Tuners: for you scientifically gifted people :-)

[Rick Denney]

In rehearsals often the conductor regularly drills into our heads that we shouldn't tune to a tone generator or pitch generator, like one found on a large metronome, or some tuners BECAUSE it has no overtones.

Well, if it's like the tone generator on the tuners I've owned, all it has are overtones. Those waveforms do not sound very clean, but perhaps it's the little piezo speaker that is at fault. The main problem is tuning a 110-Hz A to a 440-Hz A, especially when the 440-Hz fundamental is not strong.

Tuning to clean pitches produced by an electronic keyboard voice, on the other hand, or to a recorded drone on a CD, is no different than tuning to the trumpet player sitting in front of you, or the horn player on the other side of the room. When I tune to the horn, I'm not tuning to their overtones, but rather to whatever I can hear of their pitch fundamental pitch. The advanced form of this skill is learning how to adjust my pitch so that the note I'm playing in the chord is both true to the chord and to the other players who are playing other notes in that chord. That requires disagreement with a tuner (or with a keyboard), but agreement with one's well-trained ears.

Rick "who learns nothing from watching a needle" Denney

[ThomasP]

Classes start back next monday, 1-10, I'll ask him or one of the other directors who know him and his teachings well, why he say's its bad to tune to a tone generator, and more of a reason than because it contains no overtones....there has to be some reason, because the man is very well recognized in his field, and I'm sure either did the research or is receiving the information from someone who has, let me ask him and I'll see what I uncover.

[Art Hovey]

To answer your original question, yes. If your tone is clean and steady all of its overtones will be reliable for tuning in that they will be exact integer multiples of the fundamental frequency.
If that were not the case you would hear the harmonics wandering, and the tone would not be "steady". If one or more of the upper slots (partials) on your tuba is out of tune then that overtone will be weaker but will not be out of tune with the fundamental.
Obviously no electronic tuner can take the place of listening skills, but tuners are still useful tools.

[smurphius]

To answer your original question, yes. If your tone is clean and steady all of its overtones will be reliable for tuning in that they will be exact integer multiples of the fundamental frequency.
If that were not the case you would hear the harmonics wandering, and the tone would not be "steady". If one or more of the upper slots (partials) on your tuba is out of tune then that overtone will be weaker but will not be out of tune with the fundamental.
Obviously no electronic tuner can take the place of listening skills, but tuners are still useful tools.

thanks! i thought that i could tune the overtone and know that the pitch is in tune.

the main reason that i am using the tuner at all is that i have had a problem in the past of playing with the main tuning slide hanging very low. to combat that, i've had to work on sitting down with my horn, the slide pushed in considerably more than i was used to, and working to adjust my air speed to put the horn in tune. the visual concept of seeing the needle on the tuner was a very useful aid in that.

for that reason, i only have the tuner on for probably 10 minutes out of the 3 or 4 hours a day i practice. if i'm going to tune anything else beyond that, i will generally tune against a drone pitch.

for me it has helped substantially to use both ear training as well as have something visual. after all, we musicians have to use both the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of our brains simultaneously to create music. the visual and aural variance acts as one more way to allow me to improve my musicianship.