Ever wonder why your ears and your tuner disagree?
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Tones are relative to their pitch environment not a "well-tempered", fixed source.
I had a friend who played in the Philadelphia Orchestra. I asked him one day how they played so well in tune with each other. "We don't play in tune together", he said. "We play out of tune together'.
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Yep, tuning is a moving target as you’re playing with a group. That’s why I discourage people from playing or rehearsing with a group while watching a tuner on their stand. That’s a great way to play out of tune with the group.
1976 Bach Strad ML 43 trumpet
1960 Conn 6B Victor trumpet
1982 Bach Strad ML 239 C trumpet
1970 Olds Ambassador Eb/D trumpet
1993 Bach Strad L 184G cornet
1962 Conn 9A Victor cornet
1890 Besson A/Bb/C cornet
1870? Henry Lehnert SARV cornet -
My ears aren't that good that I can tell if I am out of tune when playing with the band so I don't even think about it. The lead player in the trumpet section will sometimes point to one of us and motion for us to pull out the tuning slide a bit.
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A tuner is often the worst thing that we can do to our playing. Drones, Stamp and simple duets (not recording one voice and then the next however - then only one voice "gives" - the second one!) are about the best.
The tuner is almost always wrong except for establishing a one note reference.There are a couple of internal mechanisms for tuning, none are accessible from the intellectual level.
Drones teach us to relate with sum and difference beats
Stamp teaches to find the resonant center
Duets teach us give and take in the context of ensemble playing.The consummate trumpeter needs it all. We need thousands of repetitions to claim "habit".
