SAT II pitch raises

[Jim Coleman, Sr.]

Dave and Terry gave good basic answers about SAT pitch Raises. I will 
add my 2 cents worth here:

It is not necessary to measure each note during pitch raise, this takes 
extra time. With the SAT, one can do the PR in 10 to 15 minutes and have 
the results close enough for a good fine tuning to follow. If the piano 
is more than 50 cents flat and string breakage is a possibility, I use 2
PRs, the first time, just to A440, the second time I measure the pitch 
of three A's, taking the rough average of them as the one upon which to 
compute the PR for A3. I use a temperament strip throughout the piano 
and tune only the middle strings, finishing up with clearing the unisons 
roughly for the plain wire notes. If one string is left slightly high, I 
will deliberately leave the next one deliberately low. I only desire to 
balance the tension during a pitch raise. When I use this "quick and 
dirty" method, the entire tuning including the pitch raises takes no 
more time than an ordinary fine tuning.

During the PR's the hand learns the tuning pin torque fairly well and 
is able then to do a better tuning on the final pass.

Just a note of caution when doing the rollover technique from MSR to SHIFT;
If you hold down the MSR button too long, it will not know that you 
intend to do a pitchraise calculation and may measure some extraneous 
sound in the room and give you weird results. So, once you have measured 
the pitch drop, press the MSR button and quickly press the SHIFT or Green
SHIFT button quickly, release the MSR button, then release the SHIFT button.
Just before you release the SHIFT button, you will notice the offset 
amount in the right window. If you used the 25% overpull (MSR-BlueSHIFT) 
the amount in the window should be approx 25% of the amount of flatness 
which you had measured on the chosen sample note. Of course, one COULD 
measure each note as some others prefer, but the results versus time are 
not worth it in my opinion.

My personal preference is to sample the treble only once or twice and 
then after tuning the unisons, the Bass is tuned by ear to match 
wherever the Tenor section fell. I can tune the Bass faster by ear than 
with the machine. Whatever small variations you may find after the PR 
are easily and stably corrected during the fine tuning.

The SAT III processor runs at twice the speed of the previous models, so 
it is important to do the rollover technique quicker to avoid picking up
odd sounds which could skew the results.

Doing fast pitch raises helps develop hammer technique in both speed and 
accuracy in the long run.

Jim Coleman, Sr.