<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Re: [CAUT] Sacrifice (was tuners- technology)</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> On 3/4/05 3:54 PM, "Otto Keyes" <okeyes@u= idaho.edu> wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE>Fred, et all, This was what I was getting at in = a previous response to the "jumpiness..." thread which this evolve= d from. -- see snip below --  I must admit though, that I don't recall = Virgil's assertion, or Jim C's experimentation.  Since I'm constantly c= hecking over the S&S D's (used for everything, since we have no dedicate= d hall or instruments), I have their tunings stored in Tunelab (formerly SAT= & then RCT).  Running through the pianos checking open unisons aga= inst the stored tuning I often found the unison clean, but drifting slightly= , so would check individual strings, only to find them individually "in= tune".  Aural checks confirmed the solidity of the tuning, but th= e EDT still saw the un-muted unison as drifting slightly.  Always wonde= red about that, so this thread has been interesting. Otto </BLOCKQUOTE> Hi Otto,     This has been my experience as well over the years:= often a lovely sounding unison, all three individual strings “dead on= ” according to the display, unison played with all strings open gives = a display that is creeping one direction or the other. And “one direct= ion or the other” seems fairly random. No pattern saying it is more of= ten flat than sharp, in my experience.     More recently, I have become more finicky (and just= plain curious) and have investigated further. And I have often found that, = where the unison read in tandem is creeping, if I look more carefully at ind= ividual strings I can detect a slight movement in that direction in one or m= ore of them. Sometimes it is far less apparent than what the whole unison is= showing. But if I correct the individual string, the display for the unison= is also corrected. And the unison sounds that wee bit better, too.     Part of my unison technique in using the ETD involv= es watching the display while tuning the additional strings to the first. I = find that the display seems more likely to follow whichever string is farthe= r from right on. So if my first string was really solid, the next string wil= l also be solid when I get the display to stop again with both strings sound= ing.     I don’t mean to get overly rhapsodic about ho= w great and easy it is to tune a perfect unison with an ETD. That’s no= t my intent at all. It’s just that I use that tool as an indispensible= part of my unison tuning process. I’m responding to a couple folks wh= o said, more or less, that ETD’s don’t work for tuning unisons. = In my experience they do work. But it ain’t easy. It’s never eas= y to tune a really good, solid unison. Hearing and figuring out where pitch = should be is the easy part. The unisons are the hard part, and nothing makes= them easy. Except lowering your standards <g>. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico </BODY> </HTML>