I wrote this on the “Post Clips” thread, something I’ve been thinking about for awhile. Wanted to have a separate thread because I’m very curious about other peoples’ experiences and views regarding tuners and ways people practice intonation.
"Mnpts,
Regarding tuners (and maybe others can chime in on this and perhaps I should start a new thread about this), it seems to me that the wood flute sound is so complex with so many overtones that many tuners give inaccurate readings. Particularly on 1st octave A, E’s and others I find that I have to bend a note till it’s obviously out of tune to get it “right” on the tuner.
Another way I practice intonation is to set a drone note (usually D or G of course, but also throughout the keyless range) and work to set the right wavelength feedback based on its interval, concentrating particularly on the base note/octave, the major third (G-B, D-F#), the fourth (G-C, D-G) and the fifth (G-D, D-A). The note will “settle” into its proper place when in tune. I then at times record myself playing with a drone note to see how it sounds just listening, not while I’m playing. It’s certainly more subjective, less scientific, but makes more sense to me, particularly since: 1) ITM is often played with Just Tempered intonation rather than Equal Tempered, which is how modern tuners are usually set; and 2) I don’t trust tuners.
ITM is often played with Just Tempered intonation rather than Equal Tempered
i think this is wrong, today almost every instrument is made to be played at an equally tempered scale.
its a bit more difficult to use the tuner for the flute, the pointer oscillates a lot, but i don’t think that it can be wrong…
A lot of electronic tuners can be set to a variety of temperaments. The one that I use, downloaded from the net, has dozens of temperaments. Try playing a Baroque flute in equal temperament. It’s doable but it sounds awful and requires a bit of lip gymnastics.
That’s not the case with wooden flutes, pennywhistles (except maybe burkes or other fancy ones), or pipes, and fiddles can play in any temperament they wish. Also, I don’t think accordions or concertinas are tunes to equal, either, as the resulting intervals, played together, rarely sound good on them.
Are you talking about the instruments in different keys?
Equal temperament wouldn’t help the instruments that are pitched in A440 and A415 play together. Baroque flutes, bass flutes and piccolos (descant?) could play together and still use a proper Quantz-just-intonation scale and were very different as to the lowest pitch they could hit.
it is quite possible that modern, electronic tuners do not register wooden flutes accurately. it is not an issue of the scale (because if you are intending to play the third and the sixth flat, then you would see this). in my experience, a scale that sounds in tune to my ear on the wooden flute registers as widely out of tune.
the problem is that it is probably only listening to the fundamental tone, and even then, it might not even be registering that. the way to check would be to have a recording of a note, and measure it against an electronic tuner, and compare this to the results of a spectrometer. spectrometers show not just the fundamental, but what overtones are present in the sound. by looking at this, we can see if the fundamental matches up between the tuner and the spectrometer.
i dont know very much about how the human ear hears tones, so even if the fundamental is “out of tune”, it might sound right to the ear through presence of harmonics, as the ear very well make a composite of all the overtones to “assemble” a pitch. this sounds very likely, as when i blow certain notes in tune, they often do not only change in pitch, but presence of harmonics. in this way, for me, oftentimes i play b and a with more harmonics than d, in order to get them to sound right to my ear.
in general, concertinas and accordions are tuned to equal temperament. i have only seen one concertina (out of the 20 or 30 i have played) that was tuned in a just temperament, and there was definitely a difference in the sweetness of the chords. most of the time, anglo players do not construct their chords using the third, which then alleviates any slight dissonance (which is also apparent on piano chords).
as far as i understand, most pennywhistles and flutes are out of tune, not just tempered–many sets of pipes are out of tune as well. the difference is in the tuning that they are aiming for–flutes and whistles generally aim for equal and pipes aim for just. the compromises made for tuning on whistles and flutes are in compensation for the bores, and for the fingerings that irish flute players like to use (changing the pitches of A and B to get the C natural closer to in tune). good players on flutes and pipes are able to adjust the tunings of the instruments to fit the temperament that they are intending to hit. flutes are such flexible instruments tonally that they can play in equal and just temperament (or as i like to say, equally out of tune at all times!), regardless of the tuning of the instrument.
Yes, perhaps the tuner is simply telling it like it is. I’m guessing the transient portion of a note’s attack not only includes a mess of harmonics (and white noise) but also some pitch variation, especially for players who have weak embouchure development or blow too hard/soft on the attack. No wonder the needle is jumping around. I like the “dampened” quality of needle tuners versus their digital counterparts but both seem to work for me.
I don’t trust tuners.
Okay but are you so sure you can trust your own sense of tuning, even when you employ your drone/interval method?
Some handheld tuners are better than others and with any tool you need to know how to use it. If the tuner displays equal temperment you need to know, for every note, how much different that is compared to the temperment you want to use. I’ve found I can use a tuner to tell me the pitch of one note relative to another by swapping back and forth between two notes. Do this with lots of pairs of notes and you get a good picture.
I’ve been having a look at Tartini http://miracle.otago.ac.nz/postgrads/tartini/ which gives a graphical display of pitch with time so you can just play and look back to see how you did. Again you need to understand temperments.
You can also use Tartini to look at a recording. So I grabbed some MP3 clips from the Wooden Flute Obesession stite (good players, good flutes???). Converted the MP3s into .wav files. Looked at tuning with Tartini. Some have great tuning eg June Ni Chormaic playing a Pat Olwell flute - very close to just tuning. There are however some where the tuning could only be described as having little to do with any temperment I’m aware of.
I was practicing today using the free digital tuner I downloaded through a link on Terry McGee’s site. I can get the notes in the ballpark, and if you listen to my clips, you can hear how well I do in terms of intonation practice.
How much do I trust my ear when practicing using my drone/interval method? It has flaws, like I said it’s a bit subjective, but I find just practicing to a tuner that tells me I’m a bit sharp here a bit flat there is too mechanical (i.e. negative reinforcement) and leaves out the practice that matters most–how well do I sound when playing with others, how well do I harmonize. I think much of flute playing is confidence: one has to believe one can play in tune and create the sound and feel one wants or all that will never happen. Practicing to a drone versus a tuner helps with some that for me. Plus, I like playing like a piper with drones a blastin’.
I’m still wondering how other folks practice intonation. Perhaps it’s too etherial and holistic in the end, a qualitative phenomenon rather than a quantitative reductionistic event. Perhaps that’s why I like drone practice versus tuner checks.
Yes, I’ve also noticed that if one listens closely enough, many fluters sound slightly off or worse. Sometimes, intonation on flute seems a bit of a quagmire: the more one digs into it, the worse it becomes and sucks you in deeper and deeper. At times, I just have to “give up” in a sense, and trust I’ll be in as good a tune as I can be and go for it–once again, a confidence (ignorance) issue.
It’s an interesting phenomenon, and one which took at least a few hundred years to address. Historically, it first became noticed in medieval times, when much of music was vocal, and, as a greater range (of instruments) eventually was developed, in particular of pitches both higher and lower than the human voice, and as these instruments eventually were played in various combinations together, a series of tuning compromises eventually were made, most famously by Bach.
It seems that instruments of a low pitch have an octave which is “wider” than an instrument of a higher pitch. That is, going from the lowest pitched instruments, and then upwards to the highest pitched instruments, one could say that the octaves become “shorter” and shorter, NOT as a mathematical doubling of the frequencies. As a practical matter, moreover, the natural octave of a low pitched instrument simply didn’t coincide with the natural octave of a high pitched instrument, and something just had to be done about that.
The “solution” was to compromise the tuning of the scale, so that the lowest instruments could match the tuning of the highest instruments, and that is the tuning known as equal temperament. Without equal temperament, for instance, there could be no such instrument as a piano, with it’s several octaves, and, similarly, there could be no such thing as an orchestra.
The fundamental is fairly easy to check out. Use something like Audacity to generate a single frequency tone (no harmonics) of the same pitch as the fundamental then blow the note whilst listening. The absence of harmonics makes the decreasing speed of the beats when close to the pitch and an apparent volume peak when the frequencies match easy to hear. Do that with headphones so that a tuner can’t pick up the reference tone. What does the tuner say ?
The downloadable shakuhachi tuner (as linked on Terry Mcgee’s site) seems to read correctly and will display a spectrum. Certainly any discrepancy is tiny compared with, say, the difference between a just or equal tempered third note in the scale.
None of which addresses the mystery of being in tune for the tune and in tune with other people.
Equal temperament has nothing to do with changing octaves; equal temperament keeps the exact octave interval present in older tunings. The purpose of equal temperament is to allow you to change key freely on a fixed tuning chromatic instrument without retuning it.
On the other hand, pianos are not tuned in ideal equal temperament, precisely because it does not sound good across octaves on the piano. Good orchestral strings and winds do not use equal temperament at all, but are expected to make small tuning adjustments on the fly to bring the note they are playing in tune with an ideal chord. Both orchestras and pianos existed for centuries before equal temperament was invented.
Make a set of uilleann pipes tuned to Equal Temperament and you will find that they are out of tune with the drones (and will never ever be in tune with the drones).
Uilleann pipes are tuned to Just Tempered so that they harmonise with the drones. There is a lot of info out there explaining why this is so.
The uilleann pipes are often the reference point for other instruments…a bit like the way that orchestra’s tune to the oboe.
So a good flute or whistle will be Just Tempered.
Thats the convention.
AND..it sounds better!
see the “Getting In Tune” section of this link, for an easily understood explanation:
As a somewhat flawed analogy, try singing in perfect tune to an electronic tuner. If you’ve ever worked in a recording studio, take a vocal track that sounds great and remove the instrumentation - the voice is often noticeably off pitch - not greatly, but noticeably. The singer, in this case, is tuning his/herself to the instruments and not to themselves. In reverse, good acappella singing is almost impossible to lay instruments behind, after the fact (unless it’s an acappella harmony, where voices lock in a chord). Exceptions to this abound, just as they do for flute solos, but it underlines the obvious difficulties of trying to electronically fine tune a non-fretted, embouchure-driven instrument. The true test of tuning is whether you play in tune with another instrument when you play - adjusting your embouchure properly to match the other player (assuming they’re in tune). Our embouchure’s allow us to adjust, whether to equal or just temperment. If you’re not in tune with yourself, (and by this I mean to the human ear, not a tuner), then you’ve got a different problem, and a tuner is only going to point out the obvious, that you are off pitch, note to note. Keep in mind that different flute types, Pratten, Rudalls, modern hybrids, hone their tuning with differing sensibilities - ultimately, it’s really up to the player to fine tune the differences.
