Teaching students to tune

[tony-morosco]

+++I definitely agree with Saul and the others — remove that crutch and give the ear a chance to develop.

[bernhard-schmidt]

Sorry to

[Kathleen Clark]

Are you talking about tempered tuning here? If so, that was the comment
I was going to add. As an adult student I had a horrible time tuning the harp until I was
able to purchase an electronic tuner. I am very sensitive to perfect
fifths and tempering octaves is always a trial for me, especially the
upper octaves. I remember reading somewhere to count the sound waves in
the upper octaves to get the tempering needed so the whole harp will
sound in tune, when tuning by ear. When I used to do it by ear I would
go nuts having to deliberately hear the upper octaves out of tune to
get them to sound good with the other intervals and octaves on the rest
of the harp.

I have this ‘theory’ about the divine proportion and the spiral. It
keeps things growing and mutating, thus explaining why it isn’t
‘perfect’ and needs to be reined in and tempered to sound ‘good’ when
dealing with sound on instruments like the piano and the harp that have
so many octaves that ultimately have to sound in tune to each other.
The spiral has to be cut off and brought down into an ‘unnatural’ sound
(to my ear) in order to sound good (tempered).

There are some harp players I know that deliberately tune untempered,
the theory being that for ‘healing’ harp the untempered harp is better
and more natural. My ears automatically go to the untempered tuning and
it is something I have to constantly fight when tuning by ear because I
know when I go to play the whole harp is going to sound out of tune if
I don’t.

It is interesting reading the history of ‘tempering’ and the outcry
that went on when it was first introduced (“Unnatural! Against God’s
plan! Heretical!”). Huge debates and fun to read about. I suggest:

“Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization” by Stuart Isacoff (available at Amazon)

Part of the description: “Involving mathematics, philosophy, aesthetics, religion, politics, and physics, Stuart Isacoff ‘s Temperament
invokes the tone of a James Burke documentary. However, the focus is
not on a modern invention, but rather a modern convention: that of
tuning keyboards so that every key is equally in tune–and equally out
of tune.”

It’s the ‘out of tune’ part of tempering that constantly ‘gets’ me. Oooooh, my ears…..

[sherry-lenox]

Very interesting point, Kathleen. I’ve wondered about this, especially since I’m more used to the relatively easy practice of tuning the chord rather than the individual note when playing orchestral instruments. I feel comfortable tuning the octave intervals on the harp, but when it comes to checking the intonation of other intervals I have to “suspend” my own intonation and go from the electronic tuner. I’m not sure what will happen when I have a harp with levers- I’d have to guess that I’ll wind up having to “learn” some keys for their individual pitch characteristics rather than expecting them to sound right as noted in your quote, even though some will likely sound more right than others.

As an alto, I sharp

[bernhard-schmidt]

Kathlee,

Sorry, I was not talking about the tempered tuning.

I was talking about tuning the harp in tune with itself.

Because the stiffness of the thicker strings at the lower range results in a non-linear warping of the harmonic serie that run contra to the ideal tuning of each octave.

Regards

[Kathleen Clark]

Well, with levers you will tune in one key and then find out if your
levers were installed correctly. Something to test when buying a lever
harp.

This is sort of off-topic, but does play into the whole tempered /
untempered scale thing. Recovering from a stroke I have always wondered
and am still wondering why Paul Baker’s “Ladder of the Soul” affects me
physically more than other healing harp albums out there. Taking
improvisation lessons from him I now have a theory. He uses a lot of
pop chords on the lever harp, lots of seventh chord inversions, which
you don’t normally hear in ‘healing’ harp. He also mixes up the
fingering in the chords to give them an upward shimmer. I am wondering
if the seventh chords, the way he uses them, affects me because they
are in a sense ‘trying’ to get back to the untempered scale, that
upward spiral effect of the divine proportion. Sort of a marriage
between untempered and tempered for lack of a better description. It’s
my current theory anyway and one I’m exploring at the moment. I’ll
probably copy this post and put it onto another one at some point. One
thing leads to another…

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

It was my understanding that the tuners were already tempered, and that octaves that sound good to us are actually going to veer far too sharp in the top, if I let myself do that, they get sharper and sharper. When I do stretch, it is only the last three strings at top or bottom. From what Mr. Schmidt is describing it sounds as though his harp would be in another key. Can you tell us exactly how many cents you are raising and lowering the pitches by? I would like to try your tuning.

I am old enough to remember when there were only the rare strobotuners, and no portables and we all had to tune by ear, so there is no excuse in my book for not learning to do it. It may just be taking longer than you would think. It took many years for my ears to start remembering pitch. Don’t give up on it just because it doesn’t seem to have been there. Crutches are made to be used as needed, but they remain crutches. And when Peak Oil comes, we’ll have to be ready to go “off the grid” and power free!

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

After two days of using stretch tuning, I can certainly say it is a success. The harp rings differently, but the pitches seem to last much longer and the bass is much stronger and more powerful. I can provide a chart of how much I am raising and lowering the pitches.

[bernhard-schmidt]

Saul,

from my side a big Bravo….but

[Tacye]

Sometimes I tune the bass by playing harmonics instead of natural notes- this will automatically stretch the tuning by the right amount as what you want is for the octaves to ring perfectly i.e. for the harmonic of the lower note to be the same

[bernhard-schmidt]

Tacye,
Sorry I have to be the devils advocate here I guess.
But the way of tuning you describe is not a correct stretch-tuning.
It is a common misinterpretation of stretch-tuning to playing the harmonics.
This does not automatically stretch the tuning.

The reason why it is not working this way is because you need the real plucking of the string.
The string needs the force which brings the string out of alignment to produce amplitude / a vibration. This way, the harmonics of a swinging string are produced correctly.
The way you did describe the tuning it is the pure mathematically 1:2 way which produces an octave?.nothing more and nothing less.

The reason of making a stretch-tuning is only because the stiffness of the strings becomes higher at the bass and getting higher at the treble?while the result is opposite from bass to treble.

[bernhard-schmidt]

Let���s go back to the 4 meter example of harp. The several overtones which are produced by plucking a string have an almost exact frequency distance from the fundamental tone. By increasing the diameter of the string the position of the overtones becomes more away from the fundamental tone. By increasing the string diameter again (next octave) the stiffness of the strings is getting more and more and the overtones getting more away from the fundamental tone. At the end you tune with a tuner and you will have exact fundamentals but the overtones are out of tune. The first 5 overtones can be as loud as the fundamental. So you can imagine, the first, the fundamentals are in tune to each other and the other produced overtones are not.

No pianist would say that his instrument is in tune and no one would do a concert

[Tacye]

Bernhard,
You are of course correct that the first harmonic played as a harmonic is likely to be quieter than the first overtone component of a normally plucked string and lack the increased tension on the string caused by the fundamental sounding.

[Evangeline Williams]

Sometimes by the time a family returns a rental instrument, the child hasn’t played in a few weeks or months.

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

Having tried it for about a week now, I have been progressively lessening the amount of stretch, so that it is about 10 cents maximum in the bass, which makes the harp sound terrific, and only about 5 in the first octave, and maybe 10 on the 0 octave only. The reason we tend to go by the tuner, is that there is no authority to correct the ear’s desire to go sharp, sharp, sharp. This also affects our regulation. There is a spot in each direction in which the overtones line up

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