[CAUT] String Coupling / SB and Bridge stiffness Don M.

[Richard Brekne]

Hi Don.

Excellent post !  Thanks much for your thoughts on all this. Would like 
a bit more thoughts on the P-12ths from you. You say you find it a 
<<wide>> stretch.  It does seem to widen the octaves and double octaves 
around the C5 -F6 area... but then again the top notes alway end up with 
fairly moderate stretch numbers... under 40 cents as a general rule for 
C8.  Often down as low as 32-33 cents. Depends of course on the 
resultant 3rd partial of F6 which is decided by tuning its fundemental 
to the 3rd partial of A#4, which again has its fundamental decided by 
D#3 (at least the way I set up a P-12ths tuning)

The bass gets scrunched if you stick to 3:1 12ths all the way down. I 
remember Jim Coleman commenting on that when I first started off on 
P-12ths about 9-10 years ago. He said actually he kind of liked the 
middle treble stretch tapering off higher up... but thought the mid to 
low bass was just plain too narrow.

Really... I have a hunch that an awful lot of aural tuners have been 
using something very close to a P-12ths stretch for a very long time. I 
keep running into a heavy reliance by many on tests and controls for 
setting octaves that result in either a P-12th in between double 
octaves... or something very very close to it.

Take for example the Major 3rd below the bottom note of a double octave 
as a control note .  One common test that pops up again and again in 
several forms of description ends up boiling down to comparing the beat 
rates of the bottom note of the double octave, the fourth above that, 
then octave and the double octave abovethat Major 3rd (for example G#3 
as a control, C4, F4,C5,and C6 to be compared against it). The major 6th 
G#3 to F4 and the double octave and a 3rd G#3 to C6 are asked to beat 
pretty much the same in nearly every description I've run into using 
variations of these.  But thats nothing more then a test for a P-12th to 
begin with.  Bout the only thing <<new>> with this seems to me to be the 
various formalizations we've seen.

Cheers
RicB