Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum My Piano in EBVT III

It needs a good octave tuning (as in a musically 'open' stretch) but there IS a great difference to the C arpeggio and the Db arpeggio, for the very reasons Bill stated earlier today in this thread.

Excellent detailed information regarding what to listen for up and down the register from the tempered section!

I look forward to tuning a piano in EBVTIII this weekend.

Thanks a million!

Glen

Patrick,

this statement would imply, that on a string quartet the consercative span used with these string instruments wouldn´t hold harmonically together too.
Remember that in a string quartet the violin is tuned with 3 consecutive pure fifths. The viola too, but a fifth lower. So we have already a span of four consecutive fifths in the violin and viola used in this scale. The cello is also tuned with pure fifths, but with a distance of a pure duodecime (twelfth) to the violin. The cello has a distance of a pure octave to the viola, and as the viola has a distance of a pure fifth to the violin, the average is again the twelfth.
The ET scale on pure duodecimes (twelfths) is even slightly narrower than this "conservative" violin family scale span (which is in fact a pythagorean span between the lowest cello C and the highest violin E. A slight tempering of this pythagorean third into the direction of a pure major third does happen with an ET scale based on pure duodecimes. There is nothing wrong with that harmonically and musically for me.

Regards,

Bernhard Stopper

Let me correct your statement about my approach Bill.
I am doing the duodecimes (twelfths) aurally pure. This results with slightly wider double octaves than in your method (and Alfredo´s). The stretch is necessary for the purity effect to occur when playing chords.



Although this pipe organ effect in my tuning is not occuring as prominent as in the one chord in EBVT III, it is therefore present in any key.

Bernhard Stopper

Bernhard,

I've scored countless of times for string quartet, by itself and with piano (and vocals).

I've worked with some of the best string players there are to find in this country. This as a pianist, conductor, composer, and arranger. I slipped into the tuning obsession just a few years ago (and, I love it )

With the piano, string players constantly adjust their fingered notes. Open notes are more difficult, even to the extent that a lot of players willingly temper their open string 5ths when they have to deal with us others!

But you're right in what you say. If you want to have the piano sound like a string quartet, stopperstimmung is the ultimate solution. To me, that kind of tuning - be it piano or strings - will always sound too wide.

And Bernhard,

seriously,

what pitch? Considering the string quartet... the vibrato is the ultimate solution to the pythagorean comma

If it is too wide for you ok, but for many millions of string players and their audience it is not.

Regards,

Bernhard Stopper

Yes please let us keep serious. If you can show me how to vibrate an open string, you are my hero, Patrick.

Regards,

Bernhard Stopper

FWIW:

For harmonic tones, a pure 12th is only 2.0 cents wide of theoretical ET while a pure 5ths ET would produce 12ths that are 5.3 cents wide of theoretical ET.

And on a Yamaha U1 you could expect D3 to be 2.6 cents flat when tuned as a pure 12th to A440 and would require the octaves to be tuned only slightly wide of 4:2.

Bernhard - touché Can't do that, but here's a real life example from a score i arranged a few years ago.

The CD has a single track of string quartet + vocals (the rest is jazz trio /w vocals, or jazz trio /w vocals + string quartet.)

In this song there are a lot of open 5ths. If we roughly divide it into A B A (B being the instrumental part = #5 in the score), I can clearly hear that the strings are playing less tempered when they are by themselves, so to speak.

Vargsången ('[i]The song of the wolf[/i]')

Here's the score (for reference):

Vargsången score

None is necessarily better than the other, but the pitch together with the singer is more coherent to me. Others will, without doubt consider the 'B-part' to be better.

Can't possibly be that many left... The rest of the modern world is not stretched to that extent anymore. Seriously.

Not true. Seriously.

easy answer. Indeed there was no question, I'll give you that.

To the point: I asked you earlier if you've ever encountered negative feedback in tuning the stopperstimmunng for a close-mic recording of a piano in an ensemble setting. Well, have you?

Then, if you would devote a fraction of your time to the sound clip I posted... do you hear what I hear, that is, the difference between stretch in string quartet w/singer and string quartet alone?

Not to say that you have to agree in any way at all, but do you hear it?

Never. You also asked me what jazz pianists said. (I forgot to answer another question you mentioned earlier, i apologize, i want to take the chance to do this now too) Well look on my homepage, you find a statement of a well known german jazz pianist. I also tuned recently for a duo concert with Jasper van´t Hof and Bob Malach. Mr. van´t Hof took notice of the outstanding clarity and harmony of the tuning which helps complex chords come out very defined and clear.


I answer this asap.

Bernhard Stopper

Yes, and both are well known and respected European jazz pianists. But Dauner is 70+ and van't Hof 60+. Which reminds me of Horowitz.

My close friend was one of Franz Mohr's protégés. Small world. Mohr was the best man at his wedding, just to give a picture of how close they where (are). Mohr took him under his wings when he walked in to the office at 109 W 57th street.

My friend told me that Horowitz wanted more stretch the older he got. In his last years, Mohr tuned the C8 of his piano +100 cent, that is, C#8!

I think there is something happening with age. And I really do think younger musicians in general (to whom string quartets are more or less an anecdote) prefer a more compact sound.

This again just my own thoughts. Me myself am 40 by now. I would say my desire for stretch have increased already. Still I consider equal-beating 12ths/15ths hitting the upper limit of my tolerance, and in case of my (non-classical) piano students they have an even lower acceptable maximum range.

I am in no way sure, but I predict that average stretch will shrink in the future.

The customer I tuned the EBVT III for the other day (who was not home at the time) is apparently intrigued. The e-mail I got says:

"The tuning sounds great on the piano. John said that you had a new way of doing it. Maybe you could explain."

What do I explain? That I didn't know what I was doing before? Or better yet, HOW do you explain what you are doing different to others?

Thanks,

Nick

Patrick, while I don't profess to understand this theory/tuning discussion between you and Mr. Stopper, I do understand what 'sounds' good. That recording of "Vargsången ('The song of the wolf')" is very beautiful, and stunning in it's simplicity! However they tuned their instruments is first rate, and the singer is excellent. What is the title/info of this CD?

Your theory regarding age and the loss of high-frequencies makes a lot of sense. I wonder if there have been any definitive studies as to how this would affect the way we perceive stretch in a piano?

Rontuner, sorry that disklavier is not there anymore. Perhaps you will come across one in the future.

BDB, to answer your question specifically, what does the C# Major arpeggio sound like? To tell you the truth, I had never played it that way. So, today, I did a custom tuning of a restored Gildemeester & Kroeger 9 foot concert grand. [Ron Koval, I want to send you the data on that when I get a chance]. It is owned by a local performing artist who earns her living as a vocalist and pianist. I worked the latter half of the day on tuning and regulation.

I played the usual C Major arpeggio and got the marvelous pipe organ effect which I really only expect from C Major. Yes, G, D, A and E yield it too but to me, that top note, C8 is key to the effect. Curiously enough, it is among these keys with 5ths more highly tempered than they would be in ET that yields the effect. F Major which has the same M3 beat speed as G Major sounds very clean and pure but it does not sound like a pipe organ. It sounds very nice, yes but does not have that magic effect. The M3 and M6 are not equal beating in that key.

Now, the C# Major chord is also perfectly pure and does have equal beating M3 and M6 intervals. Now, I suspect that you would think that C# Major would have this wild, violently out of tune, horribly sour sound, so intolerable that no musician could ever stand it. It would make anyone's skin crawl, lawsuits would be filed, I would get kicked out of PTG for it, etc. The fact is that (according to Jason Kanter's graph) the M3 is less than 3 cents wider than an ET M3 would be at 16.81 cents.

When played as a long arpeggio, C# Major yields a very clean and pure sound because the 5ths are pure, the octaves are pure and the M3s and M6s are equal beating but it does not sound like a pipe organ.

Debussy wrote a lot of material in D-flat. The song, "If I loved you" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Carousel" is in that key. Anything you play in C# Major or D-flat Major that was originally written in that key sounds as it should in the EBVT III. Anything written in B-flat minor also has the dark sound that it should. The aftermath of the fire scene in the new opera, Shining Brow (for which the EBVT was first conceived) comes to mind.

Regarding ultra amounts of stretch among the highest notes of the high treble, I have frequently encountered pianos which had been tuned by aging tuners who have now passed on where those last few notes were literally in the stratosphere! (More than 1/2 step sharp). I've also seen broken strings that were left broken there too. I've heard opera singers, both Tenors and Sopranos and some violinists that pushed the envelope that far too.

Occasionally, I encounter a client that just can't get enough stretch. I can always find a way to provide it and still keep the piano in tune with itself. It is quite simple, just keep referring back to the temperament octave itself. For the last few notes of the high treble, G7-C8, simply play the quadruple octave note below it, G3-C4 (but reading in the 7th octave) and you will have C8 end up at +75-80 cents.

Of course, to do that, you have to build up to it. You have to "push" the stretch the entire way, favoring the 5th over the octave, favoring the 12 over the octave, favoring the double octave and 5th over the triple octave. It works far better on a high inharmonicity piano such as a Steinway than it ever could on a low inharmonicity piano such as GP's Mason & Hamlin.

Bill,

Have you ever tried toning the "wellness" of EBVT III down even more? I know it's more homogeneous temperament than EBVT I with less range in the M3 beating rates, but I mean brining it down even more. Like 1/4 or 1/6 EBVT.

http://www.rollingball.com/A10z.htm

At what point would you loose the benifit of key color for the sake of equalness of all keys? In other words, where's the optimal or most universally accepted temperamnet?