Tuning a Xylophone

Video Transcript

Now we're going to talk about how you get the right pitch for a xylophone. This would also be considered what you might call how do you tune a xylophone, since there are only metal slabs or metal pipes or wooden slabs, there's really no easy way to tune them. So, you really have to get it right the first time. So, we're going to talk about how that happens. Now, the orchestra bells here is the kind of xylophone that we're going to try to mimic in a way today. And the orchestra bells are what we call orchestrally tuned, and what that means is... I'm going to take this apart for us for a second here. Let's try a, the C. Now, if you could come in close here you'll see that every single one of these, I can do it it's failsafe, here's the D. The D and the C you can see the D has a little bit more burrowed out in the center. And the reason that is that every single one of these notes is made just a little bit flat. Then, what they do is they drill out and they burrow a hole in the note so that the note becomes the exact right pitch. When they reach that pitch, then they stop. So today, for our xylophone, we're going to mimic this process and we're going to talk about how we're going to mimic this process in just a moment. But for right now it's important to understand that a xylophone can only be tuned once and must be tuned perfectly, which is called orchestral tuning. When we make something purposefully flat and then take away a bit of it by bit of it to get it to that exact right pitch. So, we can tell that Ludwig who made this xylophone right here, did a good job. Here's the C and this piano was just tuned, there's a C. And it's the exact same note. So we want to have that same consistency in our xylophone.

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