Tuneoff challenge

[Robert Scott]

Richar Moody asks:

 >>>>>
Why are not machines used to
tune unisons in practice, or are they?    Unisons to me are the second
hardest interval to tune, actually tune it so it ISN'T an interval : )   .
I would think machines would be of great help.  You could check each
partial with a machine where you can't by ear.
<<<<<

The main reason unisons are tuned by ear is speed.  You don't
need to move the mutes as much.  Another reason is that in
the bass the inharmonicities of strings in a unison are
sometimes so mismatched that when you tune one partial beatless,
some other partial is noticeably beating.  In such cases it takes
a value judgement to come up with the least offensive unison
tuning.  Sure, you could tune any one of those unison partials
by machine, but that would not tell you the relative importance
to the overall sound so you could make a good compromise.  Even
if you used a voicing measurement (like pianalyzer) to gauge the
strength of the partials by machine, that would not necessarily
correlate to how much each partial contributes to the out-of-tune
sound.  Only your ear can do that.

That being said, there is a situation where I sometimes prefer
using a machine to tune unisons.  In the high treble it is sometimes
difficult to hear the beat rate, especially if there are false beats.
In that case I find I can do a better job by tuning each string
individually to the machine.

And here is one more time when it is very important to tune unisons
by ear and not by machine.  When you are doing a major pitch raise
with either RCT or TuneLab, the overpull amount is based on the
assumption that you will tune one note with the machine and then
tune the other strings in that note by ear.  If you were to tune
each of the three strings by machine, then the first string you
tuned would fall a little when you tuned the second string, and
fall even more when you tuned the third string, leaving you with
a bad unison.  But when you tune the second string to the first
string by ear, you automatically ensure that at least the unison
will be as good as it can be.

Robert Scott
Detroit/Windsor Chapter