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

Although my tuner prefers ET himself, and often vocalizes why he prefers ET, he tuned my piano in EBVT3 after I gave him a heads up in advance letting him know that I would like to try it out.

He said that he had no problem tuning a piano that way if it was requested by a client (while letting me know why he personally prefers ET) but he made sure that he was up to speed with the EBVT3 tuning technique and the requirements (as well as using his software for it) and he seemed to handle it without a hitch.

Initially it sounded somewhat different for a few things at times but that didn't seem to last long really and I've been more pleased with it than I thought I would.

I thought that there would be some keys that would sound strained or something but I haven't found that to be the case, to my rather crude ear anyways.

I think I'll be keeping this for a while, although I may try one switch back to ET after a few EBVT3 tunings just to be sure that it isn't just the difference of a freshly tuned piano that I like instead of the actual temperament (although I'm sure that's not it because I can hear a difference).

My tech's got both the settings for my piano (ET and EBVT3) now stored in his software so I can choose them at will I guess.

But as I suspected, EBVT3 is sitting nicely with me and at this moment I plan on keeping it for a while.

I appreciate all the banter that has been going back and forth about this issue on this site since it has certainly added to my education.

I'm thankful that Bill (and others) have worked at keeping this out there and (somewhat) in the forefront and also to my tech who's a professional in every sense of the word for adapting to my whimsy.

I agree it's not practically relevant. It's however theoretically interesting that there are many equal beating intervals that are not built in the tuning scheme but that arise by themselves.

Kees

Thanks for the comments Jim. I am looking forward to speaking to your group next Spring. I should mention that I have heard many a concert tuner way back when take the same approach in the High Treble as I did in the Low Bass. Tune the note as a single octave until it is obviously too sharp and back off. Open the whole thing up with the damper pedal and flatten the note until everything seems to ring true.

That will excite the highest audible partials from the middle of the piano and you will easily and with very low stress find a place for the note that will be far beyond what any ETD calculated program would dare to offer. Certainly, it would not be for everybody but many a successful concert tuner did no more than that and was the man to call for those piano concerto tunings.

Holding a Midrange unison open with the Sostenuto pedal is also a technique I have long used. For a difficult to settle unison, it not on reduces the stress of tuning it but simply allows the strings to keep sounding so that you can more effectively control the slight beat you are trying to eliminate.

I also use the Sostenuto pedal when trying to find a reading for a string that has an unstable pitch, both during tuning exams and when creating a custom program for a piano. The same technique that affords the best unison tuning possible also helps find a pitch reading. The ultimate test when using this technique is to go back and play the interval again and determine if whatever electronic reading was determined agrees with what would be done when tuning strictly aurally. The tuning exam actually requires that but so does the finest of any tuning work.

I agree. The more that I have worked with the EBVT and the EBVT III, I have come to realize that what was originally intended only to facilitate a practical and replicable aural tuning procedure also had some very fine properties to it. Equal Beating does reduce "noise" in the piano! This is why modern music with so many complex harmonies still sounds so good in the EBVT III. The piano just sounds so much better in tune with itself, no matter what you play.

About one year ago, as I was asked to demonstrate these concepts at a chapter meeting elsewhere in my state, one technician who had long held the view that only ET could possibly be the compromise that would result in the least amount of dissonance had his mind changed about that. As with me long ago in 1989, it was not what I said that convinced him, it was what he heard!

The pianist for those Jazz recordings I did in the early 2000's said precisely the same thing to me. He knew what he had heard and he liked what he had heard. What he had heard was an approach to tuning that at the time and apparently still today, conventional wisdom would say would not work. I simply know better than that and am not about to retreat from it.

High fives, Jim! (That was an enjoyable post! Meaning that it was fun to read and inspiring! )

--Andy

Here is more recording art, for any interested listeners. It is Bach's French Suite No. 1 in D min., the whole thing, after a fashion, which is to say, an interpretation, loosely defined. It goes Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Menuette 1, Menuette 2, Gigue. Since I recorded this on the Sunday after the Wednesday it was tuned, you may notice some of the unisons out of place. Or, not. It is a Lester, after all, and I just can't seem to get it to sound like not a spinet... Not that I would want to.

https://www.box.com/s/12fc45cb0d44dc1682f5

from Johann Sebastian Bach's Little Note Book for Anna Magdalena Bach: Complete, pref. by Arnold Schering, trans. by Kurt Oppens, (New York: Kalmus, 1949). 1940 Lester spinet in EBVT III, two Sony ECM 220s through a Yamaha Audiogram USB interface, into CuBase AI4, with DC8 noise reduction and Switch file conversion.

--Andy Strong

Thanks for your comments, Sparky. I appreciate them more than you could ever know! I certainly have met with a lot of resistance over the last 20+ years. I have to admit that I have not always responded to it in a way that would actually benefit me.

However, how often have you heard such advice as "stick to what you believe in"? How many times have you heard inspirational stories about inventors whose ideas were ridiculed, mocked and defeated yet persistence allowed them to ultimately prevail with many of the things we enjoy and take for granted today?

I took the advice from one of my colleagues to "just keep serving it up". I never did back down from what I knew that I could do that was outside the box of conventional wisdom. I rubbed many people the wrong way in doing so. I have been called mentally disturbed merely because I did not see things the same way as virtually everyone else in my profession.

Yet, I have seen long the way, many of those same people warm up to the ideas I have had and ultimately embrace them. GP, who started this thread has been my greatest friend and advocate in this. He had no axe to grind. He is a professional musician but a Do-it-Yourself piano technician, the likes of which most technicians warn against.

GP's perception of what he hears could only be considered subjective. He does not know all of the ins and outs of tuning possibilities that professional piano technicians do but he does hold the very strong position of being a professional musician who knows what he likes when he hears it! The Steinway people have always gone with the perception of the artists over those of technicians and engineers and so do I.

Andy, from 75 miles away from me in Rockford, IL has also been one of my strongest advocates. A truly organic man in every sense, he could also hear the difference in what I did. He found, at first, some aspects of it that were not what he expected but later embraced them. I know of such statements by others, ranging back 20 to 30 years that have been written about in newspaper articles. People wrote about finding "inner voices" in the music. Ed Foote has often written about pianists having an "epiphany".

The latter had nothing to do with the EBVT III but with Well Temperament of one kind or another. I have also heard of people who tried some kind of Well Temperament and were initially intrigued by it but were ultimately most satisfied to return to ET. So, either way, I and all who have participated in this thread will be glad to know of what your experiences are.

I am also most gratified to know that your technician handled your request to tune the piano in the EBVT III in an outright professional manner.

I should also mention that another participant on this forum and topic, Professor Patrick Wingren (Professor of Piano Performance at his university in Finland) was the type of guy that said to himself if he wanted it done, he would have to do it himself. He is the world's most affable and likeable guy.

Not only is he that, he too is a professional musician and instructor of music in a place where pianos go horribly out of tune and there are few people at all to address that need. I offered techniques that allowed him to learn piano tuning very quickly and expertly but he certainly did not learn everything he knows from me alone.

Patrick is now an RPT in a truly amazingly short period of time, especially from someone who never had the opportunity to attend a piano technology school as I never had. To anyone who aspires to become a piano technician, I would first suggest a fine piano technology school, of course but among the very finest piano technicians I know, many of them learned what they know how to do purely out of very highly motivated interest, from wherever they could learn it.

I value Patrick's perception of how the EBVT III functions perhaps more highly than I do anyone else because he is now a performing artist, a music educator and a fully qualified piano technician. If he knew that the EBVT III and the way I stretch the octaves didn't work, he would tell me so. Yet it was he who stood along side me when I created the second tuning data record of GP's piano and literally "gave me his ear" to tune the Low Bass. What is heard in those recordings that have that very highly stretched Low Bass sound have been influenced not by my own perception so much but by a performing artist who knew what he wanted to hear!

It is also interesting to note that Roy Peters, another very highly skilled piano technician simply used the data that was supplied to him. It is safe to say that from all of his experience, it would not have been the way he would have chosen to tune the piano. So, my hat is off to him as it is to your technician in this instance that Roy did what he was asked to do.

Roy had his own reaction to it and I tried to explain to him that in the quest for a "pure" sound, it could actually be better found with some very slight impurity. There are many contradictions in piano tuning as well as other aspects of piano technology and this is one of them: The very purest sound from the piano will come from impure but equally impurely tuned and opposing intervals, whether they be slowly or rapidly beating.

Thanks to everyone lately for all of the positive comments.

Now, Andy, I am giving you very great credit for being able to maintain the tuning of your piano the best you possibly can. I enjoyed the recording, for sure! It did not sound the way many technicians on here might have wished their finest 9 foot concert grand to sound, no, but what I really like about it is that it does sound amazingly like what some kind of instrument from that period would have sounded.

I bet both Johann and Anna Magdelena would have loved it had they been able to hear it on what would have been to them a very advanced instrument!

Whatever happened to Patrick anyway Bill? I haven't seen him around here lately?

Ha-ha! Thank you, Bill! That is a very kind thought, and greatly appreciated. Two years ago, I would never have been able to play those mordents and trills (let alone that slooow Gigue) because the action was so unpredictable. Now, I have a piano I can actually work with and enjoy. So here's that great amount of credit coming right back at'cha!

Highest regards,
--Andy

Thanks for the write-up Bill. I appreciate it, and will try it. I've tuned stretch tunings, and EBVT, but it just hadn't occurred to me to mix the two. GP is a wonderful musician, and I was more than happy to use his Verituner settings to tune the piano. If that's the way he likes it, no problem. I looked at it as a learning experience. And I did learn something.

I'm here, Jer, thanks for asking! I've just had this unbelievably busy academic year with a lot of non-piano tech stuff requiring my full (and then some more) attention.

But now summer has arrived, and - what do you know - the pressure is off. I realize that I have quite some catching up to do here on PW

I will be in Seattle for the convention, will you as well?

Patrick

Not this year Patrick, sorry! Long story........ Enjoy it! Looking forward to having that beer with you and Ryan though!

Hello, ANdy, why dont you tune unisons that give you some control on tone dynamics, those unisons are so much flowing they sound almost false, make a global slippery feel. You could tighten them and get some tone in the attack, not just in the sustain. With those unisons you tune you are saturating very soon if you play a little more strong, and you have to use the sustain pedal a lot to hide the attack.
Just tune at the moment the tone speaks, not later, not sooner. Let us listen to the way you tune unisons so we can give you some advice if you wish... thanks for the record...

The overall sound is so pleasing to my ears that I had to repeat it 5 times! Is there a reverb added or is it all the piano tone and it's tuning? Maybe a couple of unisons could be tweaked, eg top G I think. Not to be too pedantic, but does your edition have an F natural the second time it is played in the right hand in the third last bar?

I have a request for all of the Suite VI as well, whenever you have time!

Ohmigosh, Chris! Thank you so much! I was craving some feedback from listeners who were listening muscially to the art! (I have yet to hear from my friends in Pianist Corner! Two days, and still no comments! I was so hoping to hear where I fell within the spectrum of "That's not Bach!" to "Oh, alright... That's Bach.") I am so glad you liked it!

Yes, I dressed it up with reverb--and targeted EQ, as well. This is a two-track rendition, in which I cleaned up the finished (edited) track with DC8 noise reduction software to get rid of a maddening 60 hz hum (sloppiness on my part, but I swear, I checked the headphones for silence before I started to record, but the 60 hz hum required some comb filtering, and once you pull one EQ thread from the tapestry, you have to smooth down the other threads that come with it...), then I copied the track and put some reverb and stereo spread in one track, while leaving the other track alone, then mixed them with volume adjustments. (For me, finished recording art is about the sound. Just as interpretation is about the music. Come to think of it, tuning, finished recording art, and interpretation are all about the music!)

As far as the tuning goes, Yes, probably so. Inlanding (Glen) who listened to the movements as they developed, also noted that a few unisons had started to fail. I will listen for the note. If you want to identify any specific others, please do. (See following post to Kamin.)

As far as pedantic goes, fire away! I am not the most accurate reader... If you don't mind, I am a little lost--which movement are you referring to?

And as to the request--I am happy to oblige, but I will have to acquire the score! Perhaps I can find it on IMSLP.

Thanks for listening!!!

--Andy

Kamin, the invitation is still open for you to fly to the Chicago airport. Andy will pick you up and take you to his home so that you can show us all how much better you can make his piano sound.

Chris--

Here is the un-adorned track:

https://www.box.com/s/36d2333f0e69b9015e56

It is pretty much what it sounds like when I sit at the Lester and play.

Kamin, strangely enough, I trust you. However, as Bill says, please make the arrangements. I would be happy to meet you at the airport and show you some Midwestern American hospitality! Failing that, the next time I tune (which will be soon!), I will listen to the note on the attack and tune to that. (EDIT: Come to think of it, I believe that is what Bill instructed me to do! )

You must know, though, that this little piano is RIDDLED with strings that beat falsely. Up AND down the scale. So unisons are mostly a compromise on many of the tri- and bi-chords. But actually, I think that is part of what I like so much about the sound of this little spinet. To my ears, the false beating works with the overall sound to the absolute advantage of the music. It is the beating and phasing, coupled with the sound of the overtones as the partials swim together, that gives the piano that mystical, shimmering depth, as well as the mysterious undulations that I like so much. I firmly believe that EBVT III fits this piano to a "T," as they say (what does that mean, anyway?--To a "t"?). Perhaps it is an acquired taste.

Still, I will try your suggestion when next I tune. Stay tuned! (Get it? That's a pun! In English... "Stay tuned!" ) )

Thanks for listening, Isaac!

--Andy

Andy,

Short answer: I like it.

Perhaps they haven't replied in the other forums or here because of the tempo that this is usually rendered. Maybe because you use copious amounts of pedal. However, let me be the first to say (uh.. that's second) that it's absolutely beautiful. I'm listening as I type. :-)

My second teacher, Margaret Richards, for whom I NEVER worked but who was such a musician, often said that Bach was like 3 or 4 old ladies sitting in a room with tea, and one would say this thing and another that thing, and the conversation would go like that, some days sunny and other days not, ladies with different personalities, and sometimes the cat shows up, that the musical lines have personality like that. You capture that spirit so well. It's apparent you have worked hard, are listening and enjoying your creation as it comes out - the essence of Bach!

I heard a Chopin scholar recently state that the genius in Bach was the ability for the music to move across platforms (playable on guitar, organ, piano, harpsichord... etc.. VOICE (Swingle Singers) ) while the music of Chopin could not leave the piano and work. The Lester is lucky to have you. I don't want to anthropomorphise the Lester because like most pianos, it probably hates it. Really, the sound of that little instrument is delightful and it's clearly responsive.

Did I say I like it?

peace.. it's late, I'm going to sleep.

Forrest