Dear Andrew and Clyde,
>Just for grins, consider thinning a plectrum and
>see if that settles down the pitch variation and improves tone quality too.
Thinking through the experience, the effect is
there even on weaker quills that are definitely not overplucking.
>I don’t know the algorithms that PitchLab uses. It may be filtering on the
>fundamental, or it may not. It may be integrating the overtones. WIthout
>access to the souce code there is no way to know. When a harpsichord string
>is plucked the overtone spectrum rapidly changes with time, unlike an organ
>where it is much more stable from the start.
Depending on the nature of the pipe, even with
the organ, there is a transient period when the
pitch is not stable. (I dont mean the stopped 16
ft Bourdon coughing its 12th before settling!)
> This is part of harpsichord
>tone production, and is of course caused by the pluck. This does not mean
>your instrument is overplucking. Even very lightly quilled instruments show
>this. It is because of the initial displacement of the string which settles
>down shortly after the initial attack.
Yes, and presumably a function of the string
being slightly stretched elastically.
What it seems to demonstrate is that PitchLab
displays results that are unnecessarily accurate
for music. Like using a timepiece that is
accurate to a second to time the boiling of an egg.
>Don’t use a tuning meter to judge overplucking., Use your fingers to sense
>the force of the pluck, and your ears to hear the quality of the sound. A
>tuning meter is not the right tool to determine if an instrument is over
>plucking.
Your assertion confirms what I subjectively
felt! And the quality of the sound in ensemble
improves considerably when tuned!
>On the topic of the initial sharpness, this brings up a most interesting
>point. I myself and other harpsichord tuners that I know tune on the
>initial pluck, by repeatedly striking the notes in succession, rather than
>striking the note and listening for a long time.
I dont listen for a long time, and do restrike as
you describe; but by ear the initial pluck is
obscured by other sounds that do not have pitch
character. I suspect that our ears hear the
pitch after this transient has cleared, and this
is seen on the meter. When using PitchLab
yesterday, I waited for this fraction of a second
(at a guess c. 1/3 sec) while the reading settled
to the point where it stayed for a while before decaying
I have always found this
>technique produces a better sounding result. It’s possible that obsession
>with fractional cent tuning accuracy is rendered somewhat moot by this
>effect in harpsichords. What is the frequency of a note? It varies with
>time in the initial stage. Of couse this is only small fractions of a
>second. This gets back to the point that I repeatedly make on forums that
>the ear integrates all these phenomena very well, but electronic devices
>cannot, in general.
Quite so. The machine measures a selected
paramter, whereas the ear tunes for the overall
best match to what is expected. I dont think it
is actually possible to tune to fractions of a
cent in the middle of the instrument and above
with a simple tuning pin such as we use.
Rather than just setting the tenor octave, I
tuned every note of the back 8 with
PitchLab. Even when two notes an octave apart
were not reading better than 1 or 2 cents "in
tune" in PitchLab, listening to them assured me
that they were in tune. I did a reverse test and
discovered that the two notes of a "dead octave"
tuned by ear are rarely better than 2 cents away
from each other, as measured by PitchLab. Having
tuned each note of the back 8 separately, I then
tuned the front 8 by unisons and the 4ft by
octaves, using PitchLab for the top octave of
this. The result was a very "in tune" instrument
that was again a pleasure to play.
It has been raining hard overnight, so RH has
gone up and the instrument is now 7 cents
sharper! The two 8s are still good, though could
be finessed; the 4ft not. So is life!
David
>
>Andrew
>
>
>On 21 August 2016 at 4:26:37 AM, David Pickett ([log in to unmask]) wrote:
>
>
>I use the rotating display which has the note name and +/- cents in
>the middle, with the rotating strobe around this. I find that the
>pitch is usually about 5 cents sharp at the beginning of the pluck
>but settles down quickly. I tune to the settled down pitch; but I
>have been wondering whether the sharpness indicates too strong a pluck.
>
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Note: opinions expressed on HPSCHD-L are those of the individual con-
tributors and not necessarily those of the list owners nor of the Uni-
versity of Iowa. For a brief summary of list commands, send mail to
[log in to unmask] saying HELP .
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