Beat Indicator

Peter

Hello there! I am very young and new to the piano technician world, and as I've been working through the Piano Technician Academy, I have been trying to find a tuning app that has a visual display for beats when playing 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, or octaves. I know Cybertuner has I lot of great features and this may be one of them, but the app seems very over complicated and the Piano Scope interface seems a million times better. I was curious if there is any feature like that on Piano Scope already or if It could be done. Many technician courses stress the importance of understanding aural tuning and this feature has become the deciding factor in which tuner I chose to get. I am sure that if implemented, it will become the new tool most new technicians will be recommended to use for learning to tune. As always, it is much easier easier said than done. Thank for your time in reading this.

Jacob L

I have also thought this would be a great learning tool and have thought about trying to build an app that does this... Frank, curious how doable you think this would be. It would involve reliable polyphonic pitch detection to detect the interval being played, and setting the live bandpass filter to the appropriate coincident partial(s) (perhaps with buttons to select between the c.p. pairs for a given interval), and some kind of autocorrelation or zero-crossing detection to display the beat rate. I actually did build a prototype of this using PianoTeq (virtual piano) and using the MIDI notes to detect the interval (avoiding the problem of detecting the interval from audio) and it works pretty well.

Peter

Jacob L That sounds awesome. If something like that could be implemented, I know a lot of new technicians would use it to recognize what beats sound like or what they should sound like for varying intervals. Thanks for the support!

Henry

I’ve been using cybertuner since I started tuning a year and a half ago, and pianoscope for about 6 months.

I don’t believe cybertuner has a beat indicator function like you describe. There is an RPT exam mode which you would need someone experienced with it to help with (it’s a tool for marking tunings to the RPT test). But other than that it doesn’t have specific learning tools built in.

When learning to tune aurally I would practice temperaments over and over again and then just mark myself with cybertuner.

I would only suggest cybertuner is worth getting if you have a mentor who uses it so you can work together and use the same tuning files.

Pianoscope apart from being a brilliant a complete ETD is more helpful as an aural tuning companion, lots of features already which are geared for learning. Have a look at the Gazelle Pianoscope course if you can access it.

The main exercise in learning to tune aurally is to print out temperament sequence instructions, set A4 or A3 with the machine and see how far you get before pulling your hair out and mark yourself with the software.

I’d reccomend learning 1 slow beating interval sequence with rapid beating interval checks (like the Yamaha sequence probably has another name in the US) and also learn a fast beating interval sequence (like Bill Bremmer’s excellent equal temperament via contiguous 3rds or the Baldassin-Sanderson Temperament if you’re feeling brave).

We’re very lucky to have excellent software to mark our work. Even 20 years ago tuners had it much harder!

Peter

Henry Thank you so so much! This was actually super helpful!

Henry

Also this is a really neat app from Mark Cerissano
A very handy and well laid out app for check notes, interval and octave types.

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/piano-tuners-slide-rule/id1645711444