Digital Tuners in Concert Band

Digital Tuners in Concert Band

Ed Dumas

There is a huge debate amongst band teachers regarding the use of digital tuners for correcting out-of-tune-ness in a concert band. I expect that debate will go on for quite some time, and I doubt that I can offer much in the way of ending that debate. Some music teachers will always swear by a digital tuner, while others will likely always swear AT the digital tuners.

I like the tool, though I know they need to be used with caution. I will make here a few observations and do’s and don’ts about using a digital tuner if you choose to use one. I will also offer some ideas on how to use them better and how to put control for tuning in your students’ hands. Maybe something you read here might encourage you to use it once again with more care, and that would be fine, too.

After having attended countless numbers of music festivals, and after working as an adjudicator as well, I can tell you that one of the greatest sins of using a digital tuner is bringing it on stage, especially in festival performances. I cannot count the number of times that I have seen music teachers with a digital tuner in hand, running down the players in the band, one note at a time, in front of the adjudicator. There is just about no better way to telegraph to the adjudicator exactly where the tuning problems in the band are than to tune the band in front of the adjudicator! The tuner should be left for the warm-up/tune-up area.

Instead, once you get seated in the adjudication room, try having your band play a chorale as a warm-up and final tuning piece. This helps the students with several things, including doing the last check on tuning before the performance begins. The chorale I loved and still love to use is “All Through The Night” in the key of Ab from the Foundations For Superior Performance Book. Once we were seated on stage, my students would run through this chorale (mostly) memorized. Once it was completed, only then would I indicate to the adjudicators that we were ready to begin and wait for their signal.

The reason I like a chorale in the performance hall before we begin is that besides confirming our tuning from the warm-up room, the students can also check the acoustics of the room. The simple 4 or 5 part harmony of a chorale allows us all to figure out the balance of the band in the room better. If necessary, I could give

them some reminders of how to play a certain kind of room, such as singing out in an acoustically dry room, playing shorter in a live room, or how to adjust the band’s balance in a room that is lively for some instruments and not others. I also like “All Through The Night” from the Foundations For Superior Performance book because it was in the key of Ab. Bands sound better in flat keys while orchestras tend to prefer sharp keys. This is one of the reasons why orchestral musicians often play differently pitched wind instruments in the orchestra, such as clarinet in A.

Now contrast that scenario of using a digital tuner to tune down through all of the musicians on stage with the tuner in hand. Often the music teacher would listen to one pitch from the student, and then direct the student to either “push-in” or “pull out.” This might be solving the teacher’s problem of out-of-tune-ness in the short term, but does little to educate the student on how to tune. Worse than that, the festival adjudicators can now see who knows how to tune, and who does not.
Instead, try telling the students if their pitch is “flat” or “sharp,” rather than “push-in” or “pull out.” At least, this makes the student think about how they must respond, not make you think how they must respond. Better yet, put the tuner in the hands of the students backstage, and have them use it before they come on to perform. Now they must check themselves, and you can be left with one final check onstage, done more in the style of a professional orchestra with one pitch from oboe or lead clarinet, and everyone else onstage double-checks to that.

This, now, brings up a couple of other issues that need to be explained and actively taught to the students. The first problem with students using a tuner is that they need to understand what “bio-feedback” means, and then they need to be instructed on how to defeat this bio-feedback response.

When a student uses a tuner, if they are looking directly at it, there is a bio- feedback type action that happens rather quickly. As the student is looking at the tuner and watching the tuner needle, the brain senses that the pitch needs to change for the needle to find the center. In a split second, the embouchure will change in the amount that is necessary to make the needle find exactly the correct position for the sound sample to be “in tune.” The student then has confirmed that the pitch is correct, “just like it always is.”

In reality, though, the student does not play with that amount of pitch correction regularly in the embouchure, and so the student, who now believes he plays correctly, is instead consistently playing off-pitch. This, I believe, is the origin of contempt for those teachers who actively despise tuners! Teachers who use tuners in this way if they are not careful can lead to students shutting off their ears!

Students must learn to listen, and not learn to tune out sounds. This is an unintended outcome that must be avoided to make digital tuners useful. As an aside, this is one of the big reasons that I have always disliked students using music in earbuds while they do their homework or classroom work. The unintended outcome is that they are learning to tune out the music, and this is opposite from what I am trying to teach them about music.

Now, instead of students looking at the tuner, teach the students to tune each other, so that someone else looks at the tuner while the sample pitch is played. The player needs to concentrate on producing the sound in the middle of the “slot,” as in not pushing the sound up or down with the embouchure. The student reading the tuner must state “flat or sharp,” not “pull in or push out.”

The next step is to teach students how to use a tuner when they are alone. First, they should blow their pitch long enough for the sound to be stable, and they must blow this long stable pitch without looking at the tuner. Then, with stable pitch and moving their eyes only, they can now look at the tuner to see what is showing. No bio-feedback response here is created, and the student might be surprised at how off their pitch is. Now adjust the instrument, not the embouchure.
I have often given section leaders the task of tuning up their section using these ideas. This can help you achieve a faster tune-up and still have the bio-feedback problem avoided.

The next step would be to have students learn by ear to tune to another pitch. This is usually best started in their section because this would keep the comparisons to the same octave and tone. Tuning to wide octave ranges or completely different instrument tones, such as flute to tuba, can be something that throws off students in the beginning.

Have one person tune their instrument to a tuner, making sure they do not look at the screen until after the pitch is stabilized. Then, the other students can play one at a time next to the “correct” or reference students’ pitch and adjust their instruments accordingly.

When I would have students go through this learning process, at this point many students would not know how to adjust their instruments. They were unsure if they were to go in or out with their slide or tuning mechanism. These students could logically tell me things like “longer equals lower” but were incapable of telling me which person played the higher pitch, and which was lower. If they could not tell me if their pitch was higher or lower than the reference pitch, my usual response was “Take a guess!”
The first time that students hear this from me, they often would think I had now gone right off my rocker because education is not supposed to be about guessing! My usual answer to that would be, “I might be, but that is not the issue here right now. The issue is, doing nothing is far worse than doing the wrong thing, so please just guess. If you go the wrong way you will immediately know if you made it worse so that now you can make it better by going the other way, and therefore you will have learned. There is no losing here, except when you do nothing!”

This gives the students control, gives them a chance to learn, and also lets them know that I am not totally crazy! Literally, everyone wins.

Now there were some students, especially young ones, who could not hear the difference between the pitches. That was because they had not yet been shown what to listen for. So, explain to them what the “beats” are in tuning. Explain that it is not like rhythm beats, but more like soundwaves conflicting, making soundwave pulses that are very unpleasant.

At this point, I would have one trumpet player play for me one stable pitch, such as a concert F. Then on my trumpet, I would pull my tuning slide out as far as I could without it falling out. When we played the two pitches together it created harsh conflict waves. Most students could now hear the dissonance. Then I would pull in only slightly and play the two pitches together once again. I would repeat that process a couple more times, each time pulling in slightly.

After doing this a few times, I would ask the students “What do you hear in the change each time?” Surely by now, someone would pick up on the fact that the dissonance waves were slowing down as the two pitches grew closer together. At this point, present to the students the idea that the faster the waves crash, the farther apart the pitches are. The slower the waves crash, the closer together the two pitches are.

 
Finally, I would present to the students the two trumpet sounds one more time. This time, I would start with my slide pulled out as far as possible. While the sounds are played together, I would slowly pull in until I was back where I normally played, and the two sounds matched precisely with no pitch waves at all. Students must hear this exercise to fully understand what good tuning feels like. It is as much an exercise in feel as it is in intellect.

Now, this tuning exercise could be repeated in future classes with more distant instruments. You could use dissimilar instruments in similar octaves, such as trumpet and clarinet, and then expand it outward to dissimilar instruments separated by greater distances, such as flute and trombone, clarinet and tuba, and ultimately ending with piccolo and tuba. Tuning for multiple octaves is a skill that also needs practice, and should be presented to students in a logical manner as well.

Once they have experienced this tuning exercise, then they will understand what it means to be in tune or out of tune. Now, there is another part of tuning that students need to be taught directly. That is, they need to know how to adjust pitch on their instrument using their embouchure only, not their slide, barrel, or neck joint. This will help them tune faster and be more aware of sounds without a tuner.

This lesson came to me from my younger brother, who is a retired pro hockey player and golf pro. I was complaining to him of my golf shots often doing a hard slice to the right. He took me to a driving range to give me a lesson. There, he said to me, “I want you to hit the fence with ten balls in a row, but you must hit the right side fence.” I immediately complained that I could already do that and was trying to learn how NOT to constantly slice! “Trust me,” he said, “and hit the right side fence, but you cannot aim that way. Aim straight down the fairway.”

It turns out that not every ball hit the right side fence, so I had to do some working at it to make sure EVERY ball went that way. Then he said, “Now put 10 balls in a row over to the left fence.” Again, against my objections, I tried and found it was much harder. When I finally figured out how to do that, he then said, “Now put ten in a row straight down the middle.” Sure enough, I had figured out how to swing so that I had control over where they went. Oh, I still sliced some, but not nearly as many and not nearly as badly, but the lesson was not lost on me.

So, going back to band instruments, now I asked my students to play their tuning pitch and pull the sound down as much as possible without touching the tuning mechanism on the instrument or moving the trombone slide. They could only use their embouchures. If they still give me the question mark eyes, I would demonstrate on my own trumpet and watch their eyes pop as I dropped the pitch a full couple of tones before it fell off. Brass players should be able to do this without allowing the pitch to fall to the next harmonic down.

Some students who attempt to drop pitch with embouchure will instead allow the volume to decrease. They need to be shown that the pitch must fall, not the volume. Demonstrate this on your own horn, and discuss the embouchure adjustments required to make this happen.

Once the students can make the pitch fall, then ask them to make the pitch rise using only their embouchure. This task is harder, so they will likely need more practice to make it happen.

Now once they have completed that task, have them practice matching a pitch in which you out-of-tune your instrument an unspecified amount. Keep to the same tuning note, but adjust the given pitch higher or lower. This gives them the practice of matching higher and lower pitches until the beat waves disappear by using only their embouchure.

 
Now at this point, it is a good idea to explain to students a better procedure for tuning next to a given pitch. Typically what you hear and see with tuning to a pitch is that one musician gives a specified pitch, and then everyone else joins in rather loud and long until the original reference pitch can no longer be heard.  Everyone stops satisfied that they are now “in tune” when in fact no one can confirm this because they have all covered up the reference pitch.

Teach the students that they should play their tone softly and briefly against the reference pitch. While they are playing their sound, if they hear off-pitch beat waves, they should move their pitch up or down using only their embouchure to determine if they are either flat or sharp. They should then stop, and make whatever adjustments are necessary by either pulling in or pushing out according to what their embouchure and ears tell them.

They can then try again softly & briefly, and again make any adjustments necessary. Once students find themselves satisfied after going through this procedure a couple of times, they should then STOP PLAYING to not cover up the reference pitch for other people to hear.  One final thought about student tuning. If you once again hear that the tuning is off in a section, have the section play a pitch together to reveal the out-of-tune- ness. Then, just ask the section to correct it, and provide them with no solution for it. Put the control for their out-of-tune pitches into the students’ own hands. It might take a bit longer in the beginning, but later on, it will be much faster and done without your input at all.

Now, let’s go back to the original scenario of tuning up the concert band on stage in a music festival with a digital tuner. What is the message that you hear from this now? Besides hearing which instruments are out of tune, I also hear that the students are not in control of their tuning, and need to be shown how to do this on their own.

Ed Dumas, B.Ed., M.A.Ed.