Pianoscope trial, perspective from a training tuner

Henry

Hi I’ve posted a few questions on this forum and it was lovely to get quick feedback from technicians and Frank the developer.

I wanted to post about my first week impressions on pianoscope with the trial.

It’s been an interesting week for me - I’ve been tuning professionally for just over a year so still very much a newcomer.

I’m fortunate to have some terrific mentors and a busy schedule to test and improve my tunings.

I delivered my first ‘concert’ tunings this week at St Paul’s cathedral in London. It was time sensitive and important that I delivered my best possible tunings as they will be played in services and concerts.

So I chose to use cybertuner which has been my constant companion since starting tuning, familiar and reliable.

But after a week using pianoscope, I can safely say that I will be purchasing pro and never look back.

I was pleased with the first tunings on pianoscope, but after side by side comparisons on a range of pianos pushing cybertuner towards it’s less user friendly settings it has started to become apparent how much I preferred pianoscope, and I cannot easily recreate similar tunings in cybertuner.

This is especially noticeable on smaller and less optimally scaled instruments.

I also prefer the pitch raise function in pianoscope.

After some fiddling the indicator and strobe settings are much easier to tune with. Thanks for the help there Frank.

If anyone is reading this and on the fence, it’s worth persevering with pianoscope even if the indicator seems more jumpy than a previous ETD, this is because it is giving more information around 0 cents. You can either leverage this to improve your tunings, or filter it out with settings if no longer useful.

It might be worth considering adding an easy mode (if that’s not already a feature I’ve missed) which sets up the indicator and strobe to a more stable reading over the notes envelope. I know that’s subjective and it’s a strength of the programme that you can edit this yourself to your own liking, but after a year of tuning with cybertuner I found the tuning in the treble with the indicator really challenging until I dialled in my settings. I’m probably more tech savvy than some of my peers (experience in DAWs like ableton) and persistent enough to tinker, but it would be a shame if someone was put off by the default settings if there could be a more approachable ‘easy mode’. Just a thought.

Thank you again for making this wonderful software, I can’t wait to tune my next piano with it.

All the best
Henry

Frank Illenberger

Thank you for the great feedback, Henry! What did you change to the settings to make them suit you better?

Henry

You’re welcome!

Linear resolution helped a lot, the variable setting makes sense for increased accuracy but when setting the pin and moving the pitch down towards target having the indicator move at the same speed with linear resolution coordinates better with my eye/hand.

And threshold 1c for the indicator to fade out and the strobe to fade in for a ‘blush like’ effect. The strobe is actually better than a blush as it still gives information for further refining.

I tuned 4 pianos today, three pitch corrections, and the pitch raise got really close on the first pass for all three.

Ears will have a rest tomorrow!

I’ve also convinced a colleague who’s been using cybertuner for 20 years to give pianoscope a try!