Hi Gregor It was precisely the same approach below that led to my own failure to pass my first tuning tests. You seem to imply that it is a negative thing to deal with the academic side of our discipline. I would take the greatest exception to that if so. The benefit of being aware and using consciously coincident partials is to be able to converse intelligently with others and with your self about what exactly you are attempting to accomplish. It does no real good to use vague expressions like <<make it sound good>> I have no doubt that you learned to listen for certain beat rates in testing intervals as a very central part of your training. The vocabulary and academics behind interval types, ie 4:2, 6:3 octaves, 3:1, 6:3 twelfths, 4:1, 8:2 double octaves etc etc are very central to what you were listening too. Finishing off a fine tuning by listening holistically is good practice in anycase... but certainly no reason for attempting to simply tune that way from the get go and most certainly no reason for advising others to set aside the intellectual side of what we do. No good tuner I know of simply slavishly aligns any particular pair of coincidents to begin with. That piece of knowledge is also one of those bits you pick up from the academic side. Coincident partials are tools we use, and the more conscious we are about what they are and how to use them the better a tuner you will be... no matter which way you go about things. Cheers RicB Great idea. The whole discussions seems a little bit theoretical and abstract. When I joined this list a few years ago I read the first time about ETD´s. In this context I heard the first time about 4:2, 6:3 or whatsoever octaves. Of course I knew what was meant but I never thought about it before. I learned all the tuning theory during my training, but I never strived for a particular octave such as 4:2 or any other. I just wanted to let it sound good. I remember that I first had a hard time to decide on which beats of an octave I should listen. I heard so much ringing, beating and overtones that I was completely confused. My goal was to cut the knot and bring some calm in the restlessness, but I did it with my ears and not with the intellectual capacity of my academic brain. In hindsight I can say that was a good because holistic approach. When you focus on a particular partial matching you risk that you neglect other partial pairs. Once you started to focus on a pair your brain will quickly adapt and filters out the rest. I became aware of it since I have an apprentice now. She is new to tuning and has the same hassle that I had with hearing overtones. She showed me what she was hearing and I was stunned because I did not hear it first. But after hearing it once I could not stop for a while, because I was so focused on her perception. My brain had completely filtered out what she was hearing before she told me. Sometimes some partials are louder than others and this constellation is not consistent over the whole piano, sometimes even not within an unison. What works for e.g. A3-A4 may be wrong for G3-G4. So, a holistic approach might be better than single partial matching. Tuning an interval always means finding the best possible compromise. Therefore, just let it sound good and don´t care too much about the math. Gregor
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