Pianotech

Any advice on approaching a Yamaha CP80 electric grand piano using Tunelab?  I will be doing this in the very near future.

I have found the Yamaha CP80 service manual, which contains a full list of recommended offsets.  There one column of the chart that is labelled "DT-4 OctaveSW" and which is populated by values ranging from 3 in the bass to 8 in the high treble.  I don't know if this has any relevance for me.

It is easy enough to type in a set of custom offsets to create a tuning file in Tunelab.  I've done that, and am curious to see if this file becomes useful when I am actually present at the piano.

For what it's worth, I'm running Tunelab on an iPhone, and am not really set up for pitch input from the CP80 other than through whatever speaker is available, and my built in microphone.

Thanks for any enlightenment you all can give me!

It can be helpful to make sure the owner has it hooked up to an amplifier and speaker before you arrive...

Ron Koval

I agree that the instrument should be set up to play through amp and speakers.

You say you are running TuneLab on iPhone, so assuming that your iPhone has updated to the current version of TuneLab, TuneLab should be able to calculate an excellent tuning for a CP-80.

I use the following settings and procedures. I’m not saying these are better than other settings, just that I know these work well:

Use 3-part tuning set to 3:1 in the high treble, 3:1 in the mid-range, and 6:2 in the bass. (This is pure 12th ET which has some inherent advantages in dealing with the unusual inharmonicity for which the Yamaha electric grands are known.)

When measuring inharmonicity from which to calculate a tuning, just go ahead and read every note. Really. The current version of TuneLab only takes 2 seconds to read each note, much faster than in the past. Some random notes may not read well; skip the unreadable notes without fear, since reading every note means there will be plenty of good inharmonicity data from which to calculate a tuning. The breaks in the various CP scales are unusually placed, but since you are reading all the notes that are measurable, the tuning will be smoothed out, wherever the breaks are. 

Generally, I find that ETD-calculated tunings for the CP-70 slightly flat in the bass; this is the result of the inharmonicity in the bass being outside the normal parameters -- that is, more extreme than the ETD developers expected to deal with. However, the current version of TuneLab appears to deal with the unusually high inharmonicity of Yamaha CP base quite successfully. My compliments to Robert Scott. Well done.

Kent Swafford