Dave writes:
<< And then we have the ones who claim that a unison can be too clean and
they alter it. Having never tuned - nor even heard - a unison I thought to
be too clean I'm jealous of anyone who can produce one of these. >>
Greetings,
I am one of those, I think, but I allow it rather than produce it!
Since reading Gabriel. Weinreich's findings,
<A HREF="http://www.speech.kth.se/music/5_lectures/weinreic/weinreic.html">
Gabriel Weinreich: The coupled motion of piano …</A>
I began questioning exactly what I was looking for in a unison. Then I
bought a SAT and began looking at numbers. The phase relationship can be
altered by an unnoticeable difference in pitch to achieve the best sounding
unsions, since it appears that the fullness and sustain of a unison doesn't
necessarily depend on all three strings vibrating at exactly the same frequency.
Since I am in this for the money, I listen to customers. One of my
more seasoned performance customers, with many years of exoerience, told me
that my tunings sounded better a day after I had tuned them. This artist is a
very forceful player and I had always tried to leave the piano as clean as
possible. I went back a day after a tuning to see what was the difference
and could barely discern any, but there was the slightest drift in most of
the unisons. NOT a drift that caused a beat, since the sound died out before
a full cycle could be heard, and not a drift that produced even a "yowl",
but the SAT would show that usually one of the three strings exhibited a
tendency to be either sharp or flat from where I had left it. I am talking
about maybe a tenth or two of a cent. However, this is enough to increase the
sustain and apparent fullness of the note.
The piano sound I get when all three strings stop the lights dead on
is not the same as when I tune two strings to the lights and then place the
third string by ear. I believe the latter approach is the way to go to get
consistant unisons, since 'machine perfect' produces some notes that are
crystal clear and some that are not. By aurally tuning the third string, I
think I am allowing a sensual judgement to determine the final sound, and the
coupled motion is at the heart of this. Some notes above C6 require an
obvious variation to produce an acceptable unison. And false beating strings
often require even more divergence from exact to give the illusion of clarity.
I tune as cleanly as I can, but the machine tells me that this often
requires more than one pitch in a unison to achieve. I do this knowing that
anything from soundboard movement to bridge expansion/contraction will
loosen up the unisons soon enough, and the durability of the tuning is better if
I start the unisons "too clean", since from this starting point, it takes
longer for the divergence to become apparent.
regards,
Ed Foote RPT
http://www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/index.html
www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/well_tempered_piano.html
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