This Old Flute - nach Meyer

[david_h]

Not really. It did that on me repeatedly and I gave up trying to record into it, I just loaded wav files recorded in Audacity. Then after a bit I forgot it didn't work and started using it again and it has been fine for weeks !

My hunch is that it is something to do with access to the sound card and that what I was or was not doing with Audacity, the sayaku8 tuner, Realplayer or some such was causing it. The only thing I can remember changing to do with sound in that interval was updating Realplayer - but thats not a suggestion, just all I can remember doing.

[monkey587]

I'd have to say I'm getting there, embouchure wise. I can play into the third octave without overblowing.

If you've been playing for less than a year, you are not anywhere near getting there yet. When you learn to focus your embouchure, it will make a big difference in your intonation and overall pitch. At least find someone with well established technique (5+ years) and have them try out the flute first.

[Carey]

Well, I'm nowhere near a year. Anyone near SW florida?

I've got a PVC flute I made that I play fairly evenly in tune. I can send that off to a player and see what they get. If we're close to the same, then that will be good enough for me.

Or, how about this, I have a (edit: removed maker's name to protect confusing the flute performance with the player performance) Flute. Lemme do a plot of that. If that looks "normal" on that flute then I'll figure I'm good to go.

[ImNotIrish]

Okay. Here's a clip of me playing a slow air on the Nach-Meyer. I still haven't got the measurements, but I will get to that soon. The clip is played with the slide all the way in, and the flute being slightly warmed up (I played a jig a couple of times through right beforehand).
Arbo

http://www.box.net/shared/7p5yjhhs8g
(nach-meyer test clip)

[Carey]

OK gang, here's myself doing long notes up the scale on my (edit: maker name removed) Flute. I could either set up the old flute to match this one or my "nach Tipple" pvc (see earlier chart.) Thoughts?

<a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/parkscarey/ ... 0690"><img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/parkscarey/SJiWh5N ... 0Hammy.jpg" /></a>

I'm wondering about the apparent slope in the octaves. While playing, the Syaku8 tuner indicates the A's are both sharp, but the rest of the notes looked pretty good during these recordings. Playing the wav file back from the notebook speakers to my Korg CA-30 tuners, it agrees that they look pretty good. Maybe this is why RTTA came about in the first place eh?

I'd love to find a local flute player with some years on, but the ones I know are in Naples (never see her) and Tampa (see them a couple times a year.) Both inconvienent at best. Would it be useful to pop into a music store and see if there's a band teacher who plays silver flute? Or have the plots with the other flutes shown that is not necessary?

[Carey]

OK Arbo! I tossed it in to Tartini (via Audacity to convert to WAV) and here's what it looks like. I'll leave it to others to comment.

<a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/parkscarey/ ... 1554"><img src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/parkscarey/SJihjIj ... 0Meyer.jpg" /></a>

[ImNotIrish]

Yeow. That doesn't look good! I'm not sure I am reading this correctly, but overall it looks like everything but the G is sharp. And the Cnat, extremely flat? I don't know what to do with the info, how to correct anything, or whether that's even possible? Firewood?

[Carey]

I'll let more experienced chart readers comment, but my initial take is that I'd be happy to trade you!

Carey

[Carey]

Arbo,

Here's where you can read about interpreting the chart. I forgot Terry put that out there.

http://www.mcgee-flutes.com/ReelTimeTuningAnalysis.htm

Carey

[ImNotIrish]

Thanks Carey.
That was helpful. It would certainly be interesting to give it a few more attempts with different C nat fingerings, etc. Also. I wonder what might occur with the hj pulled out some. I wouldn't be anywhere near A=440, but so what. Just wouldn't be a fixed pitch instrument friendly beast.
Arbo

p.s. Is tartini Mac friendly?

[Carey]

Yep, and so is R, so you are home free.

[groxburgh]

I was hoping you'd step in here, Graeme. Seems to me that the flute tuning or something is giving potentially misleading results, not a good thing when you have the chainsaw running.

If, as Carey seems to think, the flute is distinctly flat all over (compared to modern pitch), a lot of the notes are going to be interpreted wrongly - low F#s as sharp Fnats, for example. You can minimise that if you are aware of it by adjusting the ref frequency, but if you had a flute that had really bad tuning as well as really flat (or sharp) tuning, the whole picture could get rather confusing.

I wonder if we could devise some way to set the fences between notes more meaningfully than the nominal +/-50 cents? It would be interesting to plot the incidence of all the recorded notes from say Carey's flute against a semitone scale and see where the minima actually fall, and place the fences there. Could that be done, either manually or automatically?

In some cases the fences could be further from the intended notes, eg if you are not intending to play Eb's or Fnats (i.e. you've opted for diatonic in D), the fences need not be on the quarter tones, but could be at Eb and Fnat. The fence between F# and G would have to remain around the quarter tone.

Terry

Yes it's easy to get confused when the pitch is not where you expect, eg not at the defualt A440, and the tuning is not that good either. But there are ways of looking at it. You could first just look at the plot in Tartini rather than with Polygraph. I did this when looking at Careys flute. Then you can set Polygraph to the approximate pitch eg with Carey's flute A430 with the slide right in. This gives a decent plot.
Certainly we can set the division point between notes manually, just edit the .r file. While it might be possible to do it automatically I don't think it's a good idea. Who decides if the note played was supposed to be an Fnat or F# as an example.
Cheers
Graeme

[groxburgh]

Sorry to sound like one of those cynics over on the thesession.org but it seems to me that the devil is in the detail. I find Tartini a superb tool but I get questions rather than answers from summary output. Thinking about a post-processor for the Tartini output to select the 'horizontal bits' but time probably better spent practising.

Polygraph does have filtering in it to select the horizontal bits and throw away the rest..... You can set the filtering to 0 or alter how aggressively it filters.
Cheers
Graeme

[david_h]

Ah, OK, thanks, I should have delved deeper before being tempted to re-invent the wheel. It's the programmer in me coming out. I still like the Tartini Pitch Contour a lot though.

I guess I am coming at it from a different angle than was intended. I am assuming that my modern flute is basically OK and it is my job to play it in tune. The tweakers and makers are wanting to characterise a flute and are trying not to force it into tune.

I appreciate monkey587's point. The intonation profile of my flute seems to have changed a lot over my first year - and the holes are as they always were.

[groxburgh]

It seems to me that Carey has no problem with blowing in tune based on the plot of him playing his "well known makers" flute. So I don't think there's an issue with the fact he's only been playing for a few months.

The plot of Arbo playing on his "nach Meyer" is not unusual. F#s low, Cnat high, C# low, A a bit high. The biggest issue in my opinion is the D(5) being high. But as there are no D4s it's a bit hard to comment. Play some more tunes! I think with minimal effort you could get it a lot better. Check out this page http://www.business.otago.ac.nz/infosci ... eeswax.htm for an example.
Cheers
Graeme