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Double Bass Simandl 30 Etudes Music Minus One

SAlcott

SAlcott

Supporting Member
Aug 22, 2007
4,605
5,257
NYC, Inwood.
#1
Looking for stuff to work on in isolation, I found a copy of Simandl 30 Etudes with piano accompaniment. I tuned up as usual, skipping the tuning notes on the CD. I was going out of my mind trying to play in tune until (D'OH) it occurred to me to check the pitch with the strobe tuner app on my phone. To my surprise, the piano is tuned to A=437. I retuned the bass, and all is well, but I wonder why MMO did this, especially without any indication of non-440 anywhere in the book.
 
#9
Pianos can go out of tune by that much with changes in the weather. How much varies by the piano and, of course, by the weather. My tuner recommends a winter and a summer tuning because no matter what you do, it won't stay true long in Spring or Fall. I often find my piano 5 cents sharp in July if I had it tuned in March. At A=440, each Hz is 4 cents, so your 437 equates to 12 cents out of tune.

(The math is easy here because Ab is 415 at A=440, so it's 25 Hz (440-415) for 100 cents. Each 1 Hz is 4 cents.)

It doesn't Hz.

Dollars and ...

-S-
 
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#11
We all assume that CD players play it back perfectly, unlike tape or vinyl, but is it possible your CD player is playing it back slow? Do other CD players you have, play this at the same pitch? What about your computer? What about importing it into your computer and playing back the file?

I also notice that digital tuners are not all exactly the same. My old Seiko was slightly different than the Boss tuners. And perhaps the pitch reading dropped when the battery was weak. Phone apps could need calibrating as well.

Have you tested your phone app tuner with other dedicated hardware tuners? With other apps tuners? With a real metal tuning fork? Or a digital tuning fork? Could your current tuner be reading flat?

Also wondering, how does what you have compare to this (and the corresponding playlist)?
 
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#12
SAlcott said:
Looking for stuff to work on in isolation, I found a copy of Simandl 30 Etudes with piano accompaniment. I tuned up as usual, skipping the tuning notes on the CD. I was going out of my mind trying to play in tune until (D'OH) it occurred to me to check the pitch with the strobe tuner app on my phone. To my surprise, the piano is tuned to A=437. I retuned the bass, and all is well, but I wonder why MMO did this, especially without any indication of non-440 anywhere in the book.
Click to expand...
I've got that edition as well. The tuning issue is annoying as heck.

And, as long as I'm critiquing it, I would actually prefer the accompaniment be metronomic over the way they recorded it. At least you would know what to expect. As it is, you have to learn exactly where, and how much, the pianist slows down/speeds up and try to match that. ...totally backward to the way it's supposed to work in the real world, with the accompanist following the soloist.

Also, the count offs are too short. (one bar) Give me enough time to get the bow in my hand and get set, please.
 
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#14
longfinger said:
We all assume that CD players play it back perfectly, unlike tape or vinyl, but is it possible your CD player is playing it back slow? Do other CD players you have, play this at the same pitch? What about your computer? What about importing it into your computer and playing back the file?

I also notice that digital tuners are not all exactly the same. My old Seiko was slightly different than the Boss tuners. And perhaps the pitch reading dropped when the battery was weak. Phone apps could need calibrating as well.

Have you tested your phone app tuner with other dedicated hardware tuners? With other apps tuners? With a real metal tuning fork? Or a digital tuning fork? Could your current tuner be reading flat?

Also wondering, how does what you have compare to this (and the corresponding playlist)?


Click to expand...


I've checked on two different tuners and am confident about the results and my original post. Regarding the recording in the YouTube video, the CD accompaniment that came with the music is a real piano,, played by a real person; the video sounds like a midi realization complete with a wrong note in bar 15, 4th beat, which is when I stopped listening.
 
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#15
longfinger said:
I also notice that digital tuners are not all exactly the same. My old Seiko was slightly different than the Boss tuners. And perhaps the pitch reading dropped when the battery was weak. Phone apps could need calibrating as well.
Click to expand...
Stuff in the digital domain is usually pretty accurate. That said, the algorithm for a tuner can be quite complex - there's all sorts of averaging going on, so the fact that different tuners show different results is more likely to be a result of the different way each has decided to turn their measurements into feedback they show you, rather than inaccuracies of their measurements, IMO.

The Peterson strobe tuners, which you can now get in clip-on versions, are the gold standard as far as I'm concerned - after I tried them, I couldn't make myself use anything else. Expensive, $50 apiece or so for something you can buy for much less, but they're great and worth the $$ to me.

If you want to try something cool with metronomes, not tuners, take a couple of smart phones running a metronome app and put one at quarters and the other as eighths, e.g., set one to 72 and the other to 144. If you start the second metronome app exactly in sync with the first - it might take a few tries but it's perfectly doable - you'll find they stay exactly in sync with each other for at least as long as I've ever tried it, maybe 10 minutes, and I suspect they'd go on this way forever. It's way cool, IMO, and certainly not something you could ever do with the windup kind of metronome. (I use this with students all the time because I can adjust the volume of each metronome, sometimes by just moving it closer or further away - great for someone who can't, e.g., get 8ths in tempo at 72 to hear where the 8th are, then gradually reduce the volume of the 8th.)

-S-
 
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