Test your Dynamic Range

Here’s a way to test your dynamic range using only TE tuner. Your iPad mic is still in the picture, but no YouTube or video processing to erode your results.

The exercise consists of playing something as loud as you can, then playing the same thing as soft as you can — and measure the difference between the loud pass and the soft pass. If you play into the TE Tuner analysis page you can read the dB levels off the screen. If you record while you’re playing you can read the levels after the fact rather than trying to remember them.

This video demonstrates the process using the first section of an Opperman exercise. The dB values I read from the tuner screen (middle of the screen, between the tuning wheel and the sound wave):

	Exercise 1	Exercise 2	Exercise 3
Loud	90-95 dB	89-95 dB	87-93 dB
Soft	84-89	74-89	79-86
Difference (dynamic range)	6	5-6	7-8

This isn’t very good — I am looking to hit something like 12 (and I might be able to if I wasn’t working up toward altissimo where it’s really hard to play soft).

Here’s the video:

And here’s the complete exercise