WavGen Beats

[Richard Brekne]

Hi folks.

I've been fooling around with a shareware wave generator (file is called wavgen21.zip)
these past couple days and thought I might recommend it to anyone looking for a free tool
to help get a feel for beat rates. I like it a lot better then the old metronome or trying
to use the second hand on a watch, or any "ticker" gadget as it uses sine waves (at the
frequency of your choice hehe.) and the "beating" closely resembles the kind of beating a
piano makes.

Enter two close frequencies (for example 440 and 441) and play the result to listen to 1
beat per second. This kind of thing is also good for getting a feel for counting different
numbers in the space of one second which is needed for contiguous interval checking. I know
a lot of tuners who don't bother with them because they say they dont need them and dont
want to bother with getting a "feel" for using them.

Experimentation with it is kinda fun and can be of benefit. For example pluging in values
of 440, 445, and 445.5 gives an interesting result. The five beats a second created by 440
and 445 are blured by the introduction of 445.5. Tuners run into this kind of thing daily
and its one of the reasons that beats can be sometimes hard to get a hold of. The
demonstation presents a good argument for tuneing agains single strings instead of unisons.
Some guys like to mute off the whole piano before tuning unisons. Listening to this
combination will show you one good reason why they do.

Richard Brekne