Great Nick, nice job!

Out of sheer curiosity, can you post some audio clips of a variety of pieces you play written in different keys? I am interested in the overall sonic/harmonic signature for common piano music that I know evoke a particular emotion for me and I know none of the professional recordings were made with EBVT III.

For example, Chopin's Tristesse or Revolutionary Etude, Liszt Liebestraume 3 or Hungarian Rhapsody 2, Schumann's Trauerei or Des Abends, Beethoven's Pathetique or Appassionata, Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G-min, Scriabin Etude Op 2 No 1, Brahms Intermezzo 117 1, 2, or 3?

They are all written in different keys of course, and have wonderful modulations. When you have time, can you provide some audio of music in your répertoire along those lines?

Thanks for posting a sample of your tuning...it is piquing my interest more and more.

Glen

Um, my repertoire is no longer quite so extensive, but perhaps I could play chords in all the keys to give a better idea.

Claude MONTAL 1800-1865 , the blind piano builder, wrote a book on tuning where he ranted about the tunings made for simple keys, and advocated of ET because of "modern music" (in 1836 !)

He proposed a temperament based on 3 M thirds stacked, 5ths and 4ths, and use of M chords inversions to check the "colour" or behavior.

I may be a little dumb (fried brain !) but a friend who have read the thread, and listened to the samples make same the remark that all the pieces are in the simple keys (or minor relatives)

So I made the effort to listen again, and true, the tonalities are all in the simple keys with maximum 4 alterations at the key. I did not even think to check that.

Yes Nick to me you made a very good work, I'd be curious to listen to chords in all keys, (and if you dont mind for a few scales in 10ths 17 ths, etc...

To me you extended the temperament very well, even better than on the original.

Does this help?:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xclptf_a-new-style-of-piano-tuning-iii_music

Major and Minor Chords with 10ths in the left hand, Circle of Fifths on my piano.

Appreciate your comments. Thanks,

Nick

In my posting of the Ampico Fox Trots, I forgot to include these 2:

Ampico Roll "Moonlight on the Ganges" http://www.box.net/shared/jkvy6lhilu

Ampico Roll "The Continental" 'You Kiss While Your Dancing' (first Academy Award Winning Song, 1934) 4 hand piano arrangement played by Victor Arden and Adam Carroll http://www.box.net/shared/7bpya4rlvj

Nick, to my ear, that sounds great. What I hear is that "earthy" sound I mentioned in an earlier post. There is something very 'grounded' in the sound of EBVT III that is hard to put into words.

Question, in this case, what is the advantage of your strip mute?

I have just left my temperament strip in the piano, not having tuned the unisons yet, so I can better study (hear) what I have done.

Thanks...not being a pro tuner, I was curious.

Interesting - time after time, digging into history lets us find our 'new' ideas right there



What - fried? I thought you French people just cooked everything gently, in a lot of wine? :-D

You're probably mostly right about the keys, as the majority of music naturally is written in up to 4 sharps/4 flats. There is at least one exception in this very thread, though, and that's Clair de Lune, which is pretty heavily rooted in Db flat.

Another exception would be the improvisation I made around christmas. That improvisation is literally keyless, and played that way with an intention to cycle different tonalities, with no tonal center in mind.
EBVT tryout, 2nd attempt

Now, in that improvisation, the last two chords (as I know you can hear, Isaac, but for the record) are C major and B major. My upmost octave is a little bit too stretched, but otherwise I really don't find the B major 3rd to be overly wide, and certainly not in a way that would make me hesitate to use it. On the contrary, it contrasts very nicely against the somewhat calmer C major.

Bill himself thinks EBVT III is easier to tune than ET, but it's still not to me. In ET, you go for uniform M3s, and get as close as you can. There are without doubt deviations in our everyday tuning practice, fractions of cents +/-, but that's natural, as we are all humans. The ear (of the listener as well as of the tuner) can stand quite off-target M3rds and still accept it as ET - just as long as nobody says that they deliberately want them to be uneven in a certain way... then hell breaks loose

Now, in EBVT III the margin of error is in my opinion actually smaller than in ET, because if the remote key M3's get too wide the harsh sound is going to make many an average listerner object, let alone tuners finely tuned in to the sound of ET.

These are the pitfalls I've noticed myself:

1. The F3-C4 can't be wide at all, it has to be beatless on the verge to narrow. Otherwise the Ab3-C4 gets too wide.
   
   
2. The temperament extension can't be too optimistic in the first steps up and down. Especially Eb3 and G4 should't be overly stretched, because then the Eb major chord in the mid-range gets an overly wide 3rd.
   (This is true of ET tuning as well, by the way - the Eb3/G4 relationship was one thing that used to drive me nuts during the many years I played the piano before I knew anything about tuning. Now I think I know why.)
   
   
3. The D#4 should be placed equal-beating 'between' G#3 and A#3, Watch out for the well-known tendency to favor the 5th, getting a too wide B3/D#4 M3. Better stay away from that.
   
   
4. F3-F4 has to be 4:2, not wider, otherwise the C#4/F4 gets too wide.

I suspect that many tuners trying out EBVT III make at least one of these small 'errors', play the instrument, hit that wide M3rd and dismiss the whole temperament.

Now, why this impatience with EBVT? Jeez, if I judged my first attempt at ET by the same standards, I would never have found a temperament that would sound right

Hi Nick,

great hearing the cycle of 5ths

I really like the progression into the remote keys and back. I think your 5-6 #/b keys sound just enough 'twangy' without being too harsh (I wrote in an earlier post about the four mistakes I made in the beginning, and how to watch out for them. You seem to do that naturally, in your very first try-out. I am in awe... )

There's one thing that sounds slightly out of concept, but again that might be just to me. When you raised the E4 in the last step of the EBVT III instructions, you might have slightly favored the 5th instead of placing it truly equal-beating 'between' A3 and B3.

It sounds a little busier than C major should - this is again just in my opinion. I notice that you stretch beautifully and definitely in favor of pure-sounding 5ths (and I KNEW Isaac, aka Kamin, would like that - it reminds me very much of his stretching before his CHAS experience )

The way you like to stretch might make you automatically rise the E4 just a tiny little bit too much.

Or then, I'm just too used to my own way of putting the EBVT III into play.

I just had a thought...my disklavier can transpose to any key...and with a recent LX upgrade, the disklavier can now be played through to the LX..which means any of my disklavier library can be played directly on to the M&Hamlin RBB/LX, allowing key changes.

I remember seeing a YouTube video of Earl Wild giving a master class, and he talked about how much of the classial piano repertoire is in too high a key, due to our A440....lowering it a half or whole step, closer to what the composer had intended, makes it more enjoyable.

So, if there is anything someone wants to hear in a different key, let me know. One caveat...the midi info playing from the disklavier to the LX is not quite as good as the native LX format...but for this purpose, it should not matter that much.

Patrick,

I followed Bill's instructions which were specific regarding the E in the temperament octave, in that you sharpen it slightly until the A-E 5th and the B-E 4th have the same tempering, which I interpret to mean having the same beat rate. I checked and both are beating very slowly.

I would not 'stretch' it beyond this point, because I do not have any choice in the matter while I'm still in the temperament octave. The temperament needs to be as precise as possible per the instructions given. The term 'stretch' applies once you leave the temperament octave. And there I will still strive for a very even standard from note to note. You can also gauge the accuracy of your temperament by how well you are able to tune from it, meaning beyond it.

I hope that I have not experienced some sort of 'dumb luck', and certainly my first try should not be the best I can do, so I hope to repeat this again and again in order to perfect it and fully understand it. I can't wait until I am able to make some concert recordings.

Thanks a lot for all the responses. Mark, your comments are still welcome. The acclimation to ET that some people have is still a reality. I thank you for not resorting to condescension in expressing your sentiments. If all you really like is ET, that is fine with me but in as much as you did seem to enjoy some of the benefits of a WT, you may yet discover a way of working that in to your satisfaction. There are WT's even milder than the EBVT III (although it is very mild) and also quasi ET's that seem to suit some people's desires.

Kamin, the Montal information is "old hat"; just like Rameau, he dreamed of ET but never really perfected it. It was all covered in the PTG Journal. Even if Montal, himself, somehow managed to tune a piano in what we call ET today, how many other tuners would you say read what he wrote and also tuned every piano in a perfect ET for everybody ever since? How many of them actually tuned for Chopin? Here is my estimate: None, Zip, Zero, Nada, Rien, Niente, Kein, Nul. What is your estimate? After all, how many tuners who have read the Braide-White book manage to do so? (I do know of two or three who do, or at least they say they do).

Thanks to many others, especially Nick M. and Patrick for answering questions which I have not enough time to do. Nick, I especially like your comments about the variability of aural tuning having its own validity as opposed to very rigid electronic tuning standards. The fact is, as Ron Koval aptly demonstrated long ago with some graphs that he made himself (please re-post these if you want, Ron), that Well Temperament does not have to fit into the same rigid model as ET to be valid.

Now, Jeff recently posted a comment about some ancient historical temperaments which did have rigid rules. I have seen this tactic many times. Bring up some ancient style of tuning to "prove" that one "knows" about that kind of thing but to be sure, whichever item is mentioned can surely NEVER be used to tune a modern piano for all music. Moreover, to include "meantone" in the argument shows that whoever brings up that term does not know that there is an infinite number of possibilities for a meantone temperament, including the 1/11 comma meantone which is the equivalent of ET. In ANY meantone temperament (strictly speaking), all 5ths are tempered exactly the same as one another. Is that not the definition of ET (if all 5ths are tempered narrowly by 2 cents)?

GP, I would suggest not transposing anything except for a few examples to prove that the original key signature is correct. I truly believe that all music has been composed in the correct key signature. Whatever character it has in that key signature was meant to be. Can anyone play and record the "Going Home" melody from Dvorak's 9th symphony in the correct key of D-flat in the EBVT III? GP, would you have that in your library somewhere? Nobody could ever convince me that any orchestra ever played that in strictly ET intervals. If you could find it, GP, playing (and recording) it in D-flat and then in C Major (and/or D Major) may prove something. It belongs in the key that it was written and it was conceived as having wide intervals, not narrow.

I'll get back to any more comments or questions that I can, as I can, sorry if I missed yours, it was not intentional.

Nick, I am very impressed that you have understood all concepts so well and so quickly. To me, they are all so simple and natural. Where I struggle is to convert what is so natural to the ear to the way ETDs have been constructed to tune. I personally know what to do and achieve the kind of superior results and pass them on to others (as with GP's best efforts) but I find that information difficult to pass on. Everyone who gets the information immediately wants to modify it to what they think it should be and then tells me it doesn't work.

Thanks so much for just following the very simple directions and achieving such superior results! Your octaves sound superb!

Bill you seem to forget Pleyel, and that we had fine acousticians that where exploring the world at that moment yet.

The main thing that Montal stated is that dividing the octaves in 3 thirds allow to intall the basis of a good ET.

For what I know, the "Pleyel temperament" does the same (3 thirds stacked for the first octave.) As soon as the beginning of the temperament is done that way you are sure to get to something that is at worst a quasi ET. The idea that tonality have been tuned volontarly with differnt harshnesses is all that I can get along with. Thy certainly where dreaming of it, or, as Nick (that BTW does not even know what is a 6:3 octaves, it is nice to find tuners that are not stuck in theorizing trying to reinvent the wheel and that can tune a perfectly nicely sounding ET just by listening, and if you pretend than none exists before that century it is simply not possible.

Books are books, musicians are musicians , tuners which are musicians know what they are after : a way to tune so the instrument can play in all tonalities, and that is, for a long time.

Simply tempering the M chords output is even mores precise than using only 3ds, or only 6ths or only whatever interval, to rule the tuning.

The source of that "clinically straight" tone that we can hear is a misunderstanding of the octave size theory, and tunings that are driven, by smoothing partial matches high in the spectra. Then the ear of the tuner locks on those high pitches and clean them, forgetting to tune the fundamentals, (and the attack of the tone).

Just to say that historically speaking the subject stay highly debatable. the relation between interval speed and modulation not evident, to me.

(Text selection and highlight are my own)

Bill, here I would beg to differ in all humility - and this was exactly the point I was getting at earlier.

As you probably well know, the movement starts with a slow progression of chords in the brass and woodwinds:

Db maj, G maj 6, Db maj, Bb maj, Gb maj, Eb min (5-6), Db maj.

For anyone interested, here is the score at IMSLP.

After the first pass of the "Going Home" melody, the woodwinds repeat this chord sequence, and the brass do so again at the end of the movement, which is then closed by the double basses who play a soft Db major chord, with the M3 (F3) at the top.

I have played as a violist (in one instance, principal) in a number of symphony orchestras, and have played Dvorak's 9th numerous times. The violas also carry the major third of the Db Maj and Gb maj chords quite often.

Here's my point:

A wide M3 in such a brass or woodwind chord would stand out like a very sore thumb. The brass, woodwind and string players would never play the M3 of these distant keys wide. If anything, they would play them purer, for a cleaner harmony in those monolithic chords. They would therefore, in effect, play some type of reverse-well temperament.

And this is in direct contrast with playing "Going Home" on a keyboard instrument tuned to one or other well temperament.

Yes, Bill, I do know that there are an infinite number of meantone temperaments and if you read what I wrote carefully you will see that I allowed for that. The thing is each of those meantones has a precise definition, but well temperaments do not. (Actually, I have been thinking of ways that some could...) And that was my point in my musing, not the twisted way you are referring to what I said.

Bill, your claim of persecution reminds me of the man who murdered his parents begging for mercy because he is an orphan.

Kamin, Marpurg did the same thing long before Montal or Playel. It produced a temperament that had no key color but it was not ET.

From Wikipedia: Antonín Leopold Dvořák September 8, 1841 – May 1, 1904) was a Czech composer of Romantic music, who employed the idioms of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. His works include operas, symphonic, choral and chamber music. His best-known works include his New World Symphony, the Slavonic Dances, "American" String Quartet, and Cello Concerto in B minor...In the winter and spring of 1893, while in New York, Dvořák wrote Symphony No.9, "From the New World".

The title of the very first chapter in Owen Jorgensen's book tuning is: ET was not practiced on pianos in 1885

So, however Dvorak's piano was tuned, he obviously didn't have a fit about it as he wrote his compositions.

Mockery? Ridicule? Oh, yes.

I don´t know how Jorgensen backed up this statement. In a reedition of Werckmeister´s "Musicalische Temperatur", (original 1691) by Rudolf Rasch from 1983, a quote of Rasch (p. 35):

"In the older works (1681-1691, to which "musicalische Temperatur" belongs) only unequal temperaments have been described explicitely. In the middle works (1697-1698) equal temperament has been mentioned as a possible solution, when all keys are to play an equal part in musical performance. Since this was not the case, Werckmeister prefers unequal temperament, because it favours the common, diatonic keys. In his late works, (1702-1707) Werckmeister is an unambigious propagator of equal temperament because it makes possible unlimited modulation and transposition as well as any enharmonic change of notes and intervals."

Mr. Stopper:

Thank you very, very much for posting that.

It has bothered me that the apparent evolution of ET could somehow not have been true. Just the way that string players tune shows that well temperament is not the goal.

There is this sort of conspiracy theory about how ET became predominant as a pretender to the throne. Perhaps it is actually proponents of Well Temperament that have been trying to stage a coup.

We can expect a great deal of smoke and thunder now. I hope everyone considers the source.

The unfortunate thing is that it is perfectly fine if someone prefers how a temperament sounds. History need not enter into it at all. It seems to be a justification for getting on a soap box.

If any of them know or care what a temperament is. I’ll wager that 9 out of 10 ordinary people could not tell you which temperament is which. Most just listen to music casually on the surface they do not break it down.

Nick,

the only reason I gave that feedback is that I feel (and still do, listening to the cycle of 5ths) that the last C major is wider than the G major and D major right before.

This might be due to a small inconsistency in the temperament. It might also be due to the sound recording limitation, my vivid imagination, or my (currently) clogged sinuses

If everything is ok over there, don't think about it further. Just a spontaneous comment.

I really look forward to possible concert recordings!

Jeff,

why is that unfortunate? I think it's a relief

Darn English language! (Some of us are stuck with it, you know.)

That tears it, I'm outta this thread.

I took EXTRA care to state my opinions humbly, calmly and clearly, I went to SPECIFIC detail about not wanting to criticise Bill or what he does. I explained how an orchestral composition was typically played in the orchestras of which I've been a member.

And now this flaming. It's disgusting - and a damn shame, I might add, after the kind exchange that Bill and I had via e-mail, when I tuned my parents' harpsichord in December.

But I have better things to do than act as a lightning conductor (no pun intended) for Bill's electric storms.

Bill, I wish you well with your endeavours. But PLEASE, do learn to separate the person from the issue.

well, over here I'm stuck with the minority language swedish, 94% of the country speak finnish as their first language. And THAT is a strange language, I tell you!

I see I'm not the only one who tried EBVT III and liked it:

http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/1220388/1.html

I'm sorry you were offended by the remark. It was too late for me to edit it myself but I asked a moderator to do it.

I have been a lifelong musician. I have studied strings (violin and bass), brass (trumpet, euphonium and french horn), piano, percussion and voice. I was a music major in my university studies and I continue to study as a grad student in voice and am often selected as a soloist for performances. So, I very well know what ensemble performing is all about.

Unfortunately, ensemble performing has no relation at all to keyboard tempering. I hope someone can play the orchestral reduction of the second movement of Dvorak's 9th symphony (The New World) in the EBVT III so we can all hear how Dvorak himself may have heard it as he composed.