WTT #6 - Tuning

Whistle
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This is a Tech Talk about anything that doesn’t fit the other subjects, that doesn’t have potential for a whole thread. The other threads are:

  1. Windway shape
  2. Metal fatigue
  3. Whistle materials
  4. De blade, boss! De blade!
  5. A “Boring” subject

Let’s start this one with “Testing Methods”
Everyone knows (or surmises) that we makers all use sophisticated electronic gear to get our whistles perfectly in tune. I know this ain’t always so. My first test instrument, was a pair of Clarke whistles (C and D), and a pair of ears (mine). Blow 'em both and listen for beat frequencies! Pretty good, if the Clarke was perfect, but kind of difficult, 'cause I had to tape holes to be able to test all opens (only 3 fingers per whistle available! )

Next, I moved up to a Yamaha electronic synthesizer. Crystal-controlled, so right on WRT pitch, but the “test instrument” was still my ear. Subjective. Empirical. All those Bad Words that our “Engineering Is God” folk despise! I’m so ashamed! :slight_smile:

Finally, I moved up to computers. Two of 'em. One runs a spectrum analyzer, the other a simplistic instrument tuner, that reads out the note and the exact frequency. And still, through all this, the very first high-C and high-D whistles I made, are perfect. Go figure.

A long time ago, in a C&F thread far, far away, somebody made the observation that the human ear is a highly-sophisticated instrument. What think you??
Cheers,
Bill Whedon
(edit 2 to change title)

[ This Message was edited by: serpent on 2002-10-28 17:48 ]

[ This Message was edited by: serpent on 2002-10-29 19:50 ]

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(wrong topic post)

[ This Message was edited by: Caoimhin on 2002-10-30 04:05 ]

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Bill, the ear hears what it’s trained to hear. If you play an out of tune whistle long enough, it sounds right. Then when someone else has a well tuned whistle, they’ll sound out of tune to you.

We run across this quite a bit in the fife and drum world. The historically correct fifes play a scale that is slightly out of tune with itself. Lots of ancient corps are more concerned with musical accuracy than with historical accuracy, so they choose a fife with accurate modern tuning. So a re-enactor will stand next to an ancient in a jam session and think the ancient is out of tune (which he would be, if it was still 1863)!

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Jim, that has a ring of truth to it, but maybe seasoned a bit with human differences. I have a friend, Jerry, who loves music, and loves to sing along with it. Only problem (for everyone else) is that he sings with virtually no pitch change, through the entire song. Now, if it’s a song that does well with a drone, and if he starts on a note that comprises same, things sound fine. Not most of the time.

Jerry can’t tell the difference, even when a recording of him singing along with the music is played back for him. He also can’t tell the difference between two whistles playing a dime off, simultaneously, with the beat frequency enough to drive you straight up a wall. Is he trainable? I doubt it.

Maybe in Jerry’s case, the “instrumentation” is broken.

What about “perfect pitch”? One of the ladies I worked with at Renaissance Festival, could hit a B for the opening note of this one song we did at closing, and hit it right on my whistle (which the songmistress wanted us to use), before I got a chance to blow a note. She could also pick up a piece of sheet music and sing it in tune. I can’t do that. Neither could any of the other singers. I, and some of them, could get the intervals right, but not the pitch, without a starting note. Is “perfect pitch” trainable?

“… listen to the music playing in your head…” (from “Lady Madonna”, the Beatles). We do that all the time, and it “sounds” pretty good to us, I think. But is that “inner music” in the correct key? Not for me, much of the time. I’ll think of a song, and want to hear the CD. I keep hearing the music playing in my head, and when the CD kicks on, I’m off-key.

But I can “hear” beat frequencies <1Hz when tuning a whistle, and so can my musician colleagues (at least the five I tested), and several other non-musician friends.

I know this has been a long dissertation, but maybe somebody would like to comment on what it all might mean?
Thanks,
Bill Whedon

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On 2002-10-28 00:08, serpent wrote:

And still, through all this, the very first high-C and high-D whistles I made, are perfect. Go figure.

A long time ago, in a C&F thread far, far away, somebody made the observation that the human ear is a highly-sophisticated instrument. What think you??
Cheers,
Bill Whedon

I dont doubt this,but an experienced player who is also a hard blower might be a little more picky.When I was learning to tune my tweaked whistles I was fortunate to have as my ´tester´one of Viennas most gifted whistle players,Nikki Eggle.He was brutally honest with my earliest efforts but was patiently prepared to play anything I handed him ,and I listened and learned from his very constructive and honest criticism.I learnt that experienced players like Nikki are better equipped to assess tuning accuracy then the novice I was at the time, and one day after a test run that included the 3rd oct,he stopped and paused for a moment and saidthat,s it..its perfect,what did you do?´.What I´did I could never have done without `his´ears and I´m happy to say he still loves and plays this whistle,which is of course now his own. :slight_smile: Mike

[ This Message was edited by: mike.r on 2002-10-28 09:25 ]

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I used a program called Tune-it.

http://whttp://www.hitsquad.com/smm/programs/TUNEIT_win95/ww.hitsquad.com/smm/programs/TUNEIT_win95/

Dave

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http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/programs/TUNEIT_win95/

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Mike, we gotta talk about that keyboard you’re using! :slight_smile: Getting ? for ’ on my display. Thanks much for the interesting vignette! Never a bad idea to get someone with real know-how to help, huh?

Dave, thanks for the link - I’ve D/L-ed and will try it out this evening!
Cheers,
Bill Whedon

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On 2002-10-28 10:28, serpent wrote:
Mike, we gotta talk about that keyboard you’re using! > :slight_smile: > Getting ? for ’ on my display. Thanks much for the interesting vignette! Never a bad idea to get someone with real know-how to help, huh?

Dave, thanks for the link - I’ve D/L-ed and will try it out this evening!
Cheers,
Bill Whedon

It,s a `Fujitsu/Siemens´whats happening now?``

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Mike’s using two different quote characters (ascii 96 and 180) for quoting instead of ’ (ascii 39).
See this](http://www.efn.org/~gjb/asciidec.html%22%3Ethis) chart.
They show up just fine as angled “left-single-quotes” and “right-single-quotes” on my windows/IE5 machine.

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Bill,as this thread concerns "tuning"I wonder if re-naming the topic to include this might be more specific for future reference.Just a thought…:slight_smile: Mike

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On 2002-10-28 17:31, mike.r wrote:
Bill,as this thread concerns "tuning"I wonder if re-naming the topic to include this might be more specific for future reference.Just a thought…> :slight_smile: > Mike

Good idea. Done! :slight_smile:
Cheers,
Bill

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I use a chromatic, rackmount tuner to tune my whistles. The hardest thing I find is how much an individual note can vary just because of air pressure. I try to keep a steady stream and try not to let my desire to see the dial go to the center effect my air pressure. Sometimes I have to look away when I blow then look at the dial to see where it lands. The frustrating thing is not knowing how hard the person who will ultimately get the whistle will blow! I figure if I keep my air pressure steady on each note then I will end up with the best overall product.

Sometimes I play the whistle for a while after tuning to make sure that my ears like the end result. For tuning purposes I use my own mouthpiece, that way I can goober all over it and am used to the subtle harmonics. When I choose a bottom for a mouthpiece, I then do a final tuning to make sure the length of the tube with that in partictular mouthpiece is slightly sharper than concert pitch offering tunability either way of 440.

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I have 2 electronic tuners that I use to check out my whistles. One can produce a reference tone so I can hear the correct pitch, plus a needle which centers when the whistle is on pitch. The other has some red LEDs, with a green one in the middle for correct pitch. After getting everything as OK as I can, I simply play the whistles for a while ( couple of days if a customer is not in a real hurry, preferably at a session). The proof of the pudding is in the playing!
Tuning is sort of variable anyway, since everyone blows a bit differently. I belong to a recorder( gasp!) consort, and we run into this at every rehearsal. Takes a piece or two of playing and warming up the instruments until we are all listening to each other well enough to play in tune. Out of tune unisons on high notes of recorders can be excruciating!!

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The tuning is only as good as the equipment, whether it be human or electronic. I’ve bought a few instruments that were horribly out of tune. I called one of the makers, and he apologized, saying that he was tuning to an electronic tuner because his son was out of town. Appears his son’s ear is better than that electronic tuner (as is mine).

I think if you have a good reference, like a tone generator, tuning forks, or a good pitchpipe, that it’s not that difficult. Most human ears can hear beats (differences of one cycle per second) quite well and get the note to much better than a cycle. OTOH, I know that many people can’t tell whether the note is sharp or flat, and they have a lot of difficulty tuning by ear. A friend with that affliction used to cook me dinner once a week in exchange for me tuning his hammered dulcimer.

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Does anyone know why some threads like this have a wider format than others?Is there some way to reduce it? Thanks, Mike

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I believe the sixth post in the topic, in which dkehoe posted an excessively long URL is the culprit in this case. The browser doesn’t know how to break up that long “word”, so it makes the text column as wide as it needs to be to avoid breaking it.

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Thanks jens,thankfully this new page is OK.If dkehoe edited the URL to two lines would that fix the problem? Mike

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On 2002-10-28 23:48, Sandy Jasper wrote:
I use a chromatic, rackmount tuner to tune my whistles. The hardest thing I find is how much an individual note can vary just because of air pressure. I try to keep a steady stream and try not to let my desire to see the dial go to the center effect my air pressure. Sometimes I have to look away when I blow then look at the dial to see where it lands. The frustrating thing is not knowing how hard the person who will ultimately get the whistle will blow! I figure if I keep my air pressure steady on each note then I will end up with the best overall product.

Sometimes I play the whistle for a while after tuning to make sure that my ears like the end result. For tuning purposes I use my own mouthpiece, that way I can goober all over it and am used to the subtle harmonics. When I choose a bottom for a mouthpiece, I then do a final tuning to make sure the length of the tube with that in partictular mouthpiece is slightly sharper than concert pitch offering tunability either way of 440.

I use a compressed air cylinder running into a HVLP regulator set quite low and necked down through a valve, into aquarium tubing that slips over the end of the whistle. Crank the pressure down until the bell note plays at max volume, then back off until it quits, then set in the center and check the low register. It removes the variables imposed by my not having a pressure gauge on my cheek! :slight_smile:

A large (procedural) benefit of this is that since I use a fairly long bit of tube, I don’t have to pull the whistle out to clamp it back in the press to re-size holes, with the added (mechanical) benefit that the continued compressed air clears chips!
Cheers, :smiley:
Bill Whedon

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One thing I haven’t heard in this discussion about tuning is a correction factor for temperature (which is the largest variable). If I just turn on my Korg master tuner and start tuning, it will only be accurate for the ambient temperature of the room where I’m tuning. So if someone trys to play this instrument at a different temperature (referencing a standard tuner) it will be off, and if the shift is considerable it can be way off. So what I do is callibrate the tuner for 70 degrees by using a correction chart, which gives the player something a lot closer to tune to. So when we say that our instruments are tuned to A-440 at 70 degrees we are being much more accurate.

Is anyone out there making whistles taking the temperature into consideration? Of course if your shop is a constant 70 degrees then theres no problem.
Whadaya think?
Ronaldo