VT and SAT III

[Greg Newell]

not a dime's worth of difference in the result but quite a bit in the
cost, eh?

"Jim Coleman, Sr." wrote:

> 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.

--
Greg Newell
mailto:gnewell@ameritech.net