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Doublereed Archive - Posting 000093.txt from 2003/12

From: "Judy Latz" <atlconcertband@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [DR-L] Tuning Trivia (warning: long!)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 18:36:08 -0500

I can certainly understand your frustration if you lost all you typed!

I tuned pianos as an extra job in the 80's. I trained with a very
respected & gifted local tuner and he insisted on starting with A above
middle C with a tuning fork -- then set the temperment in the first octave
with 4ths & 5ths and finally, tuning all the octaves smooth by ear. No
electronics allowed! It took many, many pianos for me to get the knack of
setting the pins, setting a good temperment, which I did in my trainer's
piano shop. I grew to love tuning and also began listening to piano
recitals, concerts, and recordings in a new way -- noticing the piano's
tuning (hearing the beats), in addition to the pianist's talent, style &
skill. -- opened up a new world to me that I continue to enjoy!

Judy

> [Original Message]
> From: William R. Brohinsky <onlyocelot@-----.com>
> To: <doublereed-l@-----.edu>
> Date: 12/19/03 12:41:51 PM
> Subject: Re: [DR-L] Tuning Trivia (warning: long!)
>
> 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
>
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