Reply To: Tuning Standard

#2002
Alan Brinton
Participant

Thanks so much for your insights, beezer. Your eclectic tastes in what you play are really valuable for a discussion such as this. I was persuaded by the comments of Kevin, Melodica-Me and Troy that I should probably be tuning to 440 or 441 rather than 443. So I spent the entire day yesterday tuning my Suzuki M-32C, which I’ve been playing a lot lately, to A=440, getting simultaneous readings from AP Tuner on my PC and da-Tuner on my tablet. I also did some checking with Tunable, which has a line graph on which you can see that you’re producing a stable tone. At any given instant, these tuners and gStrings Tuner get comparable readings. I then played several Jazz tunes with Band-in-a-Box accompaniment, and I have to say that the M-32C sounds much better at A=440 tuning than at 442 or 443 — I’ve been experimenting with this melodica. I was tuning to get within 3 cents +/-.

I’m curious as to how accurate you try to get with your melodica tuning. I’m not sure I can do much better than 3 cents +/- verified (more or less) within those parameters by subsequent readings. Also, are you familiar with the Adaptive Pitch Test at jakemandell.com? It just takes about ten minutes to complete and measures how reliably you can recognize which of two tones is higher or lower. After completion it, you are given results for all who have already taken the test.

Thanks for the article link. I’ll see how much sense I can make of it!

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