RCT

[Richard Brekne]

Leslie W Bartlett wrote:

> I'm absolutely new to electronic tuning-  have tuned ONE piano with a SAT
> III, and hated it!  Of course, I hated tuning by ear for the first
> thousand hours of practice or so..........     It occurs to me that
> carrying around a laptop, with all its electronic sophistication, plus
> its tendency to be fragile would be considerably more of a hassle than
> the very portable SAT.  I haven't seen many comment about this, and,
> since I am being swayed by electronics, having been shown how little I
> know about tuning by those nasty little lights, would appreciate thoughts
> in this regard.
>
> Thanks
> les bartlett
> houston
>

Hi Leslie... I too am new to El-tunings. Have had my RCT for about 3 weeks
now. And have a copy of Tunelab I am also checking out. One thing I noticed
right away was that tuning a piano straight to RCT just didnt work. Let me
refine that a bit. It worked ok... but the stretch was way wrong for the
piano (or my ear) But it was a very even tuning regardless of the stretch
amount. After about 5 tunings I started getting the hang of deciding which
stretch settings I liked best for which instruments, and now after about 15
tunings I am able to produce tunings using both my ear and the RCT as a
reference (and a aid to keep me tuning evenly) that are as good as any ear
tuning I have ever done. I find that most often if I just tune by ear, the
RCT will agree, but if I go the other way around my ear argues more often. I
believe as time goes by and I get more familiar with what RCT can really do I
will really be glad I have it with me.

One thing I like about Tunelab, is that it makes no decisions for you. You
can use it exactly like you use your ear. You want to set the 4th partial of
A3 to the 2nd of A4, then you just do it, and you use both your ear and the
machine to make it right. Draw back with it is that it takes a good deal of
time to tune this way, but I am looking at possibilities with it. In general
I am more comfortable being 100% in control of the decision makeing process.
Still I find that with each new RCT tuning, I am more able to let my ear and
the RCT work together.

So if you had a bad experience on the first shot... well what did you expect
??? grin. Just keep at it and find a way of making it be what its meant to
be.. an aid. Thats the course I am on in any case

Richard Brekne
I.C.P.T.G.  N.P.T.F.
Bergen, Norway