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

Neither can be "in-tune" if your standard is just intonation (just ask any string player).

Then neither an augmented chord nor a diminished seventh can be in-tune. I have always wondered what they do, or think they do. And then there is the problem of playing bitonal pieces in just temperment.

I'd tell you, but I slept through all my theory classes. Oops. Lol.

Loren, the nice thing about ET is that we dont need to use the criteria "..so for that interval...". I prefer a visual anology to the ET vs UT arguement. Dissonance is like garbage strewn on a huge otherwise pristine beach. ET has a same amount of garbage as UT, but spread out over the whole beach equally spaced far enough apart that you only see a small fragment from any one spot you stand. UT has the same amount of garbage but clumped in less piles, that are larger and more visable from anywhgere you stand.

The following photo shows a beach that has small piles of garbage all over it. Because of the perspective, the majority of it is unoticed except for the peice in the foreground. UT that has an appropriate piece of music selected for it that favours the better intervals is like this picture with the upper portion cropped out for viewing. An UT that has music played in a less favourable key will require the viewer to look at the cropped out lower portion of the photo. Except for the sand, the rest of the beach is lost in the garbage.

ET would be the equivalant of photographing this beach from a position where no highly visable garbage is close enough or large enough to be really noticed. UT followers will always have to either crop the photo (select music in appropriate keys) or find some mystical way to remove the lower portion from their sight.

If you prefer anything other than ET, you prefer a piano that sounds out-of-tune.

To presume that all music prior to the XXth century was played out of tune is the epitome of arrogance. And silliness!

In ET all intervals are equally out of tune. In WT some intervals are less out of tune and some are more out of tune.
Pick what you think sounds best.

Kees

[quote=Ed Foote] [...] I find the protestations against anything other than ET to be the behaviour akin to enraged followers of a strange religious sect.

This STUPID thread should have been over right after this post because Kees just nails it.

I would have to agree with Mr Kees quote although its general and doesn't address the severity of that out of tuneness.
Perhaps every tuner should really be called "sort of piano tuner".

Pick what you think sounds best.
Kees

I have been really busy lately and just returned from the final rehearsal for a concert that will be held Sunday night that features, in part, Baroque period instruments and Baroque music. Thankfully, there will be no modern piano in the entire concert because the Model D Steinway that the music director of that church insists upon having tuned by his favorite tuner is tuned in none other than Reverse Well! The piano was only used to provide starting pitches for rehearsal.

The pipe organ that will actually be used is at another pitch and another temperament but I could not tell exactly what temperament it was just by listening. All I know is that it is a Well Temperament. At one point in the rehearsal, when trying to refine certain elements, the music director made the statement, "What is coming from the piano and the organ are not quite the same".

What a delusional existence it would have to be to believe that ET always was, is now and forever shall be the foundation of all music! I, for one do not believe that ET ever played a part in any music of the past. I hear pitch correction technology being used in pop song recordings of today to make better what vocalists could not achieve on their own, yes. I hear electronic keyboards tuned in theoretical ET substituting for real pianos in many instances.

I also know of frozen, pre-packaged, processed "foods" being purchased by people using food stamps issued by the government. Poor people in this country are obese because of it. Much of pop music is also "obese" with pre-packaged, electronically enhanced remedies aided by the delusion of ET as a model for what is correct.

I could say a lot about what I think the history of ET actually is but I don't want to inflame things any more about that than I already have. Suffice it to say that I don't believe it was ever really practiced on a large scale until about 1990 when many technicians had become used to using ETD's to help them actually tune it. There are still many aural tuners out there in whom many people have a lot of confidence and who still tune in Reverse Well and firmly believe it to be ET and so do the people who hire them.

The author of this thread recently proclaimed that he sings in ET. That is absurd and preposterous! Nobody now or ever has sung in ET and nobody who plays any stringed or wind instrument either modern or antique ever did either.

If there ever could be any music that at all times had nothing but truly "in tune" intervals, it would surely be boring and lifeless. The temperament of a piano, whether a truly and properly executed ET or not is what provides the resonance that a piano has.

The oscillation in pitch that strings, winds and voices naturally produce when practicing good musicianship and intonation is what contributes beauty to music. I am no Baroque music expert or enthusiast, to be sure but I can tell that often, what is desired is not ET at all but Just Intonation. The desire for that purity of sound only occurs fleetingly. Nevertheless, that occasional pure sound is what contributes to musical beauty as does all of the rest of the impurity.

The resonance of a piano tuned in ET was what the late Virgil Smith taught in piano tuning for decades. He surely did believe in ET and tuned entirely by ear but he was often disappointed at the results of other aural tuners and particularly the results of ETD tunings. Nobody seemed to put the right amount of stretch in the octaves that would produce the kind of resonance that he did as his usual practice.

When I try to describe what to do to get that same kind of stretch, I get vitriolic condemnations of it and endless rantings of how it would not work, could not work and should not be tried. If I add to it that a carefully constructed Well Temperament could enhance that resonance even further, I get complete condemnation and remarks about how all the real technicians that used to participate on here have left in disgust by it.

Frankly, I don't care who comes and goes and never have either on here or any other forum. I prefer to talk about what has worked for me and the success I have made of it. Maybe I have polarized thought about temperament just as the Governor of the state of Wisconsin has done about certain political issues.

That seems to be a tradition here. It is either one way or the other. You either believe in what you are doing and stick with it, practice it, continue to serve it up or you do the best you can with whatever you may know. What I know is that ET, as a model and a goal is not worthy of pursuit. The more it is perfected, the less interesting a piano becomes.

I only need to go back to a match up between Virgil Smith and me in 1998 when, in an audience of exclusively piano technicians, the original EBVT prevailed over Virgil's best effort at ET, 4:1. In a re-match the next year in Chicago, there were virtually the same results with Virgil conceding, "I like that temperament."

It does not matter to me how many people liked what I did at either of those demonstrations, whether they understood it or not, whether any of them took it up or not. It also does not matter to me any of the negative comments on here may be. None of them have ever changed what I do nor will they ever. I'll just keep on doing what I do regardless. I will also keep noting virtually on a daily basis that what has been claimed to be ET, believed to be ET, ranted and raved about to be the only way to tune a piano, is actually a backwards version of what I do.

BTW Bill, just what kind of perfect stretch and resonance did the late Virgil Smith use on that Kawai in the Chicago tune off against Mr Colemans' ETD only tuning. It lost by a 10% margin if I remember correctly.

In ET all intervals are equally out of tune. In WT some intervals are less out of tune and some are more out of tune.
Pick what you think sounds best.

Kees