Precision Strobe Tuner

[Michel Lachance]

>Gotta say Michel... the jury is still out on ETD's and as far as they have 
>come
>through the years.. they still have a way to go.. The idea of a smoothly 
>evened
>out tuning curve has one major weakness... real inharmonicity on a real 
>piano.
>Indeed thats why the best ETD tuners end up tweaking the tunings a good 
>deal in
>the end.

Concerning ETD devices, there are so many different techologies available 
that one cannot say "you've heard one, you've heard them all!".  Mentionning 
for example that ETD users have to manually tweak the treble shows that you 
may not know exactly how RCT program works and, most of all, may not have 
heard how a RCT tuning sounds in real life.  With the program, you can 
custom tweak your curve (any part it actually) up to an outrageous rate if 
you want.  If you only have a theoratical idea of RCT and put it in the same 
basket as some early ETD's, I think you don't shoot the right target.

>Dont get me wrong.. I like ETD's.. but for what they can teach me.. not for
>their ability to decide what a good tuning is or isnt. In the end a good 
>tuning
>is the result of a good portion of skill, knowledge and subjectivity... 
>with
>accent on the last. Puters dont have that last ability and no amount of
>programing is going to teach them that.

Good ETD devices are not the opposition of aural tuning.  When you record 
you own aural tuning on RCT for example, you DO an aural tuning with the 
machine.  You can even do it with a vacuum cleaner running next to you!

>A little Korg auto tuner works just as well for a pitch raise.. if you are 
>able
>to figure out in your head how much to raise.. which is no problem.

I STRONGLY disagree here.  If you would pitch raise a piano with a simple 
ETD the way RCT does, here is what you would do:

1.  Measure the four first partials of five five partials ladders:  A1, A2, 
A3, A4, and A5.

2.  Move ladders A1, A2 and A3 down, and A5 up, in order to have the most 
optimal partials alignment.

3.  Calculate with logarythm a stretch curve connecting all these ladders, 
including the width you would give to these octave without forgetting giving 
maybe a bit more for the treble.  You also determine the best tuning partial 
for each note and adjust the offset with the inharmonicity rate of the 
tuning partial compared to the fundamental.

I simplify a lot here.  In reality RCTdoes even more.  It has lots of smarts 
for example that autocompensate for badly scaled piano in order to give the 
best compromise possible.  It takes about three minutes with RCT to do all 
this, the longer part being taking the note samplings.

When you have your stretch curve and determined the best tuning partial for 
each note, you start pitch raising bottom up, unisons as you go in the 
following fashion:

5.  For each note, you measure the pitch, compare it with the desired pitch 
of your calculated tuning, mathematically add a compensating offset 
percentage that varies with the register of the piano.

6.  You take that value and make an average with the offset of the last five 
notes in order to temper any odd pitch drift.

7.  You tune the note and the unisons.

With training, you may take about five minutes to do the calculation for 
each note.  RCT does it automatically with a blink of an eye.

This is lots of talking and sounds pretty complicated. Just forget all what 
I said and read this:

Again yesterday, I tuned a Steinway B that had not been tuned since last 
summer.  The A440 was 16.2 cents flat.  I did ONE pass and the A was dead on 
pitch (not +0.1 or -0.1 cent).  On the 88 notes, only ten needed to be 
slightly reajusted and to tell you the truth, most of them sounded really 
nicely; they just had a slight drift on the machine...  This was for a 
concert and the piano sounded great.

Please, don't believe me.  Find someone who has RCT, sit with him at a badly 
out of tune piano and find out by yourself.  With all my regrets, this is 
the only way you may have a fair opinion of RCT.

To come back with the initial issue.  I can understand people may like 
tuning so much that they may be disapointed, when pitch raising, of having 
the job done on right on the first pass.  For me, my time is valuable and if 
I can save 15 to 20 minutes on pre-tunings, I find really worth spending a 
bit more for a good ETD device.  For me, Precision Strobe Tuner does not 
fall that category.

Regards,

Michel Lachance

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