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I know what you mean BDB! Same here. When pianos go flat in the winter months I notice this kind of curve: (this is totally unscientific - just based on my impressions.)



Sometimes A4 can be almost right on pitch but everything is sagging on either side.

I think it's each person according to his or her talents. C fork, then emphases fourths/ fifths worked quite well for me (aurally). One tech wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. His tuning were excellent (aural as well).

Most definitely; to each his/her own!

Yes, Ryan, this is exactly what I encounter over here too!

I've been tuning EBVT III aurally for the last week, and had the time to measure my stretch with my ETD (RCT). It was most interesting.

The EBVT III has a 4:2 F3-F4, and a wider A3-A4 (around 6:3). Now, the instruments I tuned where a Steinway B and a D, two Yamaha C5's, and two Yamaha U3's.

I laid down the temperament, extended it through the midrange (C3-C5), picked up the ETD and started checking 12ths with the idea of applying the same kind of stretch upwards, starting at C#5.

On the two U3's, my F3-C5 where almost dead-on pure 12ths. I extended that both up and down (except for the last octave in the bass) and ended up with very nice-sounding pianos.

As these were also my first two instruments during this week, I thought I'd try to use the same pure 12th stretch from C#5 upwards on the grands. It didn't work at all.

When I measured F3-C5 on the B, D, and the C5's, they where all narrow 12ths, the B having the most narrow 12th of them all. There was just no way of going wider without getting wobbling octaves.

I have to continue these checks, but what I found last week thought me two things: 1) the actual situation suggests the stretch much more than any theory, 2) I suspect that ETD tuning applies a tuning to a piano more than it tunes that actual piano (loosely quoting Ryan, who said something along those lines in an earlier post).

Then again, it might just be me being scared of wide-sounding tenths around C5 (that is, compared to the M3 an octave below. I do not like them that much in any temperament, unequal or not).

...oh, and one more thing: it was only on the U3's that not only did the pure 12ths work well, they also did it all through the treble. On the grands, I ended up with wide 12ths in the last octave or so, otherwise the high part would have sounded too flat.

I'd say that woodwinds have just as compelling limits in pitch on the flat side, if not more. There is a very definitive place where you just can't extend the mouthpiece any more without detatching it

Thus, when winter climate lower the pianos far below our standard pitch (A=442), I rather go for 440 or 441 except for a) concert pianos, b) pianos in woodwind classes. In both examples the players will check the piano, and if it's below 442 they will call the tuner. Now, there is even a trend here to tune slightly higher nowadays, up to 443-444, just to avoid these problems. I do that too sometimes, but never on instruments that aren't tuned at least 4 times a year - otherwise they might approach 450 in august!

In many cases even 15 minutes is too long, because that is valuable time I could be voicing, regulating or cleaning - things that matter to my client way more than pitch being within a cent. Do you retune your own piano when it's off by a cent or two?

It is common in this business for professionals to waste lots of time doing things that don't really benefit the client. As a piano player I know what things make a difference to me and that allows me to prioritize. Thus I am aware that having let-off and checking set close is more of an advantage to me than having key-dip at some exact "standard". Or that reducing friction in the front rail bushings is going to make a bigger difference than making sure the keys are perfectly level. Knowing how to use your time to the best advantage of the player is, what I believe, separates the amateurs from the pros. (maybe some day I'll get there! )


I agree with that 100 %.
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Pat:

I am confused. You are tuning UT and are evaluating the stretch by observing the 12ths. They should be somewhat haphazard, even with mindless octaves if that is what you are doing. And you tune F3-F4 as a 4:2 octave and A3-A4 as more of a 6:3 octave. This seems very odd. On these pianos there won’t be that much difference, but for an even stretch these octave types should be the same or even reversed.

Can you explain more why you are doing this??? Both my understanding and experience show that when 4:2 octaves are tuned, the 4:1 double octave will always be wide. And the higher you go the wider it will become. At some point the 12ths will also be wide. The smaller the piano, the sooner this happens. So if you want to avoid pure or wide twelfths, you need to tune octaves narrower than 4:2 as you go up, but you do the opposite? Now tuning strictly aurally octaves without testing the octave type will tend to produce octaves that are narrower than 4:2, especially on smaller pianos. Maybe what is missing is just how you are expanding the temperament upward.

Because those are the instructions and he is doing it right. The reason is that the FC 5th is pure and the CG 5th is tempered. I have tuned WTs that way for more than 20 years.

Bill:

Hopefully Pat will have a better explaination than "Bill told me to."

Jeff,

I do not tune based on the 12ths alone, just this week. It fit so good on the U3's that I thought I'd try it on a bunch of larger grands, but just as you say (and as I stated earlier) it didn't work. Too bad, it would have been a nice "one-size-fits-all" kind of idea, and easily replicated with an ETD

I agree on everything in your last paragraph above. In my stretch the 12ths goes from narrow to wide, the 4:1 is wide all along (getting wider towards the upper treble). This is what Bill does too, and what he calls mindless octaves. A balance between the 12th and the double octave.

When I tuned aurally listening to that balance I got confused by false beats and other disturbances, particularly in the 6th octave, so I started to do it like this:

1) in the 5th octave, I stretch by ear, then check to make sure the note is "in between" the double octave and the 12th, using RBI's, (3rd-17th upper interval faster, 6th-17th upper interval slower),

2) at some point the 12ths and the double octave beat equally,

3) that is when I start to tune with the upper note as a root, 3rd and 5th of an arpeggiated major triad (with the other two members of the triad struck in lower treble octaves). This indeed gives me wide 12ths.

This method arrives at an end result that is very close to what Bill does, at least judging from the two of his tunings that I've played myself. Just another way of getting there.

As for EBVT III, the F3-F4 4:2 is pretty much what C#4-F4 can stand, it can't be wider in my opinion. But if you tune A3-A4 as a 4:2 the D4-A4 sound a little too narrow, so you rise it a little. The beauty of Bill's temperament is that it really is a more of a 2-2 1/2 octave temperament, where the ear guides you towards the good sounding octave sizes. I'm sure that's the way Bill did it, only later did he put the theory down. This is also why this temperament is quite impossible to tune by ETD alone.

That said, once you have, say, F3-F5 or C3-C5 where you want it aurally, of course you can apply a balanced stretch between the 12th and the 15th - at least as much as you can do that in ET.

Why is it, by the way, that so many differ between temperament and stretch? To me, ET is about making the 5ths as pure as possibly without letting the 4ths go too wild. This is true for the whole range of the piano. In EBVT III, to me the idea is kind of the same, with a little twist... going beyond the temperament, the stretch of the 5ths are guided either by 1) a desire to avoid beating 5ths in the midrange, or 2) a desire to keep the character of the temperament 5th sound (as is the case with the pure 5ths).

Unless you use my Tunelab plugin, of course, which considers A0-C8 to be the temperament interval.

What makes Bill's temperament stand out from being just another (of several hundreds invented and fanatically promoted) unequal temperament is indeed that it is not just a recipe to divide the Pythagorean comma in a specific irregular way over the 11 fifths, but Bill's temperament is different in different registers, taking into account what's aurally significant depending on the register.

This is really only possible due to inharmonicity of the piano, which allows some leeway in the size of the octaves, so the temperament can mutate out from the temperament octave.

For example if you tune Kirnberger 3 which has CG GD DA AE narrow by 1/4 syntonic comma, you have a perfect M3 on C3. Do you really need that perfect M3 on C2 or C1? Nobody writes muddy thirds like that. You do want the perfect M3 on C4 I think, but C6? Those high partials play almost no role anymore.

So by playing around with the octaves you can design a temperament which is different in different registers. EBVT3 is just the first example, just as Werckmeister 3 was the first example of a workable circulating temperament on just one octave.

As I've said before, I think Bill in the reincarnation of Werckmeister.

Kees

Sometimes it's "Reblitz told me to," other times it's "Jim Coleman told me to," still others it's "Randy Potter told me to."

So what's wrong with "Bill told me to?" Gaining wisdom from others is a good thing; a necessary thing, actually.

Wisdom comes from understanding, not from knowledge alone.

You can't understand what you don't know.

Pat & Doel:

Thanks for explaining that the “morphing” (my term for this) of the both the stretch and temperament in expanding a UT is to preserve the qualities of both, rather than how I tend to think of it: as a way to deal with a less than ideal temperament by making it closer to ET.

What I still question is how well a stretch scheme can be evaluated by comparing the resulting 12th and 15ths on different sized pianos when this “morphing” is part of the mix. Maybe if a certain UT is desired, this is the only way to evaluate it. Kind of like calculating a “moon shot” or something.

Pat, my understanding of mindless octaves is when the 12th is narrow and the 17th is wide and beating at the same speed, with a common note on top. But what you are doing, if I understand you correctly, is allowing the 12th to become more and more pure, and then wide. Of course the 15ths will be wide all along, also. Not that this is wrong, I tune very few large pianos and starting with pure 12ths is a bit much. I prefer to stick with 4:2 octaves and continue with pure 12ths when they occur. This is pretty much a one-size-fits-all stretch for me. On small pianos, the 12ths occur immediately and I stick with them to avoid 15ths that are too wide. On larger pianos, pure 12ths occur above the treble break and I wait until then, again, to avoid 15ths that are too wide. But sometimes I will allow the 12ths to become wide if I think the piano sounds better that way in the high treble.

Exactly! I cannot know why someone does something when all that is given is instructions on what to do. (It reminds me of how Microsoft teaches...)

No, that is not the goal. The goal is to tune the piano to itself using the chosen temperament.

Then I can only go back to what I usually think: The stretch scheme is chosen as a way to deal with a less than ideal temperament by making it closer to ET. That is, to me, a piano can only be in tune with itself when tuned to ET. "All roads lead to Rome."