Reply To: Market for a melodica bellows

#9132
David I Am
Participant

Thank you Mr. Brinton – I will create this tuner eventually, and don’t be too surprised if I try to solicit your help to alpha test what I come up with. I value your experience and feedback.

In considering how our aerophones are distressed diff between play vs. tuned, I can think of several factors – temperature is one, as our warm breath is going over them. Also, moisture may hold some factor as well.

And that isn’t to dismiss the resonance chamber of the instrument and how that could slightly bend the effective tuning – if a reed is hitting counter to a sound compression wave that bounced off the end of the wind chamber on every couple occilations, that could slow it enough to tweak the tone a cent or two.

Perhaps a more measured differential approach option, using software, would be reasonable as a more advanced way that would address some of your concerns. Play each reed *in* the melodica while warm and moist as a ‘calibration’ pass combined with a pressure sensor inline on the blow tube, which can then be stored in memory. When you remove the plate from the melodica and place it on the bellows, it knows 1. the pressure you played it at and 2. the differential between how it was in the instrument and how it sounds now

as a for instance, initially measured 222.8 at 400 pascals vs. now outputting 223.6 at 400 pascals – if 220.0 as the desired frequency it could bend it the effective target to pitch 1.2 hz lower – naturally there’s going to be a curve of some kind involved in this effect but for a particular reed is probably linear approximation will do… At any rate, it may be possible to have a procedure which makes every effort to compensate for the alteration in circumstance.

It may also be that few people are doing tuning because it is so tedious and twitchy a process to engage in. Were there a clear sophisticated tool with videos and documentation that eliminated much of the tedium they could get more engaged. Or open a business tuning for others. That’s my hypothesis anyway. Who wants to play a lousily tuned melodica? 😀

David

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