Free Unisons and Stability Course
Lesson 3 - How to Get Better Unisons
The Problem with Getting
(and keeping)
Pure Unisons!
So what's a tuner to do? You need tricks and hacks to be able to know for sure if your unison is clean. If there are any beating partials at all, it is NOT clean enough!
Before we get into that, I need to address an important issue.
Some of you might be thinking, "That's not me. I have good ears. I know what I hear and what I don't hear."
Just so I don't have to engage in any kind of effort to try to convince you of something you are so sure of, just leave the course now. I don't have time for this.
OK. Now that we're back, I'm glad you all have stayed. You are the kind of people that can really learn something from this course; people who recognize that there may be things that you have left to learn and are open to learning them.
That fact of the matter is, many people can't hear beating partials. If they did, they wouldn't be sending me unisons that fail!
The secret to hearing things that are hard to hear is to have different angles, different tricks, different hacks. One way you may not hear it, but using a different way, it may be more obvious. So as tuners, we try as many ways as possible to disprove a pure unison. Only then, when all have been exhausted, do we conclude the unison is clean, or more accurately, has a better chance of being clean.
How Amateurs Tune Unisons
How Masters Tune Unisons
Internal and External Judgements
Internal Judgements are opinions.
"Opinion is the lowest form of knowledge" - Plato
Yet that is how most people tune pianos.
"Meh. Sounds good to me. Guess it is!"
The secret is to use External Judgements. These are much easier to use and give much more accurate feedback.
READ THIS article on "Internal and External Judgements", or watch me read it below.
Different Tricks to Tune Better Unisons
The first trick I want to show you is the external judgement mentioned in the video above, called the Single String Test.
This next idea comes from audio engineering. It has to do with the concept of tone.
The tone of a note is determined by the volume of the partials. Change the relative volume of the partials and you change the "tone", or the vowel sound of the unison.
This is a very powerful concept because trying to get the higher partials beatless is not good enough.
It is not good enough because the higher partials may not be beating, but if they are changing at a different rate than the others, the vowel sound will change, and that will make the unison sound whiny.
For example, a unison that sounds like "eeeee" or "ooooo" or "aaaa" is a clean unison. If it sounds like "eeeaaaa" or "oooooeeeee" or "oooooeeeeeeaaaaaa", it is not clean.
When the vowel sound changes like that, we say the unison is "talking" to you.
You do not want to hear the unison talking to you.
This is the concept of the "Unison Word".
The follow links to a lesson page that describes this much better.
Check your inbox tomorrow for the next lesson!