Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum EBVT - Ok, I'll come right out and say it

No. Basically it's like Bach-Lehmann but in BL the worst key is E major, which I don't like. In this scheme C# major is the worst key which makes more sense.

I like the temperament, but for F minor the Lehman tuning is better. I think Bach intended it to be read two ways, depending on the music you play. But I have no proof of this whatsoever.

As as side note, the "Bach organ" in Leipzig Germany (where Bach was Cantor) is tuned almost like this.

Kees

Kees,

I just want you to know that a harpsichord is coming my way later this summer, at which time I will happily try your temperament 13 (and others!). At one point, when my dad walked the earth, he built it from a kit with one of his piano students (whose dad was a harpsichord builder), and it has been in storage by a friend of mine for a number of years, now. My wife says, "No more pianos come into the house until an equal number of pianos go out of the house." I say, "It's not a piano!"

--Andy

I hear ya! Since it seems like I'm being forced into self-employment (And I do mean forced. I want to work for a shop, but with this economy....), I'm building a website, and it's a pain.

Self-employment has its advantages, B9! Every day is a faith proposition, to be sure, but guess what? Do a good job for one fussy customer, and your phone will continue to ring. All the best to you as you make your way!!!

I love being self-employed! 2014 will be 30 years, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'd like to add two cents to this thread.

1) Loren, I'm glad you like EBVT III. I've tried to tune it - albeit on a harpsichord. I followed Bill's instructions as closely I could, even e-mailed him directly about my problems, but in the end I lost a long battle to get Ab maj. and F# maj. to sound at all pleasant to me. (Subsequently, another forum member wrote to me that the G#-C M3 is difficult to keep from going too wide.) According to you,



That either means I did something incorrectly (although each step checked out with Bill's instructions and supplementary tips), or is it perhaps conceivable that your statement is a bit too absolute, because different people have have different concepts of consonance and dissonance?

2) About the partisanship Phil mentioned: Bill may see all of this as "advertisement", but for beginners who are eager to learn from everyone, this is very unfortunate. It appears that any contrary opinion or critique, clearly and systematically as it may be presented, will immediately be seen as a personal affront. (In fact I'm already worried because I've just said I found the "spicy" keys unpleasant.)

I'd say it's either the latter or perhaps a combination of both? Whether something is dissonant or not is certainly going to be subjective, so it's possible we just have different degrees of tolerance in what we call dissonant.

That said though, you are absolutely correct that Ab and F# are the standout keys; I've noticed that also and may have even mentioned it earlier in the thread (or a different thread).

Per my ear, I've not heard them sounding "wrong," though. Certainly opinions on that will come into play though from listener to listener.

The A-flat Major and F# Major M3's in the EBVT III are both 16 cents wide. That is only 2 cents wider than they are in ET. They would, of course be wider than ET in any Well Temperament. Therefore, in Mark's case, I believe that either he must somehow be making them wider than they should be or even a mere 2 cents is wider than he can tolerate.

I developed the EBVT entirely by ear, using my own sense of what would be either too wide or not wide enough for M3's for what I deemed the "contemporary ear" to be able to tolerate. Certainly, there are a very few people who are so attuned and sensitive to ET that the very slightest departure from it sounds "wrong" to them. However, given what I know about the kinds of errors that most aural tuners can make, a 2 cent error in a M3 would certainly be within the range of errors that many aural tuners would make.

I find it funny that one person says 99.9 % of tuners don't like EBVT III etc., yet, 99.9% of the people AND tuners in this thread and others, DO like it and "we" do use it.

Not much in the way of a yardstick for measurement; a few members of an obscure forum in one corner of the planet. What is the total maybe 50-100 people?

Even 5 thousand would still be too small a sample worldwide to make any significance in numbers.

Obscure? hardly...

Well, then, let's use the yardstick of people that I know personally that do use it and do like it. Including techs and pianists. The number of people that like it and do use it, is a lot more and it is catching on rather quickly.

Let's also use the yardstick of people that know of other techs that personally use or prefer EBVT III as well... That too, will be a much larger yardstick or number.

If there were 10,000 piano tuners world wide and 2,000 of them liked it, and/or used it, then that becomes 80/20. Either way, I believe, the number of users and "likes" is much, much, lower than 99.9 %.

Attend a PTG convention and ask once.... The difference may surprise you. It did me.

This is a pretty obscure forum Jerry. 300 million in the US and 35 million in Canada which makes up most of North America. And this is not counting the population of Europe which would drive the percentages down even farther….….

How many members in this place? Maybe 60-70 thousand now? What is that percentage out of the entire population of the planet? An even less percentage wants this kind of tuning?

From what I see here only a very small percentage of people know or want this kind of abstracted tuning in their life.

Attending a PTG convention and asking a question such as this is not a good representation for any kind of in- depth survey.

I wouldn’t spend the time to even ask as this issue is of little importance to me, and further, I can see it is of little importance to many, as we can all witness very few in the way of PW members participating in these continual threads about one particular way of tuning.

Have fun with your numbers. Of all the things to do and accomplish in life this is not very important.

But any way you see it is just fine with me.

If it is not very important, they why do you always dispute me in such matters as this?
It is my opinion and it is also what I see and what I have learned from other tuners as well. Where does Emmery get his 99.9 % number? There is no such number.

I am simply pointing out that the figure of 99.9 % is inaccurate. Nobody knows the numbers for sure. But, we do know that more and more people are using it.

Asking other tuners is most certainly a viable answer as to how many other tuners use it and/or, what they do use. We are the ones using or, not using it and a PTG convention where you may have around 1,000 tuners there, is an excellent place to ask this question.

I'm just an outside observor of this debate, and while it is perhaps being conducted in "an obscure forum in one corner of the planet," that forum seems pretty popular among piano enthusiasts from around the world.

Anyway, on one hand appear to be those who say, "we've tried EBVT and we really, really like it." On the other hand are those who seem to say, "EBVT is wrong and shouldn't be tried."

If it's all the same to you folks, I think I'll try it myself and make up my own mind.

Bill, your critics have gotten you another customer.

I find it very interesting that when you post an opinion it is your opinion. Then if Emmery or myself post a rebuttal opinion it is considered a dispute or badgering.

Do you see the partisanship there that Phil mentioned on the last page?

Are we not having a discussion with differing points of view?
Using your thought process and your suggestion to attend and complete an in depth survey at the PTG convention thing then I should attend a beer convention in Bavaria and say;

“Hey guys I just invented a new kind of beer. Want to try?”
Would any of the beer makers say no? I wouldn’t think so.

It is the same as going to a piano tuner convention and saying ;

"Hey I have a new temperament. Wanna try?" Of course they are going to be interested. But that does not translate into the new sequence becoming rapidly popular amongst the general public.

Your thinking is flawed there. But once again no-one is denying your enthusiasm for something you like.

You just cannot deny anyone else their opinion of the matter.

As I stated previously in the scheme of life, this is not a burning issue for most people.

>>How many members in this place? Maybe 60-70 thousand now? What is that percentage out of the entire population of the planet? An even less percentage wants this kind of tuning?
From what I see here only a very small percentage of people know or want this kind of abstracted tuning in their life.<<

Greetings,
Well, you see a very different world than I do. It is a bit strawish to start including the world population in the sample of which the temperament debate is applicable. How about just the piano playing public? Total them up if you like, but I prefer to take percentages of local users.

I can only describe what I experience, and that is the majority of my customers have left ET behind. The majority of the new customers either ask about the "difference" they have heard about my tuning or don't care about anything beyond octaves and unisons. There is an increasingly widespread use of these temperaments, and all the modern, programmable machines have gone to some effort to serve that population of tuners.
>>I wouldn’t spend the time to even ask as this issue is of little importance to me, and further, I can see it is of little importance to many, as we can all witness very few in the way of PW members participating in these continual threads about one particular way of tuning.<<

There might be a lot more lurkers than you know. Which is not surprising, since the debate between mono-temperament techs and multi-temperament ones is tedious without there being a couple of instruments to compare. It is sort of like arguing what a banana should taste like. We can talk all day and never communicate as much as 3 seconds of tasting one. I specifically used a temperament for Beethoven's "Pathetique" on our first CD that used a 21 cent tonic third in the second mvt. It is easy to find out people's perspective when that passage is as dreary as possible, and Ab in a 18th century tuning is about as dreary as it gets. I hope to get that CD up on the web at some point, (but still working getting the later one up sooner).

There are significantly more tuners and customers involved in non-ET tuning than there were 17 years ago. A lot more. We don't all use one non-ET temperament, there are several that are very valuable for their improvement without noticeably changing the pitch of any one note, and I am finding more and more professional musicians (Nashville is full of them), that really like the variety.
Regards,

Well Mr. Silverwood, all that you have stated above is your opinion. Why shouldn't Jerry be able to express his?

I wonder what your opinion is about the number of musicians as opposed to the number of piano tuners on the planet?

Now my opinion:

Musicians hear things differently than tuners. I include more than just pianists. Orchestras and choirs perform in UT. The Bach B-minor Mass would not be performed the same way if it were in B-Flat minor. It certainly would be different in C-minor.

Musicianship and musicality takes precedence over stretch and cents to a performing musician. Myself included. This pianist prefers his pianos tuned to EBTV, and no, I don't know which version. Each one of the three may be slightly different, and frankly, I don't really care about the nuts and bolts of how it was done. That is what tuners do. I play.

It has been pointed out that I should not make comments in this forum as I am not a member of the trade. However, the trade exists to perform service to musicians. If my opinion is not of interest to you, so be it. It will not cease the statement of my opinions. Please remember that the Tuner-Technician Forum is just a very small part of Piano World. Please don't live in a closed box.

I have learned a great deal in this forum. I have greater appreciation for all that is involved in the tuning and maintenance of my pianos. Having a piano rebuilt was a wonderful learning experience.

We all have much to learn from each other.

Thanks for posting your local experiences Ed. This does indeed confirm that we all have clients with differing wishes and can share those experiences here with others.

For myself I would have to state that I don’t see a lot of requests for this kind of thing locally. I do tunings occasionally for local early music societies that ask for harpsichord tunings and things of that nature. They ask for Victorian sequences for which I oblige.

I can certainly agree with one thing that has been posted by numerous people sitting on both sides of the fence. Its the fact that the average public does not have the ears to tell the difference between ET and an alternative temperament that varies from it by a few cents here and there. Heck, even techs with good ears would mistake EBVT for a sloppy ET tuning.

What this means in regards to the topic of how many prefer this temperament or that is, average people are extremely susceptable to suggestion, hype, misdirection, downplaying or ignoring the less favourable intervals ect... Unfortunately when the reality catches up with them and it suddenly comes to light that only a few people "claim" to see an improvement, only a few of the (often) same people hype it online, only a few of the same people post endless recordings ect... it begins to take the same shape and form of what all "fads" are sculpted to begin as. Perhaps Bill would be happy with "fad" status, maybe he has higher asperations than this, I don't know. The marketing approach of bombarding a single forum with endless recordings and accolades with the associated numerous non related "bump postings" from a small select group of followers bears this out.

One thing for sure IMHO is that something rock solid that has few or no hidden negative characteristics is never marketed or publically discussed in such a way where questions, comments, dissenting opinions/criticisms are met with insults, labelled as berating, vitriolic or badgerring in nature. This type of response is a dead sure giveaway that a rebuttal is lacking or has no substance.

I do respect the opinions of a few who try to reason out and validate their tastes in temperaments, don't agee with them but at least they have taken a back seat approach to letting the temperament rest on its own merits...not professing to the public that 99% of the tunings out there (ET)are inferior to the one which is a slightly modified version of it.

Jerry, my 99.9% numbers came from a sample of the Toronto and surrounding area yellow page listings of tuners which number about 45, for a population of aprox 3 million people. 25 of the techs were called by phone and 22 of them did not even hear of EBVT, (obviously they don't come to this site). The rest of the techs heard about it but found it so insignificant in their business, they never bothered to tune it. The motto of "stick with what your good at" is not a bad one to follow for business if one wants to travel on a safe path. Adding that .1% in favour of EBVT Jerry, was simply a gesture of good faith on my behalf, considerring that there might be a slight chance a tech would claim to tune it, fully knowing that the customer won't be pulling out an ETD afterwards to validate it.

Even if 1% of the tunings offered by tuners worldwide take the form of EBVT and its variants, this is a remarkable achievement. Consider the fact that there are hundreds of alternative and historic temperaments out there and not one has ever taken a foothold against ET since its come into widespread use.

And again ..... The very same Yada, Yada, Yada.

"Average people" do not consider themselves to be musicians. And certainly not proven musicians.

Emmery, you continually berate musicians. Why is this so, since you make your living from them, not from "average people?"