Tuning

I'm pretty dreadful at tuning. Sometimes I can hear when things are out of tune, sometimes I can't, and when I can I usually can't tell what's actually wrong - it just doesn't sound right. Oft-times playing in recorder groups I only realise that it was wrong when we get the tuning right and everything sounds great. At that point I think ah yes, that's what it's meant to sound like. Unfortuately I've not yet had much luck keeping the memory of that sound sufficiently fresh to let me do better in the next out-of-tune group. Even given a reference pitch to tune just me to, I still can't tell if I'm sharp or flat half the time, I just have to go up and down and see if I can hit the right spot.

Now while those days are slowly becoming less frequent (they still make up the majority, but I tune to the harpsichord much more quickly in my recorder lessons now), some days I revert completely to my pre-music-lessons self and am utterly, utterly awful. This morning I did it while I was playing the pipes.

I tuned my G drone, got everything nicely set with the chanter. Started to play. Everything sounded wrong. The drone note was utterly out of place, completely unrelated and disconnected to the tune I was just about managing to play. I tried mucking about with the pressure and got some improvement, but the irritating thing was that the drone still sounded (to my dodgy ears) to be in tune with both low and high Gs on the chanter.

Bizarrely, adding the high D drone to the mixture, something of an act of desperation, helped to reveal that there was indeed a problem, and the G drone was retuned to fit in. Then the D drone was retuned again... eventually I got something vaguely okay-sounding, but by this point I was tired and frustrated and my pressure control was all over the place.

I guess some days one just isn't meant to play. To ease the frustration I picked up a recorder and ran through a couple of Almands from a book of Renaissance dances. At least I can play something...