Cracking the unisons

[Don]

Hi Ric,

I feel that the most offensive coincident partial needs to be dealt with.
No electronic device can beat (no pun intended) the human ear at this--as
it is subjective for the ear of the behearer.

I believe that unisons are the most difficult thing to tune on pianos--and
I believe that many times the plate flex is a greater component than most
tuners accept. That's one additional reason for listening to all three
strings open. Then there is the factor that removing the mute will change
the tension. Muting is a necessary evil however.

Most of my clientel is domestic tuning. This level of tuning is often
unlikely for pianos within those parameters. 

At 08:07 PM 1/6/2006 +0100, you wrote:
>Interesting to hear (once again) some citing the use of high coincident
>partials for tuning unisons.  Interesting because so many techs go about
>this differently.  One thing I learned at the Yamaha Technical Acadamy
>was to listen to the lowest possible coincidents... and not really to
>just one single pair.
>
>Their idea of a clean unison... one I have come more and more to rely on
>as time has passed since my last stay there..... has to do with how long
>one can stretch out a kind of conglomerate beat rate of the most audible
>lowest coincidents.  In almost every case you can keep it from going
>full circle if you cant get it to level out perfectly.  Sometimes you
>might have to exept a kind of sideways flutter... but no full circle
>wave was ever accepted.
>
>When I mentioned trying to match higher partials he just smiled and
>said...no no no...thats a disturbing and unclear sidestreet,  and he
>would repeat his demonstration.  Since he was the guy giving the scores
>out... I of course had to learn to do what he wanted.
>
>I think I've begun to like that approach as I started to often find that
>if I tuned higher partials beatless then afterwards when I ran through
>my quick double checks to just listen to the overall sound of octaves,
>10ths, 12ths, and the like... I found that the character of bass unisons
>varried far too much, where as if I did what the Japanese taught me I
>had more of a consistant colour to the bass unisons.
>
>Cheers
>RicB

Regards,
Don Rose, B.Mus., A.M.U.S., A.MUS., R.P.T.
Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat

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