Virgil's Natural beats

[Kent Swafford]

on 2/13/01 11:48 AM, Ron Nossaman at RNossaman@KSCABLE.com wrote:

> Perhaps Virgil isn't
> listening to anything at all different than any of the rest of us, but the
> fact that he compensates for unison pitch drops as he goes may be the
> primary reason his tunings are so pretty.

I don't think it is that "he compensates for unison pitch drops as he goes".
I think it is even more simple than that.

> ...listening to and tuning the unison (whole sound???) rather
> than the "partial" unison (1 string???), could very well be the difference
> between beats between coincident partials and "natural" beats -  Natural
> beats (in this case) being the sum of the individuals, and very obviously
> not the same as each individual separately.

Yes. Could be.

> Since my superficial
> experiments indicate to me that I can't anticipate the degree of cumulative
> pitch drop when the unison is in tune, it might just be that simple and
> obvious a thing. It is, after all, accommodated in tuning by listening to
> the sum, rather than the parts.

Yes. You mean you have to listen to the overall results of your tuning and
adjust until it's right?  :)

> The
> apparent fact that it's not precisely predictable just means we haven't
> identified and produced ways of  collecting measurements of all the
> determining factors yet, but that pitch drop does NATURALLY happen
> nonetheless. 

Pitch drop happens, but I'm not convinced it is often much of a factor in
the actual tuning of actual pianos.

Virgil tunes great unisons, and he tunes his octaves while listening to all
three strings of both unisons. And he works at it until he gets it right.
There is a certain wonderfulness to getting all 6 strings to agree. Getting
all 6 strings to agree is a simple concept but devilishly difficult to
actually accomplish. In tuning this way, the unisons tolerances are _much_
smaller than the octave tolerances. I think Virgil just works hard at and
has a lot of practice in tuning 6 note octaves in which each individual
string is exactly in tune with the other two notes of the unison and each
individual string has _exactly_ the same relationship with each string of
the note an octave away. (If anyone thinks every tuner can do this, I'll
take some measurements with a VTD that will show otherwise.)

> This observation may very well be out to lunch, but it seems considerably
> more credible to me than most of what I've read and heard on the subject.

Ditto.

> Or is it too obvious?

If yours is too obvious, where does that leave me?  :)

Kent Swafford