TubeNet

Speaking of intonation (in one thread) and research topics (in another), I think it would be interesting to know more about what counts in human experience as "good intonation."

Try this: Get out your tuner, hook up some excellent speakers to your computer (trying to keep the playback equipment from introducing too much bias), and play some high quality digital recordings of one or two highly skilled tuba players playing unaccompanied pieces or passages, and watch the tuner. It is all over the map.

I don't want to drop any names, but I've tried this with some pretty fine musicians' recordings. The overall effect is pleasing music, yet watching both notes and intervals on the tuner, it's hard to imagine how. I need to try this with some bad, obviously out of tune music and see if I notice any differences. But someone could do it with fancier equipment and get more useful results, I would think.

Your tuner is looking for an equal tempered scale. Great if the performer is on a DX-7
Major thirds will be flatter, minor thirds sharper, and a whole host of other tuning modifications. Some of the Korg tuners even used to have little white marks where the thirds would actually sound "in tune"

So is there a tuner that will measure a well-tempered scale? (Or whatever we would need to learn something from such an exercise?)

Well, we seem to be in a self-defeating arena about intonation.

Valved low brasses are naturally host to intonation problems.

Otherwise, why would they be optioned out the wazoo with gimmicks like compensator systems, triggers, easy-pull slides, or bunches of valves with odd bits of tubing included?

6th partials and some infamous others ain't easy.

If perfect pitch were the goal, we'd better stick to synthesizers and hang up the horns.

Your chop-mileages may vary. Mine don't go too far from home....

DDG

Thanks bloke, that is actually very helpful. My own "comically wretched intonation" is where this started. I went to this exercise to establish the ideal baseline, and found what I described here: the best players are marginally better at managing this than I am, but just watching the numerical measurement of cents on the tuner, not as much better as I would have predicted. That's why I got curious.

The line between "in tune" and "out of tune" in actual human experience seems to be very fine.

Highpitch wrote: Your chop-mileages may vary. Mine don't go too far from home....

I'm working on it, but mine stray pretty widely, and I'm somewhat comforted to learn what good company I have!

bloke wrote:

Highpitch wrote:If perfect pitch were the goal

It "weren't". It is.

And people laugh at me for throwing horseshoes at the moon...

DDG

Tuning to a tuner is good as a reference point, but it can't govern every note. One of the hardest things for tubas is to learn to listen to one's self and learn to listen to both melodic and harmonic intonation. They're not always the same, and playing perfectly in tune according to the tuner may foul up the intonation of a chord or may sound too high or low according to the melodic context. Learning which is most important at a given point depends on one's natural ear, understanding the role of bass in an ensemble, and learning from feedback.

Bloke told me my pitch was just as good as Bob Dylan's.

And, putting a tuner to a recording is an exercise in futility. A piano alone is not "in tune" with itself over the whole range, by design. Add other instruments, trying to stay with the piano, and your tuner is worthless.

LISTEN to the pitch on the recording. Do you hear funky things? No? Then, don't worry about it. Do you hear things in your own playing that sound funky? Yes? Then, fix 'em.

Where's Dr Fred when we need him. no...no...what am I saying?????

eupher61 wrote:And, putting a tuner to a recording is an exercise in futility. A piano alone is not "in tune" with itself over the whole range, by design. Add other instruments, trying to stay with the piano, and your tuner is worthless.

LISTEN to the pitch on the recording. Do you hear funky things? No? Then, don't worry about it. Do you hear things in your own playing that sound funky? Yes? Then, fix 'em.

Where's Dr Fred when we need him. no...no...what am I saying?????

Like I said, I was making a point of watching the tuner only on unaccompanied pieces and passages, so it was looking only at the tuba. It may still be an exercise in futility, but not because a piano is mucking it up.

And, again, trying to fix things in my own playing is how I got started with it.

That's the whole point, really. The tuner doesn't reveal telling differences between my intonation and that of the best tuba players in the world. Or perhaps it's that my eyes and brain don't work fast enough to reveal them, which is why I mentioned better equipment, though this doesn't explain (to me) why 40 or more cents either side of the pitch can sound "in tune." More importantly, how can an interval where one pitch is 40 cents sharp and the next one is 15 cents flat sound "in tune" when insert name here does it, and yet when I do something similar it sounds awful? Clearly there are differences (!) in experience. (Perhaps the concept of "melodic context" is the key?)

So what would show in an empirical way what is going on? That's the question. There have to be patterns. It can't just be caprice.

eupher61 wrote:Bloke told me my pitch was just as good as Bob Dylan's.

Dang, man, I'm sorry. It doesn't get any worse than that. (Who told that guy he should sing rather than keeping himself to writing songs? Every cover of a Dylan song I've ever heard was better than the original. But the songs themselves are amazing.)

dgpretzel wrote:The thing with using a tuner as you have described, is that it is unlikely to be able to respond fast enough to provide an accurate indication of pitch for individual notes. Most tuners require some latency to do their processing before being able to display the result. The only type of tuner that might (I say "might") be able to do that reliably is a strobe tuner. All others (that use digital filtering) will likely take too long to reach a steady state result. Even if they didn't, the notes they are trying to measure will be constantly varying in pitch. So, you are chasing a dynamic stimulus with a device that has significant latency. Pure bad news.

My $.02

DG

Shoulda said that before. Sorry. I was using a Peterson strobe tuner.

But your point remains a good one.

I think (and this has been my point all along) that someone might could get a doctoral degree for a research project that would control for such equipment-related considerations (and other predictable irrelevancies), probably by hooking up some kind of microphone to some kind of computer, and figuring out what is actually going on in the cognitive space between measurable pitches and their relationships, on the one hand, and what people report about their assessments of those pitches and relationships as they hear them.

And the results of that study could help some boots on the ground tuba players figure out their own intonation issues along the way.

bloke wrote:As far as favoring various pitches according to their function, I have some pertinent questions:

- When playing with a polka band, should I tune with trumpet player (whose main instrument is sax), the accordion, or the cowbell?

Hahaha. More cowbell.

- When playing a tuba solo with piano accompaniment (aka "playing a freebie gig"), should I bend various pitches this-way-and-that (as you guys discuss above), or just try to play in tune with the piano (ie. stretched 5ths - flat down low, roughly A=440 above middle C, etc.) ?

Don't worry, Caryl will make sure it sounds good.

- Isn't it true that if (as the toobuh) if I sit on a pitch long enough (assuming that I can hold a pitch steady for more than an instant), everyone else will give up and tune to me anyway?

Yep. That's been my experience anyway. Which is why I've got a problem.

- Should I go ahead and play the open G on a 6/4 CC tuba stupid-flat, or should I just tacet?

Beats the he11 out of me. I can barely get along on a CC anyway.

Thanks, Bloke. I think we're on the same page as far as thinking there has to be some actual standard. It's hard, but we've got to work it out.

Research on Intonation


I don't know about the size of the field, but you're certainly free to devote your life to intonation study. Methinks acoustical physics would be relevant.

eupher61 wrote:Bloke told me my pitch was just as good as Bob Dylan's.

'Zooks -- I never knew Mr. Zimmerman was a baseball player!

A Peterson strobe is a digital impersonation of a true strobe tuner. The reference is to a StroboConn or a StroboTuner, especially one with 11 windows.

bloke wrote:As far as favoring various pitches according to their function, I have some pertinent questions:

- When playing with a polka band, should I tune with trumpet player (whose main instrument is sax), the accordion, or the cowbell?

Cowbell.

- When playing a tuba solo with piano accompaniment (aka "playing a freebie gig"), should I bend various pitches this-way-and-that (as you guys discuss above), or just try to play in tune with the piano (ie. stretched 5ths - flat down low, roughly A=440 above middle C, etc.) ?

At a freebie gig the piano is more out of tune than the tuba. Try to play in the right partial at the right time.

- Isn't it true that if (as the toobuh) if I sit on a pitch long enough (assuming that I can hold a pitch steady for more than an instant), everyone else will give up and tune to me anyway?

Yes - they are all better players than I am, and they take pity on me.

- Should I go ahead and play the open G on a 6/4 CC tuba stupid-flat, or should I just tacet?

Switch to BBb and the G will be just fine.

Bloke hit it on the head with what he said about tubas with naturally good intonation.

I know I've owned my share of gorgeous sounding tubas with tuning issues, but the end result was always the same. I could get the intonation to work on some gigs but not all.

If a note has to be lipped up to tune to the tuner you can train for that. But if at a certain moment in the music that "challenged note" needs to be played higher or lower than it was in front of the tuner you might be taking a big nose dive. A tuba with a lot of challenged notes for which you lip the one note up, the other down, pull for that note, and use alternate fingerings for the other can turn a good musician into an unstable factor in an ensemble.

One of my worst memories was a gig I played in a very cold hall. Lots of harmonic changes, lots of rests in between passages so my tuba was always cold. Blowing warm air into it helped marginally. The intonation changed constantly as the tuba warmed up and cooled back down when I wasn't playing. The icing on the cake was my choice to play a lovely Conn Jumbo; low pitched.

Major failure.

A boring tuba with naturally good intonation would have served everyone better, including the paying audience.

-Pat

Bloke's point, as interpreted by me:

If a person can't play in tune with a tuner, with all its cues and indicators to define success, how will they have the skills necessary to play in tune in a complex harmonic environment where the target pitch is not at all obvious?

I rarely find myself playing a major triad or a perfect fourth with the trombones, and in any case they usually adjust to me before I have a chance to adjust to them, as long as I put out a tone with a pitch that can be discerned by mortal human beings and that is somewhere on the planet of correct. That's assuming they can adjust to themselves, which is not a good assumption often enough in the sorts of groups in which many of us perform. Most of the time, there are so many pitch tendencies to choose from any any given ensemble tutti that I have to lay something out there and just hope it provides a useful foundation to support others.

When hearing unaccompanied performance, I can tell when it sounds wrong and when it sounds okay. I strive for the latter. Whether "sounding wrong" and "sounding okay" lines up with anything in particular is another matter. I suspect we train our ears as to what is acceptable in terms of pitch, and if we train our ears to some bastardization of the western diatonic scale, we will begin to think it is correct. I often use a tuner to make sure I'm not recalibrating my hearing. If my ears are calibrated like a tuner when playing alone, that's fine. That's probably the same calibration as most listeners. When playing duets or up to, say, a quintet, the chords have to ring. I've always thought it was the prerogative of the better player to make that happen, as long as the not-as-good player presents a stable, reasonable target. I'd hate to be the better player when playing someone who is providing a moving target--I'm not that good to chase them all over 40 cents.

Rick "if you can't play in equal temperament you probably can't play in tune in any temperament" Denney