etd for inharmonicity

[Jason Kanter]

greetings, piano technicians extraordinaire.

i've been lurking here for a few weeks after an absence of 3 years. i am
taking up piano tuning after a lapse of twenty years. i apprenticed to
sheldon smith in 1970, passed the craftsman exam in 1971, and did a lot of
tuning/rebuilding for ten years before cash flow dictated a career change.

in the early 70's, sanderson's machines were establishing a name for
themselves despite the default craftsman's resistance to electronic tuning
aids. i learned aurally and did a very creditable tuning with lots of
checking of thirds, sixths, double octaves and octave fifths.

Now, as i re-enter the area, my considerable computer savvy [developed in
the interim years] leads me with keen interest to the laptop or handheld
etd's. i have downloaded tunelab 97 as shareware and used it once. planning
to use it a lot in the coming weeks. printed out all the help files, some of
the jim coleman discussions of november, read it all three times.

by reading here and in the archives, i see that some of you use these
devices intensively, and combine them with interval testing. what strikes me
as most valuable is the ability of the etd to make a precise map of the
inharmonicity ranges on a given piano, enabling you to select which
intervals to rely on [which partials to listen to].

can anyone offer a concise description of how you map a tuning to the
inharmonicity readings on a given piano? Please describe your sequence,
including when you save the file and how you name it for reuse next time. i
am particularly interested in how you use the graphic view of the scale,
whether you sample c2, c3, c4, c5, c6, c7 and also the tops and bottoms of
string ranges, and how you annotate which partials you want to use for a
given range. 

and a secondary question; from my single use of tunelab, i would predict
that the machine encourages you to tune chromatically right through a
section and not to 'stop and smell the intervals' as a good aural tuner is
always doing. after all if you simply tune to the machine, chromatically,
what you end up with is a pointillist set of sound dots and you may not be
setting strings properly nor listening to the _musical_ sound of the piano.
am i right/ and if so, how do you counter this tendency to tune
chromatically/ [forgive my computer's errant shift key]

thanks

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 jason kanter * piano tuning * piano teaching
 bellevue, wa * 425 562 4127 * cell 425 831 1561
 orcas island * 360 376 2799
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