I am now using equal temperament tuning on my new harps. I have heard it said that chords don't sound so good with this tuning model. Why is that? If you play a C chord (C-E-G) say on a keyboard or guitar aren't they made up of equal temperament notes and sound just fine or am I missing something?
2nd question - What is the sensible extent to which you can you tune a reed up or down from it's initial pitch by removing material from the base and tip end of the reed without weakening it excessively?
Harmonica is made to play in one key. Piano in 12. Overblow harps are made to play in 12(or more like 6,7?) that is why they often are tuned in ET. If you have a midi keyboard you can "tune" it and hear how it sounds. EDIT: Pat missin has what you are looking for. http://www.patmissin.com/tunings/audio.html
EDIT2: Damit! Gnarly was faster :)
Last Edited by Milsson on Apr 03, 2013 10:53 AM
Equal temperament, like any tempered tuning, is a compromise: we put up with instruments that are slightly out of tune in exchange for the ability to play in more keys. You could tune a piano to play perfectly in a particular key but then all other keys would be out of tune to one degree or another. As western music started to incorporate more modulation between keys, the ET compromise became more attractive. By now, we're so used to ET that the comparative roughness of ET chords sounds normal to us. ----------
Playing music... it's a privilege.
Kim Wilson
Last Edited by timeistight on Apr 04, 2013 11:23 AM
A piano is tuned to ET but sounds good when played in any key because the sound you hear is more than the sum of its parts. When you play a low note on a piano, you hear a rich series of overtones that come from the soundboard and the vibration of the other keys' strings. That's also the reason why you can't play a chord on the low end of a piano - all those overtones are overwhelming, beyond dissonance, it's a mush.
Any note played on a piano creates overtones like that, but the higher you go, the more difficult they are to hear.
By contrast, when you play a single note on a harp, you only hear one pitch because only one reed is vibrating. As has been said, the overtones are artificially created by adjusting the pitch of adjacent notes so that their frequencies line up when played together and makes us hear these other tones.
Yes, you can change the pitch my removing brass: Tuning
arzjac my second question was more to do with how far you can tune a reed up or down away from it's given pitch. Take the first blow C on a C harp (or any other note for that matter) can you tune it up or down a semi-tone, tone or more. Also are the shorter reeds less tolerant of a large amount of brass removal. Thanks ---------- My MBH Profile Grey Owl YouTube Grey Owl Abstract Photos Website
Last Edited by Grey Owl on Apr 03, 2013 12:42 PM
It depends on the brand and the key, but if I had to throw out a number, I'd say you can raise the pitch by two semitones and lower the pitch by two semitones by removing brass. You can further lower the pitch three (or more) semitones by adding material to the reed tip.
You can add solder if you want something permanent. You can add blue-tak if you want something done quickly. It will apparently last for decades (says Brendan Power) but if you tinker with the harp, it's easy to displace a blob of Blue-Tak. Not that big of a deal, but it's enough for some people to not have a preference for it. There is no danger of the blue-tak falling off and getting sucked into your lungs, though. If you are experimenting with tuning, blue-tak is a prerequisite.
Does retuning a reed this much change the timbre and the response. It can. If you are meticulous, you can get the reed to play like a normal reed, for instance if you replaced a reed on a harp and didn't have an exact match. You can adjust the reed so that you can't tell it was tuned down or up.
If you want to explore tinkering with harps, an interesting project would be to purchase a B harp and tune it to Bb. See what happens and how you like it...
I tuned a G down to a low F with Blue-Tak and it doesn't compare with any low-F I have every played. Blue-Tak absorbs vibrations and makes it a very mellow sounding harp that's quite responsive. It's surprising how well it stays in tune, too....
I have trouble raising higher reeds by more than a semitone. Maybe that's just me . . . BTW, my success rate with Captcha is 100% since taking MP's advice about using Ctrl and the + key--
Last Edited by Gnarly on Apr 03, 2013 3:14 PM
You can get into the science a bit if you look up wave patterns on YouTube. Think of a tremolo harp. The way it works is you play two reeds at the same time. The reeds are tuned slightly apart. Because they aren't in sync with each other, their waveforms slowly drift from being in phase with each other (where they make it sound louder) to out of phase (where they make it quieter) giving you a pleasing tremolo sound.
When you play two notes a full octave apart, the higher waveform is exactly half the wave distance of the lower octave, which means they still stay in phase with each other- no pulsing, and the human ear isn't very good at distinguishing the difference on top of that, so you get a reinforced sound.
The less wave interference notes create together the smoother the chord sounds. The human ear seems to have evolved to recognize these simple tones. It also seems to have evolved to recognize patterns. It turns out the tuning that gives you the purest tones when heard together aren't tuned exactly equally distant mathematically. When we hear the notes individually, like in a melody, those notes that aren't exactly where we expect them to be sound off.
I've only barely scratched the surface with retuning, but I've asked extreme tuners about how far you could take a reed. I don't remember exactly what they said, but in theory, you could take Hohner Pucks (which only come in C and G) and tune an entire octave's worth of harps. (Well, assuming the Pucks could tune like normal harps. They are so tiny the answer might be different for them; that might have included doing some low tuned harps- how awesome would a low tuned Puck be!) I know Jim has made himself a LLD out of Seydel parts (he has a picture of it in the Frankenharp thread). He would have had to have tuned a LLF down for that, so at least that far.
I'd guess that taking material away from the rivet end is more dangerous than the tip. I've only ever used the Blue Tack method myself (well, actually, clay- I didn't have Blue Tack. Clay tastes yucky. It was blue clay though.) Some people use solder on the end too, which is fine if you are any good at soldering.
A big reason that ET works with piano is the fact, on acoustic pianos, that the placement of where the hammer strikes the string is important because the proper placement works as a damper to knock down many of the upper harmonic overtones, which much are the odd numbered ones, which tend to make things sound tinny and harsh and without the proper placement, ET tuning won;t work on a piano, but with the harmonica, you don't have that luxury, so therefore chords, unlike with a piano, will always sound dissodent and the closet thing to that effect for harmonica is when you put valves on the reeds, which acts as a damper, mellowign this out, but not fully. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
Ok, another question. How come chords sound sweet ET on even basic electronic keyboards which don't have the piano characteristics of the hammer/string/resonance and harmonics? ---------- My MBH Profile Grey Owl YouTube Grey Owl Abstract Photos Website
