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I would like to know how you guys approach tuning.
How do you practise ? what exercises?
Specialy when playing cromaticly..
My trouble is when I improvise..I go from one key to another..so plenty of flats & sharps.
I would like to play everything with 1.8:-)
Geni
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I would like to know it too...
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Get a chromatic tuner and use it. It will tell you where the pitches are. Any exercise or piece or phrase can be used.
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For fine intonation, I run a tone in the background and listen for beating or harmonics. For general tuning I just do my best to stay in the general area of the tone while playing a piece of music. Many other things too... practice fifths. James Galway recommends this to establish rock solid pitch reference points. I focus on hard meri notes a lot too. Chi ru tsuru chi hi patterns, tsu meri tsu dai meri then ro. I always come back to a normal note to check meris, and make sure they are the same. I use a tuner only to find where my flute is at, for example if its cold, or to find what the central pitch of a recording is, things like that, but not to check individual note pitches.
Im not a pro though.... (:
Last edited by caffeind (2008-01-24 01:25:16)
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You are talking about jazz and western pitches, correct? So we assume that you are hitting the main ro, tsu, re, chi, ri pitches accurately (except that since you have a vintage flute your chi may be a bit sharp).
Practice intervals. James Schlefer's book and CD has a lot of great exercises on that subject. Fourths, fifths, sevenths.
Another thing you can do is just pick a certain interval and work on it. Most important one would probably be Ro to Tsu meri. There's a lot of room for error there. If you're playing jazz, define tsu meri as Eb and just go back and forth between them until you nail it every time. Then pick another interval like re to chi meri and do it. Choose all the difficult intervals and hammer away at them until you own the intervals and can't make a mistake.
If you want it to sound Japanese even if you're playing jazz remember that a general rule is the strong notes (ro, tsu, re, chi, ri) are played straight and then vibrato is introduced during the course of the sustain of the note. Meri notes have vibrato from the inception. This also helps keep them (sounding) in tune, although I suppose a note with vibrato is by definition not in tune all the time, LOL.
INTERVALS! The better you control them the more in tune you will play.
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Grazie Mille Don Tairaku.
Salute a Te!
G
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