On 2/6 11:59 AM, Kent Swafford wrote: > On Feb 6, 2011, at 4:52 PM, Israel Stein wrote: > >> Well, Kent, please do share with us how you would approach a touch up using your ETD when you have 15 minutes until the next "take"... >> >> Israel > I can only speculate as to the source of your skepticism. I believe that John Formsma went a long way to explaining that - even though some of his assumptions are a bit off base, the general drift pretty much sums up my source of skepticism. Your situation is nothing like my situation, and in the sort of situation I am referring to (and I will clarify this later), that visual display could be a source of distraction and misdirection. I'd rather not deal with that possibility... > One possibility is the fact that you use a specific ETD that I determined about a dozen years ago > is not the one that is best suited to my needs. Again, thanks to Mr. Formsma we found out details. Perhaps you are right - if I were to personally experience the joys of OnlyPure, I might be converted. Or not. But I only have my familiarity with Accutuner and Cybertuner to go on - and those (when appropriate) and my ears (when necessary) do me just fine, and I am not about go to a third system for the few years that I could reasonably expect to be up to critical gigs. I am not getting any younger and my life's current circumstances have essentially put me out of the "recording sessions" (as I describe them below) business... > That said, I reject the notion that the 15 minute touch-up is a special or unusual situation. >Take for example the tuning I completed this morning: And this I will dispute to no end. In the sort of "recording sessions" that I am referring to - where they pay me to stand by for however many hours or days they keep recording - there is an imperative that does not exist in any other area of piano tuning that I can think of: to keep changes to the minimum necessary when doing touch-ups in the middle of a movement or a short piece. I have been told this by enough tuners (who got me into those gigs) and a major label producer to boot, to take it seriously. This is definitely what others here wrote about - where the piano is tuned in the morning and touched up many hours (or days - as John Formsma writes) later, "whether it needs it or not". This I treat as any other tuning. By the time I get to that piano, there will be problems in splicing different "takes" no matter what I do or don't do to the piano - so I might as well re-tune it to whatever level of quality I have time for, using whatever tools I have available, including the ETD. Strictly speaking, this is not what I would call "working a recording session". It's just a tuning, like any other tuning. > Many tunings are done with an absolute deadline. I strongly suspect that your 15 minute recording studio touch up closely resembles the last 15 minutes of any tuning done on deadline. Really doesn't Kent. You don't come in cold into the last 15 minutes of a "deadline tuning" as you call it and have to do very picky work. You've had one or several passes to get there. At a recording session touchup, you are expected to go from zero to sixty with no preparation, essentially... And sometimes with the musicians watching - and perhaps hinting that they would like to get back to it as soon as you are done, and the sooner the better. The "15 minutes" in theory could end up being somewhat less... Or at least seem that way... They break in the middle of a movement or a short piece when someone "hits the wall" and needs to refocus - they don't want to take longer than absolutely necessary (or everyone else could lose focus) - or when someone hears something wrong with the piano and want me to fix it. It's typically a note or two, and they are sitting there and staring at me while I find it and fix it - and I really don't want to start setting up the machinery just to look for one or two bad notes. It'll take longer, and it won't do me much good anyway - judging by how you describe your use of the ETD... So I am going to skip some of the description of your 1098 tuning - I am sorry, it isn't the same thing. I am trying to do something completely different, under totally different conditions, with a quite different goal in mind - getting rid of the audible offending notes or intervals, while keeping the changes to a minimum. You (and others) might disagree with this approach - but this is what I was told to do in several disparate situations in different time zones and by people who do a lot of this sort of work for major recording labels - so I'll stick with it. (I am wondering how Dave Doremus' experience with fortepianos and harpsichords fits here...) > As one goes through the scale, drift is immediately apparent by watching the display; as long as the drift is >relatively uniform without sudden changes, the drift may not be particularly audible in aural checks, so there may >be no absolute need to retune just to suit the display, nor to (off)set the machine. Fingers can still be used to mute >strings of the trichords needing attention, and having noted the general level of drift of previous notes, it is easy to >determine which string(s) moved (the most) and make appropriate corrections in the strings that will yield the best >temperament. This appears to me to be one of the best reasons for using an ETD because one can easily analyze >the mistake before making any "corrections", and help one enhance, not exacerbate, the quality of the temperament >when time is so short. Ah, but the ETD analysis would be with reference to the to the "ideal" pitches that the ETD suggests through the scale - not with reference to the pitches that I am actually leaving on the piano, because their individual drifts (nothing drifts absolutely evenly) are not significant enough to correct. (As John Formsma points out, perfection of temperament is the least important consideration here). So the ETD may suggest a larger correction to that bad note than is necessary to deal with the audible problem. It might prejudice my judgment as to how picky I need to be here to satisfy the demand of the moment. In the situation (and under the "minimize change to the extent possible" imperative) it is giving me too much information, and perhaps misleading information. > This morning when I hit the break at the octave 5 action bracket, I came upon a note that was sharp where all the previous >section had been slightly on the flat side. The ETD suggested and aural checks confirmed that this note, one of only two or >three in the entire scale needed to be completely retuned. And this is precisely where I don't want an ETD suggesting to me to what extent the note should be moved - I want to make the judgment myself, without being prejudiced by a visual display, because where that note ends up might not be the ideal place as far as the original tuning is concerned - it will be a compromise, meeting the dual demands of "taking care" of an offending note while minimizing change. Watching a rapidly moving display might lead me to conclude that the note is worse than it really sounds - our minds are very prone to such suggestions.. > I profoundly do not care whether you yourself use an ETD in the recording studio, but to suggest that the very presence of an >ETD can by itself be somehow "unprofessional", as I understood you to have said, is an unfair and incorrect characterization, >in my opinion not in line with the calm and rational analysis that you have brought to so many other issues in our field of >endeavor. Well, Kent, I'll return the compliment by saying that I have known you to be a level-headed person who doesn't jump to unwarranted conclusions - but nowhere did I use the term "unprofessional". Perhaps I got a bit carried away by hyperbole - (I have been known to do that). In this case I think I used the word "insanity". So I'll trade my "insanity" for your "unprofessional", and let's call it even. I did write that I don't want that ETD to be seen when the artists are there watching me as I am do a quick touchup during a short break (or at lest that's what I meant) . I'll use it to do the initial tuning - sure. I'll use it during longer breaks (like lunch?) - when it's safe to re-tune the piano (Once they are done with a movement or a shorter piece). But in the midst of the recording session, when continuity of pitch is important - I don't want that visual display suggesting to me a change that is perhaps bigger than that demanded by my ear... And I don't know what atti tudes artists unknown to me have towards electronic tuning - I think Cy Schuster (are you here Cy?) can tell you all about a very vocal client of mine - teacher and performer - and her attitudes toward ETD tuners that got spread all over Pianoworld and the Modesto, CA area... I really don't want to be explaining the relationship between electronics and my ear to another skeptical artist during a critical gig - and I have plenty of war stories where I had to defend my ETD use to musicians (and successfully proved that I can meet their expectations using my combined methods - where "ETD only" tuners failed). OK, got it off my chest - back to work now... Israel Stein -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20110208/989582c6/attachment.htm>
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