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Re: Tuning to more than one pitch

Author: kdk
Date: 2011-11-23 17:25

These days nearly every oboist has a tuner on his/her music stand and lips whatever pitch is being used to be in tune with A440. So, assuming your oboist is referring to a tuner, it's likely that the tuning notes will get everyone as close to each others' overall pitch as tuning with a single note would. There are some band directors who insist brass tune to B-flat, clarinets (and maybe flutes) to F (written G) and saxes to yet something else (I forget off-hand what it is) for reasons I've never really considered very good. The best you get in any large ensemble is close. Then players' ears need to take over.

Mass tuning is, I've always thought, more critical among string sections because those instruments can be much farther out of tune to start with than any wind instrument (hence the use of A in the first place - there are only two open strings, D and A, that are common to all four of the standard orchestral string instruments, and I guess of the two someone back in history decided A was for some reason better to start from).

Karl

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