Intonation and acceptable variations

[Handyman]

I didn't suggest that it was OK for intonation to be "off", just that there are limits to how accurately the human ear can hear. In live performance, if you're intonated to within 10 cents or less, the chances of (a) a problem happening, and (b) it being audible to the audience in the mix, are so minimal as to be inconsequential. In fact, it's not an issue - period.

If you're playing with other instruments, being off by 10 cents will sound truly awful, especially if you're playing unison or octave lines.

Listen to the three sound samples at the bottom of the linked Wikipedia page. You'll hear a C played, followed by a C that's out of tune by 1, 6, or 10 cents, then both of them together. The off by one cent version sounds slightly off when played in unison, but the 6 and 10 cent versions are just painful to listen to.

Cent (music) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Handyman]

Exactly. Orchestras DO have multiple instruments playing the same note at the same time, (ferexample, sometimes numerous violins play the exact same passage at the same time) and guess how they tune? The first violinist plays a note, end the entire orchestra tunes to THAT note - without use of electronics. And every tuning is only as accurate as the human ear can make it.

You seem to be implying that tuning by ear is less accurate than electronic tuners. When carefully tuning by ear to a reference pitch by listening for beats, I can get close enough that my strobe tuner registers the resulting tuning as dead on, and I doubt I'm unusual in that.

One instrument playing single note lines can probably get away with being 10 cents off, but multiple instruments that far off are going to sound like an elementary school string ensemble, especially if the guy next to you is 10 cents off in the opposite direction as you.

 

[ehque]

The human ear quite sensitive to beats, the chorusy effect when two or more notes are played slightly off from each other. Played in a chord or in unison with other instruments, I have no doubt that most people will be able to hear the dissonance created by notes even slightly out of tune.

On its own however... It may be quite difficult to tell if the bass is out of tune with the keys if the keys are playing 2-3 octaves higher than the bass.

 

[Aziraphale]

Kryten's expression on your avatar is priceless by the way Handyman...

 

[Turnaround]

When carefully tuning by ear to a reference pitch by listening for beats, I can get close enough that my strobe tuner registers the resulting tuning as dead on, and I doubt I'm unusual in that.

And there's the problem! Tuning by beats means you are tuning in a way that will be out-of-tune with a variety of intervals on yourown instrument as well as any other instrument you are playing with. The well-tempered scale has a slightly narrowed interval of the fifth resulting in a more euphnious interval of a third.

This is not new - it's really old. The problem was well-understood and a working solution was developed in or before the time of J.S. Bach (1685 - 1750). Bach even wrote a suite about it - "The Well-Tempered Clavier".

Wiki has lots of info about this if you want to look into it further.

 

[Handyman]

And there's the problem! Tuning by beats means you are tuning in a way that will be out-of-tune with a variety of intervals on yourown instrument as well as any other instrument you are playing with.

I tuned to a digital piano as a reference, using the appropriate B, E, A, D, and G keys.

The effect you're talking about only occurs if you use a non-octave harmonic on a stringed instrument as your reference. An equal tempered 5th is about 1.3 cents off of a Pythagorean fith. This can actually add up to a pretty nasty out of tune-ness if someone does something like tuning a 6 string from the low to high strings, using the lowest string as the initial reference. I think you'd be getting something like 1.3 cents sharper each string you get away from the lowest?

 

[Turnaround]

I tuned to a digital piano as a reference, using the appropriate B, E, A, D, and G keys.

The effect you're talking about only occurs if you use a non-octave harmonic on a stringed instrument as your reference. An equal tempered 5th is about 1.3 cents off of a Pythagorean fith. This can actually add up to a pretty nasty out of tune-ness if someone does something like tuning a 6 string from the low to high strings, using the lowest string as the initial reference. I think you'd be getting something like 1.3 cents sharper each string you get away from the lowest?

That's the point exactly. A tempered fifth is tuned about 1.3 cents off to make other intervals play well. The octave is still tuned exactly to the octave. But if you ring out octave harmonics on strings tuned a fourth apart, your inter-string tuning will not be tempered and we're back to the same problem.

 

[Gaius46]

Hi.



My condolences .

If I had that kind of hearing accuracy I couln't play with the people I play with. Hell, I probably couldn't play by myself either.

People with perfect hearing or perfect pitch have often a hard (or impossible) time playing with less accurate people, how hard is for You if you don't mind me asking.

Regards
Sam

What he's talking about is not perfect (absolute) pitch but relative pitch. Perfect pitch is the ability to hear and name a pitch or reproduce a pitch without reference. Perfect pitch
is not common.

Relative pitch is the ability to hear differences between pitches. Good relative pitch is common and can be improved upon with practice.

 

[basmartin]

Hi.



My condolences .

If I had that kind of hearing accuracy I couln't play with the people I play with. Hell, I probably couldn't play by myself either.

People with perfect hearing or perfect pitch have often a hard (or impossible) time playing with less accurate people, how hard is for You if you don't mind me asking.

Regards
Sam

It´s alright, the people I play with, usually plays in tune.

 

[maturanesa]

i would intonate perfectly at the 12 fret and forget about the rest of the frets. You will never get the perfect pitch in all frets, its a mechanical instrument and its nature is not be a mathematical perfection, you can achieve a perfect pitch just using programmed electronic instruments. And remember the intonation of a fretted instrument is tempered, so its basicly not perfect even when all the frets intonate "perfect". Maybe that little differences that you call imperfections actually could be closer to the perfect pitch...

 

[Stick_Player]

It´s alright, the people I play with, usually plays [sic] in tune.

Wow! A room full of musical prodigies. Impressive!

 

[shrimpchowmein]

Because a fretted bass uses an equal temperament system, it's literally impossible that each fret could be perfectly intonated. Better off compensating for this with technique than technology.

Let it ride.

 

[T-Bird]

Hi.

What he's talking about is not perfect (absolute) pitch but relative pitch. Perfect pitch is the ability to hear and name a pitch or reproduce a pitch without reference. Perfect pitch
is not common.

Relative pitch is the ability to hear differences between pitches. Good relative pitch is common and can be improved upon with practice.

IMHO, that changes nothing, it's still near impossible to play with fretted instruments if the condition is severe enough.

It´s alright, the people I play with, usually plays in tune.

Must be one hell of a group then. Congrats.

Regards
Sam

 

[basmartin]

Wow! A room full of musical prodigies. Impressive!

What´s up with the [sic]? I´m from Sweden, no need to point out that I´m not that great with english grammar.

 

[Turnaround]

No, but if two instruments play the same note and the intonation is off, the beat frequencies can cause it to sound bad.

A quick calculation (assuming I did it right) shows that an open A string that's off by 10 cents will create 1 beat over approximately 3 seconds when sounded against a perfectly tuned A string. I don't think anyone will even notice let alone it sounding bad.

 

[walterw]

i think that may depend on which A we're talking about; a pair of bass As would show these "beat" frequencies much slower than a higher-pitched pair.

in this Invalid Link Removed on intonation, steve kimock has talked about the rather slippery nature of tuning and intonation, and provided this Invalid Link Removed to a study about tuning sensitivity and vibrato, and just how close pitches have to be to "perfect" to sound good.

turns out there's quite a lot of leeway, and it all comes down to stylistic variations and the "character" of how different players perceive and produce pitch, about the context of a particular note in a piece (ascending, descending, whether it's a tonic of the song or not, whether the note is part of the actual melody, etc.), and even the tone of a note (bright-sounding pitches can be perceived as being sharper than they actually are).

apparently, margins of 10 or even 20 cents are perfectly acceptable to the ear as long as the musical "context" is appropriate.