LiveMusic Posted March 29, 2001 Share Posted March 29, 2001 I don't understand something. New Yamaha PSR740. Some of the keys in the upper register are not in tune. According to my ear, anyway. Plus, they aren't "clean" sounding. I don't understand this, since the sound is digital. Seems it should be xxxMHZ, forever, and that's that. (Limited knowledge, here.) Is there a way to fix this? (I see NOTHING in the manual's index for "tuning" and nothing in "pitch" covers this.) And... does this vary from unit to unit? (One PSR740 might vary a bit from the one sitting beside it.) > > > [ Live! ] < < < Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
d-kay Posted March 29, 2001 Share Posted March 29, 2001 well, to see if your ear is right, try FFT the sound and see if the peak of the spectrum is exactly at the right frequency(note). Use for example Soundforge. A Piano can be tuned in different ways, I THINK there are harmonic or average tuned pianos. Check with the manual or ask the support. It's tricky with tuning because it's not precise on all notes. I'm not a pro so don't trust my opinions completly regarding this subject. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted March 29, 2001 Share Posted March 29, 2001 Originally posted by LiveMusic: I don't understand something. New Yamaha PSR740. Some of the keys in the upper register are not in tune. According to my ear, anyway. Plus, they aren't "clean" sounding. I don't understand this, since the sound is digital. Seems it should be xxxMHZ, forever, and that's that. (Limited knowledge, here.) Is there a way to fix this? (I see NOTHING in the manual's index for "tuning" and nothing in "pitch" covers this.) And... does this vary from unit to unit? (One PSR740 might vary a bit from the one sitting beside it.) Being "in tune" isn't necessarily just xxxMHZ though- ask a piano tuner if she or he just cruises through with a wrench, tightening strings til the needle stands at twelve o'clock on the electronic dial. If you do check with an electronic tuner, don't be surprised to see that it is "perfectly in tune" but still sounds wrong to you. There is a lot of information in the overtones, giving you all kinds of feelings about where the pitch is. I have a PSR-520 as a midi controller and for practicing (I'll take up the comb and tissue paper before I would record those sounds) and the top piano notes sound flat- the fundamentals may be dead on, but there is apparently timbral information missing that makes it sound flat. Anyway, there are whole books written about tuning- it's not so cut and dried! Trust your ears! -CB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LiveMusic Posted March 30, 2001 Author Share Posted March 30, 2001 Okay, I understand... well, I'm familiar with the fact that if you tune an instrument to a chromatic tuner, you (I do, anyway) still have to tweak it just a bit. Certain chords don't sound right. But seems to me a keyboard... if I walk up the scale from Middle C, one note at a time... and I get to the second G above Middle C... and all notes are fine until then and then that one is flat... and the sound is not as clear... it's more fuzzy sounding... something isn't right. I mean, all the notes sound fine until I reach that point and then most above that are flat. Plus, again... do keyboards have a way to adjust each individual note? (You can tell I'm a rookie.) > > > [ Live! ] < < < Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted March 30, 2001 Share Posted March 30, 2001 Well, if you tweak your guitar after tuning with an electronic tuner, you're probably not nearly as much of a rookie as you think you are. The guitar is by nature not a pure equal-tempermant beast- have you seen the fretting schemes cooked up to try to achieve that? The PSR series as far as I know has no function for tuning individual notes- other synths allow different tuning schemes, which shouldn't be a surprise when you realize that keyboards are sold the world over. If you set the pitch bend to the smallest amount, you can do a lot in real-time- I love listening to and watching Balkan musicians getting squirrely with the left hand on the pitch-bend of some generic cheapo keyboard. The amount of control is phenomenal. But for straight-up two-hand playing, you are limited. If you shoot for some more tone than out-of-the-box with fx, amps, eq, etc., I'm guessing you will be more happy. I am sure the fine folk on this forum can suggest a thousand ways to improve your amplified keyboard tone, which is part of your "tuning" as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Organ Doctor Posted March 30, 2001 Share Posted March 30, 2001 On several of the Yamaha keyboards I have had customers complain about tonal differences in various sections of the keyboard,or on various settings.At times I can hear these differences, but they are not subject to adjustment. I find that all sampled keyboards have a weakness at some point. But as to tuning,you will find that your PSR is right on. You are ,no doubt hearing a tonal difference. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LiveMusic Posted March 30, 2001 Author Share Posted March 30, 2001 I might say something dumb because I'm no expert. But I thought if all strings of stringed instrument are tuned to the precise HZ setting they should be, that if you play them individually or sequentially, they will "sound right." And that where the problem lies is in making certain chords. It'll sound "right" in some and "wrong" in others. Hence, on guitar, I have to tweak a bit. But this keyboard thing isn't due to playing chords. It's just the note by itself. If I play the problem note and play the same note, one octave lower (which seems in tune), I confirm that yep, the culprit is flat. If everybody's supposed to know this stuff, you don't have to bore an entire forum trying to answer me. Just seems strange to me. If I sat down at a Grand Piano and it sounded like this after tuning, I'd call the guy back in. So, I don't understand why a DIGITAL instrument, which should arrive to me with perfect HZ pitch, isn't so. (It isn't like the string's out of tune... there is no string... it's a digital reproduction. Right?) > > > [ Live! ] < < < Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted March 30, 2001 Share Posted March 30, 2001 http://www.izzy.net/~jc/PSTInfo/Temper.html Check out the above article. A properly tuned piano will sound sharp in the upper keys and flat in the lower keys. "When one measures a piano that has been tuned by a skilled tuner, something interesting will be discovered. The middle of the piano will be close to perfect, while somewhere about the second octave above middle C, the notes will gradually become sharper, until at the high C this sharpening may be as high as 20 to 30 cents! Also there will be some flattening of the notes in the lower octaves. Shown is a plot of actual measurements of a piano tuned by a skilled tuner, along with a curve resulting from the average of many such measurements" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LiveMusic Posted March 30, 2001 Author Share Posted March 30, 2001 Okay, thanks. I thought that phenomena was just guitars. I'm just now taking up piano. But... I swear, my problem note(s) sound flat. Or I'm working too hard. > > > [ Live! ] < < < Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve44 Posted March 30, 2001 Share Posted March 30, 2001 LiveMusic, It sounds like less of a temperament problem and more of a bad multisample. You're probably aware that a sampled piano sound cannot just be changed in pitch to cover the notes of the keyboard, but must take new samples every few notes to retain a similar timbre. It's possible that the questionable note is at the edge of a split point where it's being bent down several steps from the original and therefore sounds covered or detuned. I'm not sure if this will work, but try playing the note a whole step up from it and pulling the bender down a whole step. That should sound pretty bad, and if it sounds equally bad as the questionable note, then you can be sure that this is what's going on. On the other hand, it could just be a bad sample, either from an out of tune key on the original instrument that works for some keys within the sample's transposition range (based on the quality of the instrument it could have a sample every fifth or third or less) but not for others, or it could just be bad tuning on the engineer's part. Creating a good multisample out of just a few small samples is a difficult task, and luckily is an art that isn't really necessary any longer. If you want a better piano sound, for less than $200 you could have Gigasampler LE and its gigabyte sized piano sample with no looping, no multi-samples transposed, but a real recording of every key, coming out of your computer. For only $400 you can get Gigastudio with the Steinway B CD-Roms which are probably the best piano you can get anywhere.. ahh the joys of the computer age. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
d-kay Posted March 30, 2001 Share Posted March 30, 2001 well, as I said: don't trust my opinion. http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/wink.gif I was right about one thing though, tuning is damn tricky. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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