Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Beginners, see how good you are at tuning A4 aurally.

Hi Goof,

These are the possible reasons you can't hear a clear beat. Check them out and let me know if that helped:

1. Unisons at F2 and A4 are not clean. Try muting the strings to leave single strings.
2. F2A4 is close to pure. Lower F2 a bit.
3. The position of your head in the room and/or the orientation or your ears is such that A4 is being filtered. Try turning your head slowly and moving side to side slowly, some say minimum three feet. Try to listen for A4 beating to get louder or softer, and find the "sweet spot" where it is the loudest.
4. If you still have trouble, use Audacity to filter A4. Then at least you can "see" the beat, hear the way an experienced tuner hears, and re-listen to the piano and try to pick out that same sound.

Let me know how it goes. I am willing to have a short Skype call with you to help you out if you wish. PM me.

P.S. Do you use an ETD? Have you recorded piano samples or loaded a standard stretch file? If not, insufficient stretch could result in a F2A4 major third that is not wide enough.

Also, when using F2 to tune A4, we are not tuning F2, but setting it to make useful beats.

Mark Cerisano,

I see you have edited your post here!

And you deleted your post in the Skeleton thread.

Why are you doing so?

Piano World keeps records of all posts.

It is useless to delete or edit them!

Yes, slightly off topic, but I think that editing posts should be inhibited after the next post appears. In this way, editing would only be possible immediately afterwards to correct typos and ideas etc that are noticed immediately after hitting the submit button, but not after the poster has seen other's remarks.

Edit: Whoops, I just made a correction

Edit 2: I must be a psychic. I knew in advance that you were about to say:

Yes Chris,

Here for example I am answering to your last post. What happens if you delete it after I have posted my answer?

It makes me look crazy!

How did you know?


Jajajajajajajajaja!


LOL!

WTH!

Am I crazi?

Rafael,

You keep pointing out Mark's "self promotion", and you keep provoking him with pointed remarks, such as



You present yourself as a self-appointed inquisitor with the single mission of provoking and discrediting Mark Cerisano. Is that what you want, rather than writing about piano technology?

Mark R.,

Each time I try to speak of piano technology, I am disqualified by Mark Cerisano.

If you want I can give you examples of that.

:)Thanks. Now! apart from the "sniping" this is an interesting post. Bear in mind I only tune my piano and my daughter's anchient Broad wood !
About twenty yrs back when I had an an 1850(about) Carl Ecke and got interested in tuning. I relied on a couple of forks, from the science lab, and a borowed book - no computer those days,thus I worked on getting what sounded "good".
Now I have no forks but a small Yamaha ET device which has a moving needle. I roughly use this starting with A4 and the two octaves on either side. Then I work up and downt he key board - sort of "as required". Because I'm only looking to correct the notes which may sound "wrong" when play the whole regime is no great sweat!
I've read plenty on this site, which has helped, plus much more on Railsbeck, inharmonicity, etc, etc. However I do find it difficult to decide how count "beats". Maybe also to decide what IS a beat. Is it the loudest point in a repeated "rythm" i.e. the peak in the sine curve? If yes then I find this maximum exceedingly difficult to isolate in the flow of sound.
I like to play the octave plus a third to get a clear soud; and acending M3s just hear the "beat" increase: but there is no way I could acually count against a measured time interval !!
Now as we have a dry day I must go and mow some lawn !!

Well, my guess is your ET device has no stretch. Look for my video on tuning a good octave aurally coming soon. Also, try my suggestions above. Also, load Audacity and have some fun with it.

BTW, you can make the thread more concise by going to the profile of any user who is hijacking a thread (click their name) and selecting Ignore User.

Examples not required. Since you seem to have taken it upon yourself to comment and/or refute every post Mark C. has made in every thread he's participated in and taken offense where none was offered let me suggest you use the ignore feature so you won't be troubled by his posts.

If you're unable to do that and find yourself otherwise unable to refrain and thereby derailing every thread Mark C. participates in, I'll help you.

I hope this is clear.

For those who found the A4 test interesting, I will be creating a similar set of pages for tuning an A3A4 octave.

Before I start, I'd like a little feedback please. Not the "how good am I doing" feedback, but more like "this is what we would like the next test to be like".

If you don't care about the next test, if you think the approach is flawed, if you think the idea of setting precise octaves is overrated, or if you have any other negative things to say about what I am doing, please do not respond. This post is not for you.

I have received sufficient feedback to confirm it is something a certain segment of beginning piano tuners finds interesting and educational. I won't be changing the approach, so any negative comments about the method will be ignored, especially if they are confrontational.

What I would like to know is:
1) Do you think the range of pitches for A4 is too high? According to quasi RPT test standards, the 9 pages (A4's) marked out approximately as -640%, -300%, -120%, -48%, 100%, -48%, -120%, -300% and -640%.

Mark,

For me, the range was indeed too wide. I could pick out the flattest and the sharpest examples immediately, simply by relative pitch, without actually comparing the beat speeds. Even the second-flattest and second-sharpest examples were, I think, quite obvious (although I can't be sure, because one never knows exactly on which page one is). So in my opinion, the test would have been better, and probably more difficult, using a smaller pitch band.

Concerning octaves: it would be nice to hear the relevant octave test(s) and listen to the resulting octave (but I suppose that's your plan anyway?).