Unison coupling

[Ron Nossaman]

>Hi Ron,
>
>One of the problems is quite simple. It is almost impossible to get the
>same reading *twice* from any Etuning device. The way a person strikes the
>key effects the pitch. Also most people only measure at *one* partial
>instead of *all* of the ones possible. There doesn't seem to be any *easy*
>way around these problems.--even the diskclavier type instruments give
>different readings.
>
>I guess if a person took ten readings and threw out the high and the low
>and then averaged the results some *general* information would be gathered.
>Regards,
>Don Rose, B.Mus., A.M.U.S., A.MUS., R.M.T., R.P.T.


Hi Don,
That's just the sort of stuff I was concerned about, which is why I figured
there wasn't any way I could get anywhere with information supplied second
hand. Not that I'd do any better gathering data myself, but at least I
could determine first hand why I was still confused. I played around with
an old Strobo-Con in a killer octave a while back to see what I could see.
With one string, the pitch went up on the attack and stayed high for about
1.5 seconds, then drifted down a bit. Adding the second string, the attack
pitch height was the same, and the decal pitch was the same (as nearly as I
could tell), but the dwell time at the higher pitch went to about a second.
Adding the third string left the pitches the same again, but the high dwell
fell to a little over a half second. No real measurement on the time
durations, just tuner's relative time sense. This was with one of my
boards, and I haven't gotten to try it on anything else, so there's nothing
remotely informative here, though I was surprised at what I saw. The wheel
display on the strobe is a bit strange to work with, so I figured if I
could "con" a local owner of a real ETD into helping me take some samplings
with a digital readout, it would make life simpler and we could get a fair
number of samplings together in an afternoon. There's a semi-local tech
with a RCT who said she was interested, and I could probably borrow a SATII
from someone else if I was extra nice about it, but it hasn't come up on
the wheel yet.

I appreciate your thoughts.

Ron N