Aural tuning plotted with TunePro - How good was it?

I had my Boston aurally tuned yesterday by the local Steinway dealer 'concert' tuner, and the results sound 'OK' to my ear. But I was curious about the stretch that was naturally applied via the aural process, and the smoothness of the stretch curve. So using TuneLab's capability to plot frequencies, I recorded about half the 88 keys spanning A0 to C8, with finer plotting at the upper end. (I did mute all but one string to record these.)

Here is the plot: http://users.erols.com/gcameron/tun_crv.JPG

Here are the questions:

1. Is the slight wavering throughout the entire range normal and acceptible? How about the occasional discontinuous jumps of 5-7 cents

2. Is the more extreme jumping at the higher end OK? There are a few jumps of greater than 15 cents from one note to an adjacent note. I'll admit it's really difficult to hear individual note differences from C6 up, but the overall sound is pleasing (e.g. arpeggios to the top).

3. Should I keep this tuner?!!

Gerald C

Just maybe, the aural tuning gives better results ? If you keep trying tuners until you find one that matches the Tunelab figures most closely, it may not sound as good, as ingenious as the software is.

Piano tuning is more of an art than a science...what you have just proven is that an aural tuner can overcome some of the imperfections in the scaling of a piano. Sometimes with unisons...especially in the treble...a good tuner can mask false beats by carefully/slightly mis-tuning adjacent strings. Do the unisons/octaves sound out of tune?

If the piano sounds good to your ears what more do you want? Maybe next time you should hire a tuner who uses an electronic aid and decide which you prefer.

The piano tuner that came over and tuned up my old Cunningham used TuneLab to first give the piano the much needed pitch raise, and then for the final tuning. The difference is, he didn't use TuneLab exclusively. As I watched him, there were plenty of times, especially during the final fine tuning, he mostly used his ear. It was fascinating and I have to agree that it IS more of an art than a science. My hat's off to you piano tuners and techs out there.

Cheers,

Greetings, The chart looks pretty erratic to me. I don't see much evidence of smooth progression. Regardless of how much stretch, a good tuning usually exhibits a progressive curve, not one with large drops in the sharpness here and there like your chart. On a very nicely scaled piano like the Boston, you would expect a smoother curve from a tuning. You might want to check your 10ths and 17ths to see just how evenly the thirds are tempered, or you can also check your octaves with these,(to test an octave, play a M3 interval below the lower note and compare it to the 10th, ie, for F3-F4, compare the beating of C#3-F3 with C#3-F4 and then C#3-F5). These comparisons will tell you if the octave is stretched. If the beating is the same, it is near pure, which will not work very well except in the middle of the piano. You should expect the 10th to beat faster than the M3 as you ascend.

up, but the overall sound is pleasing (e.g. arpeggios to the

How does it sound when you play octaves? or Double octaves?

Depends. If you have questions, there is no reason not to try someone else. It would be interesting to compare this to a tuning by an RPT with a Sanderson,or a Veri-tuner, or an RCT.

If you have pure octaves all the way up, the piano will sound flat. If you have stretched them enough so that the double octave sounds pure, the single octaves will produce beating, etc. Arpeggios don't illuminate this beating. I have seen tuners that use so much stretch in their treble that ALL the octaves are beating. Sounds like hell to me and I wonder if it is not done to hide the irregularities these tuners have in their tempering. Sorta like ET, which is beating so much everywhere that you just get used to it and don't hear at that level anymore. There is a great tuner in Chicago,(Virgil Smith), whose tuning is very clean sounding, even with fairly wide octaves. His octaves don't call attention to themselves with excessive stretch! Regards,

Ed Foote RPT http://www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/index.html Well-tempered CD's at Gasparo.com. GSCD #332, 'Beethoven In the Temperaments' GSCD #344 . 'Six Degrees of Tonality' Caution, these CD's contain pure intervals and extensive liner notes!

Sounds like your tuner used TuneLab as an aid and not a crutch. My opinion is that a tuner should be able to do an aural tuning before utilizing electronics.

I agree with you, John. When playing guitar in a band I had in Japan, we'd have these guys show up to one of our jam sessions and want to join in, so they'd come up on the stage, get a guitar, and then start plugging the guitar into a million effects, all sorts of processors, a whammy pedal, a crybaby, and all this other garbage. Then they look up and say, 'Oh, do you have 'such and such' effector?' And I would say, 'Look: Do you even know how to play guitar? Can you just play a regular, normal guitar?' Most often, they would give me the 'deer in the headlights' look. Electronics and computers will never be a shortcut for hard work, skill, and talent. (In that order.)

As ever, only my own opinion...

Cheers,

Greetings, Looking at the plot, I don't believe that it represents any use of a Tunelab or other high end electronic tuner. The discrepancies I see in the treble are far wider than most good tuners leave behind. Here is a test you can do. You want to know if any given note creates pleasing intervals of octave, fifth and fourth. On those notes that are significantly flatter than the curve, check to see if the fifth(downward) that they form sounds bad. I bet it will, or else, on those notes that are really sharper than their surrounding neighbors, check to see if the fourth(also downward) sounds out of tune. The art of tuning is making the compromises so that an acceptable octave will also produce fourths and fifths that don't stand out. The necessary deviations from 'perfect' required to do this are, in my experience, much smaller than what I see on that graph, especially on a clean scale like a Boston has. It looks like an erratic tuning to me. Regards,

Ed Foote RPT http://www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/index.html Well-tempered CD's at Gasparo.com. GSCD #332, 'Beethoven In the Temperaments' GSCD #344 . 'Six Degrees of Tonality' Caution, these CD's contain pure intervals and extensive liner notes!