In my world, tuning unisons means, at some point, listening to the note played once all the way from attack to decay. I can't conceive of tuning any other way. My tunings consistently take between 50 and 80 minutes, and are stable and musical---stability is important, but not more important than musicality, and that demands a level of excellence and precision that is aural as well as mechanical or kinesthetic. A stable tuning with out-of-tune triple octaves and screamingly sharp-sounding thirds (the kind that give ET a bad name) is still a stable C+ tuning. Tuning the bass I listen to octaves, double and triple octaves, and fifths and fourths. Waiting for the inharmonics to subside so I can hear the real beats of the fourths sometimes takes four to five seconds of listening and waiting, depending on how hard you hit the note. In the bass, softest is quickest. For a lot of us, the ten-thousand-hour rule applies. After you've tuned with some level of focus for 10K hours, your body knows how to do the work impeccably, masterfully. It's your chattering, negative, scattered, doubt-filled monkey mind that is the main barrier to speed and accuracy as well as rhythm and flow. When you find yourself talking to yourself, criticizing yourself, doubting yourself, just turn your attention back to the world of sound. JUST LISTEN TO THE NOTE and let your body do the work. Trust it. Voodoo? No. Practical wisdom? In my experience, yes. Hope this helps.... DA On Nov 4, 2010, at 6:35 AM, Ed Foote wrote: > Ron writes: > > Hi David, > > From past observations rather than specific knowledge of what you, > > personally, are doing, I find that tuners taking well over an hour are > > all doing the same thing. They listen too long, and tune way too deep > > into the tone envelope. Tuning into the decay is a waste of time and > > effort, I think. Pretty much everything you need is in the first half > > second of the note. > > > Umm, not for me. After the unison is close enough to stop beating, there are still cats meowing over the > next second or two that will be missed if I only spend 1/2 second. The bigger the piano, the more true this is. > Regards, > Ed Foote RpT -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20101104/95ade1d1/attachment-0001.htm>
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