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snark tuner



 
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lipshurt
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PostPosted: Fri May 18, 2018 10:00 am    Post subject: snark tuner Reply with quote

Earlier today i posted the following in another thread, but thought i might be better to start a new topic.......

I recently got one of those snark clip on tuners. I got it to check myself when playing live gigs with loud satge volumes and other obstacles to good intonation.

I find i really like it and and it helped way more than i would have imagined. I found that over the years i had gravitated to playing "down" on th epitch too much. On the moster oil brass chat with pandolfi he rants a bit on players playing under the horn, and says to put the note in the "taper zone" where the pitch goes when tapering to ppp. I was for sure not in the taper zone like that and could see it right away with the snark on.

I use the snark from the very first long tones and put it righ on the zero. Ten when doing drones you really see where the adjustments for harmonic content go. If you are the 3rd of a chord you see that it sound best one click under. What surprised me was the 5th is best a whole click over. Things like that were an eye opener.

On gigs it showed how much a horn section moves around especially early in the night. Putting it on th ezero instead of finding the other horn players (trumpet/sax/bone) locked everyone in WAY sooner and kept things that way. You still have to know where yu are against the chord structure so you still mainly by listening. If it gets weird, go with the zero though.

ALso eye opening was how TEMPERATURE affected the pitch. I even got a little digital thermometer to put on floor. If its 65 degrees, the tuning slide HAS to out 1/8 inch from 75 degrees. 57 degrees is a whole 3/16 inch in. I have not yet had to deal with hot stage that will be interesting.

Its also helped me a ton just to always be in the "taper zone" which i got by basically pulling OUT 1/16 inch from where i used to be. That put all my middled register notes higher in the slot, and my upper G etc more manageable. The weird thing was that my 5th harmonic D/Eb/E where SHARP fro years of thinking they were going to be flat, and years of pushing in the main slide and trying sit "down on the pitch".

That is a LOT of eye opening for a 12 dollar little gizmo.
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snichols
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PostPosted: Fri May 18, 2018 10:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

My wife got one of those for her ukulele and I tried it on my trumpet with pretty good success. It really does a good job of picking up the horn and not other nearby sounds, and is pretty accurate when compared to my traditional tuners. My only issue was that it was a bit slower at giving a reading than my traditional tuners. I think it was the original I was using, which is a guitar tuner so maybe the Super Tight or the HZ-1 would give faster readings... Which model do you have?
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Turkle
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PostPosted: Fri May 18, 2018 12:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This is interesting to me. 37 years on this planet and I've never once used a tuner of any sort. I'll bet I'd be shocked if I clipped one on... Of course I often play in bars with poorly-tuned pianos so at that point you still have to tune to the piano!
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Harryw413
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 14, 2018 7:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It sounds snarky (no pun intended) , but being a good ensemble player supercedes "hitting the targets" and nailing pitch center. If the ensemble pitch is drifting sharp, I'm sorry, but you just have to go with it. Plain and simple. If you're lighting the Snark up right on the center, you're going to sound flat to the audience and "correctness" simply doesn't hold water.

That being said, if you're playing principal then you are in a position to dictate pitch center (to an extent) to the brass section, but otherwise, go with the flow brother
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Andy Del
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 14, 2018 9:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A tuner is a good guide, but it is only that. Having put up with players who insist they are spot on because their tuner says so, I avoid the damn things like the plague.

They do NOT establish that you are in tune as they don't temper to the key you are playing in. Tuned to A=440hz and your middle E will be in very different places depending on if it is a major or minor third of a chord, a 5th, etc. etc.

In fact, I doubly avoid them after having to justify this fact to moronic ensemble manager!

That said, they can give you a guide. But then again, so can a piano, or a tuning fork, and a set of ears.

cheers

ANdy
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qcm
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 12:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Andy Del wrote:
A tuner is a good guide, but it is only that. Having put up with players who insist they are spot on because their tuner says so, I avoid the damn things like the plague.

They do NOT establish that you are in tune as they don't temper to the key you are playing in. Tuned to A=440hz and your middle E will be in very different places depending on if it is a major or minor third of a chord, a 5th, etc. etc.

In fact, I doubly avoid them after having to justify this fact to moronic ensemble manager!

That said, they can give you a guide. But then again, so can a piano, or a tuning fork, and a set of ears.

cheers

ANdy




What he said.

To paraphrase Andy, just because they are ( maybe ) in tune with one note, certainly does not mean they're in tune with the rest of them - particularly if they turn off their ears, ( because they tuned to the tuner! ) once they start playing, but don't LISTEN!!

Drives me NUTS!! ( actually, maybe I already was... )

-Dave
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deleted_user_680e93b
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 2:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Turkle wrote:
This is interesting to me. 37 years on this planet and I've never once used a tuner of any sort. I'll bet I'd be shocked if I clipped one on... Of course I often play in bars with poorly-tuned pianos so at that point you still have to tune to the piano!


I've had this same argument so many times with some band members that keep pulling out theirs tuners, when i always tune to the piano, it drives me nuts sometimes. He can't tune on the fly like us, so why are you tuning to yourself, I do have a couple of them though, but they spend all their time in a whiskey bag in my case, except when i'm using the built in metronomes.

tom
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lipshurt
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 8:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

So all of the responses so far have been about what I expected. Stuff about using your ears etc. of course I am well aware of how to use ears, and how to temper notes, and how ensemble playing works. What the original post is about is how using a tuner can help define certain things that are going on.

I just engineered a session that has 6 horns on it. I suggested to the players that they use the clip on tuner, because I found them to be very valuable when dubbing trumpet parts. They all said they could hear, so there you go. I had to use auto tune on the inner parts. One of the players always rose in pitch on sustains, and another dropped. That is because listening only works when you can actually hear either in phones or in the room. We all know that in a lot of situations it’s hard to either hear yourself, or hard to hear everything you need to hear. It’s especially true when using headphones to layer parts. Using a tuner is becoming very common for this, even with great players who can “hear”.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that most players don’t move their tuning slide when the temperature is different. Between about 70 and 76 degrees it’s pretty much the normal slide position. Around 65 degrees you need to push in about 1/16th inch. About 60 degrees it’s 1/8th inch. Same opposite thing with above 80 degrees. Higher that 85 degrees and higher like 90 to 100 degrees seems to not require addition pull for some reason. Probably because the breath temperature is about that same level.

In any event I’ve seen situations in cold or hot temperature where people refuse to move their slides because they can “hear”. And then either play flat or sharp as physics dictates. A couple of weeks ago I was playing a real good top quality sax player who when it got down to 60 degrees pulled OUT because he believed that trumpet go flat in cold air but saxes go sharp. He then pretty much played in tune by lipping up a mile, and occasionally he would lose control of notes completely from lipping up so hard. He did have ears though, cuz he was a great player.

I guess my whole point with this post is to suggest that using a tuner for a while could help the best players as well as everyone else.

I’m pretty sure nobody out there thinks that the way to use a tuner is to put all the notes on the zero, but on the other hand if all your notes are 3 clicks down or up, something is going on inside the listening situation.
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Last edited by lipshurt on Fri Jun 15, 2018 9:22 am; edited 1 time in total
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TKSop
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 9:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The whole system is GIGO.

-If you've got crap ears, you've got garbage in and you'll get garbage out.
-If you tune to the tuner and then stop listening then that's garbage in, so you'll get garbage results.

-If you've got good enough ears and are sensitive to any manipulations you're doing (whether you're lipping up or down) then you've got enough information to make informed decisions (eg: you know generally that when it gets hot you'll get slightly sharper - if it feels wrong, odds are that'll be why and you'll know very quickly if it's not so!) - good in, good out.

-If the venue or band is such that it's difficult to get a grip on where you are... then a tuner provides a reference point that can inform you of what direction you're headed in - provided you're still listening as best you can (and are aware of whether the others started out flat or sharp, particularly the piano), no harm no foul.


Sometimes it can hurt to have more information than you need - but if it helps you get better results, then you must be doing something right.


IMHO YMMV
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brendanavila9
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 21, 2018 3:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hmm, interesting I never heard of those tuners
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Speed
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 21, 2018 5:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

At the risk of taking this thread off in the direction of autotune rather than mere playing in tune, let me share this. I'll try to bring it back on point at the end.

I've had some experience with autotune with vocalists. There are some people out there - vocalists as well as horn players - who have lots of ability, but they just don't have the best ears in the world. They just do not hear that they are out of tune.

I have a friend who is a pro guitarist in Nashville. He had a gig with a band opening for a country megastar whose name I will not mention. Being a bit of a techie, my buddy made friends with the Front of House sound engineer and asked about a particular bit of rackmount gear with which he was not familiar. The sound engineer smiled and said, "I am contractually bound not to reveal that that is Miss ____'s pitch corrector." True story. Lots of talent, great cheekbones, solid songwriter, just not that great an ear. It happens.

In my experiments with vocalists and autotune, the singer has to get about 25 cents off zero before you really perceive his being out of tune. For that reason, I always set the autotune to kick in when the singer gets 25 cents off, but I only bring him back to 20 cents off, rather than all the way back to zero. That way, he still sounds human, but the listener - particularly the casual listener - does not perceive that the singer is out of tune.

I'm not sure how much a brass player would have to be out of tune before it was noticeable, but I suspect it would be more of a problem in a section than in a band with only one horn player. That's why many guitar players keep a Snark Tuner on their headstock all night long. They're playing chords. It's immediately obvious when one string goes flat. Not so much if you're playing single notes.

In my experience, being out of tune sticks out in a recording situation more than a live situation, for obvious reasons.

I use a Snark on gigs at the beginning of the night and just before the beginning of each set. In between, I use the "listen" method. I like the Snark because it picks up the vibrations from the bell, even in the presence of a lot of noise.

I think it would be a bit disconcerting to be constantly looking at a Snark or any other tuner while playing. On the other hand, if you have a segment where you are essentially playing long notes as part of a chord, it's probably not a dumb idea to periodically glance at the Snark while you're holding that whole note.
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