on the
rare, non-wild-strings, freezes when you're 'in tune'. (In tune is in
quote marks because pianos are never really intonated, they are
tempered, to adjust for the stretched partials.) These machines are
quite common for tuning pianos now. When I first saw a piano tuned (I
was in hichschool), the tuner used a fork and his ear to set the
temperament, then, as I commonly do now, tuned the octaves and unisons
by ear.

I'm now trying out a computer program which gives a spectrum display
_and_ a phase comparator display. It uses the sound card in my laptop to
measure the inharmonicity of some of the strings of the piano,
calculates and displays its guess of how to mistune the strings to make
them work together, and lets me 'smooth' the scale, which makes the
small errors caused by the scale design stay small. You can save files
of tunings, apply historical temperaments on the fly, and generally get
a lot done with less sweat. The same system is usable with strings and
winds, but you have to make sure you have a tuning file that has no
stretches at all. Peterson (the ones who make the modern-day stroboconn)
have special models for tuning different things, and the one they aim at
strings and winds has both modern and historical scales in it. Most of
the 'puter tuning programs have the same ability, as do the Sanderson
tuners. It's all a convenience, though, mere icing on the cake of a
trustable standard. By the way, you can actually calibrate these things
against the National Bureau of Standards (was called NBS, now it's NIST)
with a phone call!

Of course, the question was "what do you tune with", and I've gone a bit
far afield. In summary, fork, pipe, bar, machine, and just the ear of
people with proven trackrecords of perfect pitch. And NIST when you want
to be sure the standard really is.

raybro