SAT III beating octaves.

[Jim Coleman, Sr.]

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.