[sdiy] frequency counter

[Peter Grenader]

Two things, first thing first:

You want a simple freq counter circuit?

eBay, bay-bay.

The way I see it, you've got two choices.  Spend $30 for a nice high quality
used HP -or- spend the rest of your natural life trying to get a  homebrew
counter circuit accurate.

Second thing:

If you're after a freq detection circuit  for musical intervals, you have
two of them already:  they are at either ends of your head!  Seriously - use
your ears for tuning, not your eyes.  I forgot the ratio of people in this
world with perfect pitch, but it's a heavily skewed on the 'non' side, many
of those without it being the most talented musicians on the planet.
Relative pitch is all that's required and that is a taught skill more than
an inherent 'have it or not' quality.

Part of every music composition student's curriculum is  a couce of study
known as Solfeggio.   Solfeggio (as in 'so fa la tee doe...') is the
practice of learning, hearing an recognizing monophonic pitches and the
intervallic relationships of groups of pitches without a reference.
Basically this means that not only should you know an augmented forth (or
any other interval made of any number of pitches) when you hear it, you
should be able to pick off the pitches and scale degrees of all the notes
just by hearing it. After completing solfege, when you hear a single pitch
you'll be able to recognize it as an e flat, second octave.

Anyone can learn this skill with practice and in most cases, it's totally
overkill for the purpose of tuning.

hope this helps,

Peter



Mark Romberg wrote:

> anyone know of a simple-ish frequency counter circuit?  beginning to
> realize im going to need one to tune oscillators and things in the
> analog world as i dont have perfect pitch :/
> saw one on sdiy.org, but no schematics or source code for the uC.
> 
> have nice days.
>