Veritune

[Robert Scott]

John Musselwhite asks:

>The Veritune was released at the PTG convention but I haven't seen anyone 
>talk about it yet. Were there any demonstrations of it?

>Their WWW site (http://www.vertitune.com) has limited information on it, 
>but I'm sure a lot of people are curious about this new and apparently 
>advanced device. Does anyone who was there have any comments about it?


I talked with Dave Carpenter, the inventor of the Veritune, and this
is what I gather is up with Veritune.  The main feature is the method
of taking inharmonicity measurements on the fly while tuning.  The
user does not have to do anything explicitly to take inharmonicity
readings.  Veritune is supposed to be able to evaluate the sound
and tell when the readings are good and when they are not.  You begin
tuning at A440, I guess, and then as you tune each note, Veritune
refines its tuning curve based on the inharmonicity reading that it
gets while you were tuning the note.  One drawback that I see is that
your tuning curve is constantly being modified as you go, which may
invalidate some of the earlier notes that you tuned.  However, Dave
maintains that after the first few notes are tuned, the subsequent
revisions to the tuning curve based on later inharmonicity readings
are inconsequential.  And there did seem to be a control on the screen for
locking or unlocking the tuning curve.  I suppose that if you lock
the tuning curve you freeze its current state so that subsequent
automatic inharmonicity measurements do not modify the tuning.

The device is stand-alone (not a program in a laptop) and it is
supposed to have a battery life of 15 hours on one charging.  The
device software runs on top of Windows CE and has a display screen
that contains two concentric circular patterns that indicate coarse
and fine tuning error.  It has memory for storing tuning curves by
name.

The prototype at the show was somewhat flakely, but that was not
the actual circuit board that will be used in the real product.
I would not draw any conclusions from that glitch.

Let's see what this device does when it gets into its eventual
form and when it is applied to a wide variety of pianos.

-Robert Scott
 Real-Time Specialties