Hi Folks I thought some of you might be interested in hearing a bit about how the Yamaha academy evaluates tunings, and what their tuning parameters are. To begin with, tho they do measure tunings with the PT100, tunings are primarily judged by ear. When you are finished with your tuning then you team up with another student to do a quick measurement of the tuning with a PT100. This is a bit of a weak point in their whole process really as there is no assurance that the students really have any experience with any tuning machines. Many simply didnt know how to deal with difficult to read bass or high treble notes. It didnt seem to be a big item for concern either as the point of measurements was evidently more for a rough reference of your tuning trends then anything else. That said... on the final examination the measurements are taken by the instructors. After you were done recording the tunings, the instructors would come in, each with one portion of the piano to assess. The temperament was assessed with the temperament strip inserted, and consisted of the notes F3-E4. 4ths and 5ths were what they were listening for, and you had to be dead on with these to get a good score. 3rds were only slightly used as a side reference. They didnt spend any time listening for progressively faster beating 3rds. Just 4ths and 5ths... and boy were they picky about those. The bass was assessed by another instructor and consisted of all notes left of the bass/tenor strut. No stretch here at all... in fact even in the lowest octave you had to have very clean 4:2 octave types. You needed to balance the 6:3 and the 4:2 types but both were required to be as pure as possible. I was told that the same requirement is held for even 9 foot instruments, and they maintained that doing so would not compromise higher order types unacceptably in any sense of the word. Unisons were checked in similar fashion. The lower order partials coincidents simply had to be pure... regardless of what was going on with the higher partials. The middle section was then checked for octaves and unisons much the same... 6:3, 4:2, had to be pure as could be.... and 2:1's had to be really tight... non of this beat per second compromising to get a big stretch. Nope... just narrow 6:3's, clean 4:2's and just wide 2:1s---- leading to very tight tuning requirements in the high treble. The top two sections were checked also by ear and this area was the most difficult to satisfy the instructors... at least for me. The instructor listened to 8:1, 4:1, and 2:1 octave relationships and 3:1 and 6:1 fifth relationships. He was looking for a very even and graduated increase in beat rates as each became more relevant. He would play chromatically 8:1s and listen for when the beat rates started becoming noticeably fast... no hops or jumps... faster then slower... .. then the same for 6:1s, then 4:1s then 3:1s then 2:1s. C8 ended up being in the neighborhood of a 28 cents stretch... no more... even tho the template for the graph had it at 35. Interestingly.. if you held onto perfect 12ths for your first pass you could very easily refine your tuning to meet these criteria on the second pass... and really... except for the last 6-7 notes... 12ths were pure or nearly so the whole way... becoming noticeably narrow for those highest notes. It took me a few days to sort out exactly what they wanted from me... but once I understood how little stretch they wanted I managed nicely. They seemed to have heard about Cyber Tuner.... but didnt know anything about the SAT, Tunelab, or Verituner. No machines were allowed for tuning btw. Each tuning required a 2 cents pitch raise... and to score high you needed every bit of the 2 hours you have to do the tuning in. You are then scored for temperament, bass, middle, treble and graph. Top score for each was 20, except for graph which had a top score of 15. Getting an 18 on any section was very rare... a couple three or four students in the course of a year get a few 18's I was told. For GP course a total of 80 would get you an A, and for Master and Concert courses you needed 85. Most of the GP and Masters students were hard put to get above 80... and I was told this was the norm. Students invited to take the Concert level are expected ahead of time to be able to push past the 85 mark most of the time. That was just the tuning... the rest of the story I'll save for another post. Cheers RicB
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