Klarinet Archive - Posting 000234.txt from 1994/03

From: Martin Brown <martinb@-----.AU>
Subj: Electronic Tuners for Clarinets
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 1994 09:56:52 -0500

Does any one have any recommendations for tuners for wind instruments?
I have seen a rather nice Boss one which is quite expensive. It has a
row of about 20 LEDs indicating pitch.

I have been investigating building one for myself based around a
single chip computer. The possibilities for this are very good but the
front end design is proving quite difficult. The original design
measured zero crossings of a filtered signal and did some software
manipulation to indicate pitch on an alphanumeric LCD display. My aim
for this gadget was to be able to set its reference from a user
defined pitch (for example the oboe's tuning note), tune to a perfect
pitch scale or an equal temperament scale, perform transposition for
other than C pitch instruments, measure interval accuracy and
interface to a PC to eventually provide a graphical summary of the
intonation of a series of notes.

While investigating this I took some photos of clarinet waveforms
which were very revealing. It's a wonder that anything can decode the
fundamental from the rubbish that the lower notes produce. Between
about second register C and G there were only the fundamental and
second harminc really visible. Above that, the notes mostly lost all
harmonics and were almost pure sine waves.

I'm still working on it (as I have been for the last 5 years) but my
need for a tuner is now quite urgent - The usual 1st player in our
local orchestra is paranoid about intonation :-).

^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~
Martin Brown, Telectronics Pacing Systems
Sydney, Australia
Ph: (61 2) 413 6973 Email: martinb@-----.au