Wow!
Thursday, September 27, 2012
3:39:00 am
It's 3pm in the afternoon and I'm AT HOME! How awesome and rare this is!
Today is Day 15 of school, 20th day since we picked up the tuning hammer and today we were taught how to set the temperament the real way! And we'll be doing this for the next 80 days till Christmas holidays. It's comforting to see the confidence all of them have in our currently non-existent abilities. Our two tutors and the other two technicians there are absolutely certain we'll all be tuning decently by Christmas. Don was so proud that he was giving us the temperament today. Apparently he says the temperament sheet appears earlier each year and so far that record is still ongoing.. One day they will get the sheet on Day 1!!! I guess it's like tried and tested... The programme has been going for more than 10 over years and they should know better.....
Anyway for those who don't know how pianos are tuned, the methodology makes sense. The hard part is honing the ears to hear what you want to hear, and translating that to the minute shifts in the hands to the tuning hammer. So what we do is use a tuning fork to tune a single note, and then using that note, we tune the other 11 notes in a chosen octave by listening to the beats of different intervals (2 notes played at the same time). A tuned piano is not perfectly in pitch (beatless). The piano has to be tempered (adjusted/made out of tune) in a sort of compromise so that whatever key you play in sounds okay. If it's perfectly in tune for a particular key, if you play it in another key it may sound awfully unbearable! So if you go to a piano and play 2 notes that aren't an octave, you should be able to hear beats produced by the clashing sound waves of the 2 notes. Band people should know when we tune! Once that octave is set, we use those notes to go up and down the piano, tuning octaves to beatless. So what we have done the past few weeks is the easy part - We assume that octave is already tempered and we just tune octaves up and down to beatless. Today, we learnt how to adjust the temperament. Not easy because each interval has different number of beats you need to listen and set it too! I still kinda suck at it, but FOR ONCE, after "tuning" the piano actually sounds decent when you play something on it! I AM AN EXTREMELY HAPPY GIRL. And I'm really motivated to keep trying and trying now till I can get it good! :) And then, playing time!
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| Carpenter's pencil! So cute! |
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| This is a most awesome octave-playing contraption, hand made from random scraps in the workshop by Paul, the technician here! So cool! |
I guess it'll snow this winter since it didn't snow the year before and the year before that had snow storms. Hmmmm... Don't want snow because that means I can't cycle to school! Bummer......
Really happy to be home so early yay!
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