Hi Joe: I saw your comment on the fast beating octaves. You didn't mention if the octaves were wide or narrow. As was shown on this list a while back, you can tell if the octave is going to be wide or narrow, by tuning the A4 with the FAC program and then changing the octave to 3 while playing the A4 again and checking if the dots are going too fast to the right, or if they are going backwards. If the dots are rotating one half revolution per second, this will give you a 1/2 beat per second wide at the 4-2 octave relationship. If that is too much for your personal taste, you can incorporate the Double Octave Beat control, say up to -.2 to make the octave beat only .3 bps. Or you could make it a pure 4-2 octave by making the DOB at -.5. This feature allows one to control the width of a particular octave even if the scaling of the piano is weird. This can be used even on an acrosonic spinet to smooth out the beating of the major 3rds across the stringing break in the Tenor. It is important however to measure the inharmonicity of the notes F3, A4 and C6 accurately. Here is a method to gain better accuracy: Instead of tuning the F3 to the setting F5=0.0 (it is difficult to tune to the accuracy of .1 cent), if the F3 is fairly close, adjust the cents to really stop the dot rotation. Then hold down the SHIFT button and touch the MSR button to reset the SAT to that pitch. Now, you can press UP OCTAVE, use the MSR button to slow or stop the dots while playing the F3 (trim up using the cents buttons if necessary for absolute precision). Store this number (which represents the difference in cents between the 4th and 8th partials of F3) in the usual fashion by holding down the SHIFT button and pressing the STO STRETCH button. Utilize the same procedure for measuring the A4 Stretch number more accurately, and the same for the C6 number. Remember that just before calculating the tuning, you must recalibrate the SAT to a true A-440 by holding down the SHIFT and TUNE buttons to get into the Calibrate mode and then press TUNE to get out. Select a page of memory by using the dedicated PAGE Up or Page Dn buttons. Now you can do the "rollover technique" (hold down STRETCH, hold down MEM, release STRETCH, release MEM). Wait 4 or 5 seconds and you have a good tuning for the complete piano. If your personal taste dictates more or less octave stretch, then you can use the DOB as described above. The DOB can be invoked at any point where you would like the tuning to be a little different. Shakespeare wrote a play "As You Like It". Dr. Sanderson wrote a tuning program "As You Like It." I love it. The SAT III does what I want it to do. Jim Coleman, Sr.
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC