THE OPTIMISER
INFORMATION

The optimizer is a very powerful tool for instrument design and therefore a certain amount of familiarization is necessary. It is based on the “Rosenbrock algorithm”, which has proven itself excellently in chip design, material research and aircraft engineering. You can use it to improve real measured or even “virtual” instruments – up to redesign and cloning if necessary. All you need is an X/Y bore list of a real or virtual instrument.
The optimizer is already included in the BIAS PROFESSIONAL and BIAS ENTERPRISE edition.
THE COMPONENT BOX
In order to keep the individual steps as close as possible to the actual workflow in instrument construction, the first task is to create a component box. This means, for example, that you enter the internal dimensions of a mouthpiece in the form of an X/Y list. This is usually not a big effort, because you can simply import the data from a CAD program. Then you create the leadpipe, the cylindrical part of a trumpet, the valve section (probably a bit more elaborate) the conical part and the bell. You can save as many mouthpieces, leadpipes and other parts as you like which you can then use to assemble an instrument.

HOW DOES THE OPTIMISER WORK?

After you have assembled the instrument from the components using “drag and drop”, the optimizer calculates the impedance of this instrument and from this the intonation of the individual notes, their deviation from equal temperament and displays the result in a list.

The changes you wish to make to poorly tuned notes can be entered in this list as a percentage (musically: cent) or in absolute values (Hz).

The optimizer now compares the existing intonation with your specifications and starts to change the bore (widening or narrowing at certain points). It then calculates the impedance and intonation and compares the new intonation with the old one. If it is better, he makes further steps in this direction, if not, he tries changes in other directions. This happens relatively fast and in one hour he has made several thousands of such calculations. The following figure shows the procedure.

Although the optimizer can handle complex tasks much better than a human being (it can take into account up to 110 different specifications at the simultaneously in each step of the calculation), it is still only software to which you have to give certain rules (in the previous figure the “optimization specifications”) depending on what you want to get as a result .

For example, where the software may change the bore and where not (in the valve section or in the mouthpiece, for example), or whether it may also change the length of a component and by how much. How much a local widening or narrowing may be maximum (in % or mm), how big the allowed step size may be and whether the cone of conical components may be changed or not, and so on. These settings are made in the X/Y list of the respective component.

At the beginning, this requires a certain amount of thinking, but after a while this is greatly reduced by experience in dealing with optimizations.

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