VT and SAT III

[Jim Coleman, Sr.]

Since several discussions have come up relative to the Verituner, 
I thought it might be of interest to some to hear what occurred 
here on the 6th of January.

Paul Bailey came over to Arizona to help me in a class on 
Historical Tuning at the AZ St Conference. While here I thought it 
would be a good test to see how the Verituner handled the tuning 
of a spinet. I happened to have a Wurlitzer spinet in the shop.
Paul guided me through the process of using the Verituner. We measured
all the significant notes which included the 5 A's, the notes on 
either side of the stringing break on the  treble bridge and the 
highest note on the Bass bridge. This circumvents tuning the 
entire piano as a first pass and then recalculating the tuning to 
get the best tuning for fine tuning. I was pleased that the 
Verituner did such a good job smoothing across the break in the 
temperament area.

I decided then to do the SAT dual page method outlined in an 
appendix of the SAT III manual. This involved measuring the notes 
G3 and G#3 (in the place of the usual F3, but storing them as F3 
on each of two pages of memory). The A4 was measured once and the 
default value of C6 was not measured but accepted. So, with just 3 
measurements, I computed both pages of memory. I tuned the plain 
wire notes with  the tuning computed where I had measured the G#3, 
and I tuned the wound tenor section and the Bass with the page 
where I had used the value for G3 in place of the normal F3. We 
then turned on the Verituner and played all the notes of the area 
from C3 through A4 and the piano made the VT patterns stand still 
in every case, and better than when I was tuning with the VT. 
This shows that the Verituner does a good job, but the SAT III 
is much simpler to operate.

As many of you know I no longer sell Accutuners, but it is still 
my personal preference.

Incidentally, in our Historical Tuning class, one Steinway L was 
tuned with the Verituner, another L was tuned with the TunelabPro, 
and the other L was tuned with the SAT III. In the first round of 
voting, the Tlabpro tuned ET showed a slight preference over the  
SAT tuned Coleman 11, with the VT tuned Kelner temperate last. In 
the next voting, C-11 was highest, with the Kelner last. In the last 
voting after switching piano positions, 
the Kelner temperament came up highest barely over the C-11 and 
the ET was last.

I believe this shows there is not a dime's worth of difference in 
the tuning ability of the tuning programs and in the various 
temperaments when it comes to listening to music being played. A 
great variety of music was played on each instrument and in many keys.
It also might show that Historical Temperaments can grow on you.

Jim Coleman, Sr.