Pc Tuner Showing Frequency

[wes williams]

I've just come across a tuner program for Windows PCs that indicates frequency directly, as well as the usual LED light strip. Click PitchPerfect on the front page here. There are quite a few other interesting audio programmes there too, either free or very reasonably priced.

 

I don't know how accurate it is, but a 5 second wave file produced using a sine function seemed to read around 1Hz different to the generation frequency around the 500HZ region. But was this the soundcard, sampling frequency inaccuracy in my maths, etc...?

 

best wishes ..wes

[hielandman]

Thank you Wes, this looks very interesting....I can't use it yet, as I don't think I have a mic for my computer(I"ll have to ask my kids about that!), but I'll get one, and let you know what I think, this could be very usefull, and save a lot of us some money! Thanks again for finding this, take care,

Don

[hielandman]

Hello all. Just this morning (thanks to the rain and flooding that got my work cancelled today) I finally picked up a mic for my computer, and tried out this pc tuner that Wes discovered. It is interesting, to say the least. As Wes pointed out, it tells you the note you are playing, and in what octave, plus the hertz values, at the same time displaying the correct hertz value for the note. It worked well on my Stagi (which turned out to be in better tune than I had thought), though on my Lachenals it occaisionally told me the wrong note in the wrong octave. Sometimes, on the C notes, for example, it told me the correct note, but in the wrong octave, and when I played it on the note that had those values, it displayed correctly, but when going back to the lower C, it gave me the readings for the next octave higher. This never happened with the Stagi. Could this be due to more overtones, etc....coming out of the Lachenal? Sometimes on the middle c note, it read that I was playing an A several octaves higher, and on the L-4 push(E), it read I was playing a B note, several octaves higher. Also, could this be due to the microphone I bought? I bought the only one available at this store, which was for voice, is it really any, or much more different than one for recording music? Any/all opinions would be appreciated, thanks,

Don

[Robin Madge]

I had a friend round the other week sampling my concertinas using a laptop running audacity(?) as a frequency analyser. What was interesting was that for certain notes on some concertinas there would be the usual somewhat wide spike showing the note played but the spike for the octave higher harmonic was actually louder although a much narrower spike.

To the human ear it just sounded as a normal note but perhaps a tuner would be fooled into thinking it was an octave higher.

 

Robin Madge

[Dana Johnson]

I had a friend round the other week sampling my concertinas using a laptop running audacity(?) as a frequency analyser. What was interesting was that for certain notes on some concertinas there would be the usual somewhat wide spike showing the note played but the spike for the octave higher harmonic was actually louder although a much narrower spike.

To the human ear it just sounded as a normal note but perhaps a tuner would be fooled into thinking it was an octave higher.

 

Robin Madge

this is a common Tuner problem. Many tuners focus on the loudest partial as the note they choose. In the middle and upper registers of a concertina, this "usually" works, but especially as you go down the scale, other partials, not just the octave can be the dominant ones, making it difficult to tune the fundamental. for free reeds, like strings (but for different reasons ) the musical hamonics are not always perfect. Ocatves may not be exactly twice the fundamental etc. If you are tuning for one, but using the other, it can throw you off. Sometimes with strong octave harmonica in a reed, that is the one to tune for if you are looking for consonant chords using that note, since it will be more of a mudsical influence than the Fundamental. Still, the nicest thing is to have a tuner that knows what you want it to listen for, or barring that, one that you can set to listen for a particular note and to disregard all others. Tuners that do this are a bit more expensive, but work well to the lowest notes. Some have auto tune functions that let it guess the note, yet can be set manually for the ones it has trouble with. Third, fourth and sixth harmonics are often louder than or nearly as loud as the fundamental even though you only hear them as coloring the fundamental. Our ears are astoundingly clever devices compared to the best of tuners.

Dana

[chris]

Hi

Are electronic tuners the ultimate answer? The early tuners forWheatstone, Lachenal etc didn't have them. They tuned by ear. How accurate where the old tuners in relation to electronic tuners? even if an electronic tuner is absolutely accurate would we actually hear the difference?

I play guitar and in my early playing days I didn't have the benefit of an electronic tuner but I was able to get my guitar in tune. Latterly I use an electronic tuner and I now find that I can't tune a guitar without one. Perhaps we rely too much on modern technology these days

chris (wanting to be a Luddite but finding I can't manage without the technicalities of today)

Edited April 18, 2007 by chris

[Dana Johnson]

Hi

Are electronic tuners the ultimate answer? The early tuners forWheatstone, Lachenal etc didn't have them. They tuned by ear. How accurate where the old tuners in relation to electronic tuners? even if an electronic tuner is absolutely accurate would we actually hear the difference?

I play guitar and in my early playing days I didn't have the benefit of an electronic tuner but I was able to get my guitar in tune. Latterly I use an electronic tuner and I now find that I can't tune a guitar without one. Perhaps we rely too much on modern technology these days

chris (wanting to be a Luddite but finding I can't manage without the technicalities of today)

Electronic tuners help greatly to eliminate the subjective nature of tuning an instrument. May times this isn't such a great thing. I never use a tuner for a guitar or other instrument with a small number of strings. I let somebody give me the pitch and tune to it by ear. Practice makes this both quick and accurate, and allows compensating for the instrument involved. When the number of strings goes up, ( a harp for instance ) and the tuning process involves a lot of retuning to compensate for the deflection of the frame and that sort of headache, the electronic tuner begins to make things much faster, and keep your tuning from drifting from the common pitch.

 

When tuning concertinas, I find it important to keep the ear out of it. If you have a good set of master reeds, you can do a great job matching them by ear, but you have a harder time adjusting for they way a reed plays in situ, vs. in the tuning jig. Modt people I know make a chart or some sort of record of the amount each reed is off in the instrument, and then re tune it by that amount in the tuning jig. This gives results that are as accurate as the reed tuner chooses. Copying the pitch of a master reed in the jig gives fairly close results, but doesn't account for the difference in the fit of the reed shoe and the small change in pitch that results.

 

Final tuning by ear is a nice idea, but you need to be careful that you don't try to make the intervals sound "good" or you will get into the bottomless pit of the temperment spiral, and probably go crazy in the process. With a knowledge of the use of the instrument, you may want to deviate locally from a given temperment to smooth out a commonly used chord, but much of that will only serve to put you unpleasantly out of tune with everybody else. For years Piano tuners didn't have any electronic aids, and did a great job, but they were highly skilled people who could accuratly count the beats in intervals and knew the difference between six and seven beats per second reliably and knew just how far off to tune everything to get the temperment right. I dare say I don't have that skill, and will happily rely on my tuners to have remembered it for me.

 

I do want to mention that I have found some electronic tuners are often unreliable especially on stringed instruments like guitars and banjos, especially when hooked directly to the strings. The plucked string frequency includes higher partials that are quite sharp, and decay at varying rates. ( this gives the guitar it's characteristic twang ) If you don't wait for the overtones to decay, leaving the main note and a bit of the octave and fifth left, you will invariably tune your string sharp. To then complain to everyone else in the session that your tuner is right and they are wrong is a impolite mistake. If you tune by ear to the other people, you almost never make this mistake.

Dana