Say, you are trying to play a scale with your section, you are all in tune, but there is no unison. It gets worse when all the sections play together since there is now a difference in the sound dynamics of each instrument.
I will propose a reason why it happens.
Situation: 5 people sing
Let’s say, there are 5 people in the room and five of them have to sing a song (that they all know) loudly. They will not be given any sound reference but a count off will be given when they all have to start together.
Guess what happens? There is a high chance that they start singing in different pitches and don’t even realize that others are singing something different. This is because their own voices are so loud that they become deaf to others.
A similar thing happens for instruments, when they start playing to maintain a stable sound, they turn deaf to the instruments around them.
Tuning might help, someone might argue. But the way you tune matters. If you start relying on the tuner by adjusting your embouchure. You will get a “green” but only till you look at the tuner. After that its back to “yellow”. It’s a good idea to tune with the tuner’s dial for a certain time to develop muscle memory to play that note. But after that, one should play the note through the tuner, hear it and then try to play the note till he/she is satisfied with the tone. If not, go back to the tuner’s dial mode.1.
After doing this, the problem still doesn’t end. The entire band might not be at so it is highly likely that they will still go off and we won’t hear a unison sound. In such a case, we turn to the 5 people sing scenario. All they need to do, is just Listen to Each other.
So...
If everyone in the section or band listens to each other then they will naturally balance their volume levels that will allow a nice unison to be created. Moreover, they are listening to each other and they have trained to adjust their embouchure to match the sound of the tuner, and as a result they will all be in tune resulting to a more wholesome unison sound.
Footnotes
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A tuner can either play the sound… or it can show you a “speedometer” kind-of thing that shows you whether you are on or if not, by how many cents you are off. I was referring to that “speedometer” mode as Dial mode. ↩