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

I like it better then equal temperament. Much better. To me it's just much more musical and makes playing more rewarding.

I was a pianist for decades before I became a tech, and from a musical standpoint, I just like the sound of a well temperament better. I like the key shadings.

It's like playing in color instead of black and white.

Anyway, I've been tuning both for a while now, but for my ear, I'll take EBVT.

I've been using it a lot lately and I agree. It seems to make the piano sparkle!

Yes it does!

I like JTTPA VI too, and that well-tempered effect you built into it, Loren, is just excellent. It seems to satisfy all my customers. Some talk of a pipe organ effect!

What is this EBVT? Is that a knockoff of JTTPA?

Sorry, had to.

may i know what is the EBVT or JTTPA VI ?

Sorry, this is classified information.

Joke.

EBVT is a temperament for piano's developed by Bill Bremmer.
JTTPA VI is some joke from another thread, it is nothing really.

Kees

I agree with you 100% Loren!!!!! I was actually an organ major in college, so I've had training in combining different tone colors as far as the organ goes. When I would have to play a piano, I felt so limited as far as tone colors. Since the first time I tuned my own personal piano in EBVT I found it was much easier to pull emotion from the piano. I love all the colors!!! Also we recently purchased a new Yamaha Grand at the church where I lead the worship. I tune it in EBVT3. This past Sunday, the pianist played an offertory that modulated through about four different keys. I'm sure the congregation could see a smile on my face as she would change keys and one could hear a distinct change in the color and personality. I could not see her music and did not know what key she was playing in, but by the "spice" of the new key could tell she was going from a few sharps or flats to many...and then back again. I might have to see if we recorded that service, might be a good example to post.

Ryan, I find F#major to be the "spiciest" (good term, btw!), followed by Ab Major. When tuned correctly, nothing is dissonant.

Ha! We sure got a lot of mileage out of that gag thread!

Finally

You tuner dudes are finally starting to hear what us pianer plunkers have heard fer years!



(Just in good fun)

Thanks Folks,

Believe me, all of these comments are very much appreciated, especially when I have had to read such negative and vitriolic comments for so many years from people who have no experience or foundation in the use of non-equal temperaments. The very idea is disturbing to many people. It couldn't work, wouldn't work and shouldn't be tried!

You should have seen the comments from an engineer who had worked for many years on an ETD that never really got off the ground as a viable device. Of course, he felt that his device was the one and only correct approach! His device read only fundamentals since partials were too variable for him to deal with. If he could just get all of those fundamentals to follow one of those smooth curves he would come up with, the piano would be tuned the best it could be, so he imagined, presumed and insisted.

When the engineer saw the actual numbers from GP's data sheet, from which GP has made so many recordings that he, as a professional musician enjoys and very much approves of, he about flipped! The engineer warned GP not to use them. When I wrote long and careful explanations to him and explained that the figures he saw came from the piano itself, not any theoretical calculations, he mocked and dismissed them as ridiculous. After GP sent him recordings of the piano tuned that way, we never heard from him again. I'll make my own assumption about that: he is still banging his head against the wall and tearing his hair out over the issue.

Helmholtz' theoretical frequencies, the Braide-White book and all of the other tuning books that had been written during the 20th Century along with Isacoff's "Temperament" and his identification of ET as the "final solution" have served to solidify the notion in most people's minds that ET is the one and only way to tune a piano and the foundation for virtually all music. It is simply not true!

During the 19th Century, as temperaments became milder and edged closer to the ET theoretical model, virtually any temperament where all tonalities were useful and accessible, they were considered to be "equal" even though by today's standards they would not be. For authors such as Braide-White and others to deliberately ignore and suppress knowledge about the many temperament ideas that actually worked and were used, in an effort to promote their ET only crusades, the tactic had a quite unintended effect. It caused people to believe that any attempt they made at ET was, in fact, ET.

Many of the technicians who participate in this forum are highly skilled and are among the elite who actually can construct ET aurally. That, I know. However, as I have said many times, my experience in helping people learn to tune and participation in tuning exams has shown me that at least half, if not a majority of professional tuners cannot really tune ET at all! Most depend upon an ETD to do that for them.

Creators of ETD's and the software also worked with ET as a model and of the four people whom I have known personally that created those devices and software, they also firmly believed in ET as the one and only correct way to tune a piano. It was only the demand from a relatively small group of people that they also included a way to tune a piano in some other way.

It has taken the long and slow process of re-introduction of non-equal temperaments to the public, those who actually play the piano and listen to the music produced by those pianos for the inherent beauty found naturally in the Cycle of Fifths to once again captivate people's attention.

Therefore, Ryan, if you do have any recordings of church services, please do post them! If not, please make an effort to make some in the future! We don't usually find many ET recordings posted here other than a few perhaps whose work has been mostly about the perfection of octave stretching techniques. Most commercially produced recordings are presumed to be ET. How would anyone's ET recording be distinguishable from another? Only finer points such as purity of unisons, voicing and regulation issues might arise.

That is the reason why, at least on this Piano Tuner-Technician Forum, we see so many postings of non-equal temperaments. With those, there is at least something to evaluate. From those that have been posted, apparently many people's minds have been changed. So, I say, keep them coming! I would like to see as many non-equal temperament postings as possible. The most revealing will be from ordinary pianists using ordinary pianos. Of course, any public performances would be great too, even though most of those may not be accessible. There are exceptions and those are the ones that would be most welcome.

Alright, I'm going to be brave here. I posted a recording of me playing a piano I tuned today at a church. It is a Baldwin Grand, I believe it is an "M" from the mid 1960s. Lots of miles on this piano, but it still has a pretty sound.

I tuned it with Tunelab (iPhone app) with 8:4 octaves in the bass and 4:2 in the treble and the offsets for EBVT 3 layered on top of the tuning curve that Tunelab calculated for that piano.

Please try not to be too harsh, I've never really had one of my tunings critiqued by other tuners, except my mentor of course. :-) It is NOT a professional recording, all I did was set my iPhone on the music rack and record.

I'm interested to know what you all think. The song is "Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross" and was in the key of "F"

http://www.hassellspianotuning.com/recordings

Yes, that is the creak of the pedal at the very end...I guess I need to fix that for them. LOL!

You seem to forget the fact that 99.9% of people who have come to accept ET as the final solution also had ears, they didn't just go on a website, read a few favourable ET pitches from what most folks see as marketing stooges, and call it "final".


This is a supposition, not fact. I have not seen any proclomation from any tuner, or read from any book that any temperament other than ET is "equal". You can't change math and physics of sound on strings.



It was not a tactic Bill. Its reality. They preferred to stay within the confines of what the maximum allowable stretch for an octave is....and 99% of tuners still follow this. Stretching an octave to get the intervals more pure is not a brainchild invention, even Pythagorus was aware of it 500 years BC. Its just nobody has had the gall to try and re-define what "acceptable" is...that is untill now.

Also, you are the only person on the internet preaching that the majority of ET tunings are reverse well. For many people like myself who were initially trained by proffesionals, the topic of reverse well was introduced very early on and we were instructed exactly how to avoid it. I am not sure why you are so naive to think that the majority of tuners are not aware of reverse well. I am not sure why you would assume that those ETD only or hybrid tuners would deliberately sabotage their temperament aurally to reverse well. The ETD's certainly are not programmed to produce it.



In many peoples view, this just simply means that you attract these types of techs around you. I guess that sucks. My experiences and other techs I talk to, disagree with your assertations. We all have experienced following up behind other techs. Your stats are highly dubious. I can say with pretty strong certainty that at least half the techs out there in North America have ETD's, and this by default means they are not tuning reverse well. If the possible other half (aural only)are all tuning reverse well, you must be in a different dimension.


Not sure what your point is Bill. I highly doubt we will have an ETD out there with a historical temperament as the default setting. This just isn't going to happen.


That is until they play a B and an f# together...then they look for music without that interval to play, or come to accept a 5th that beats more than twice as fast as a fourth does in ET.




It is also the reason why many high caliber tuners who used to frequent here, no longer do. The sites they do frequent, contain no discussions of the non ET malarky I often see here.

I have not had a single person who has listened to any of the recordings here differentiate between which ones are ET and not. Fellow techs I've talked to, have found the same thing. I have two identical pianos in my living room with one of them tuned ET and the other to EBVT3. Piano teachers, several musicians/composers and numerous music afficiandos cannot tell which ones which. They mostly feel that they are both ET but the EBVT3 one sounds poorly tuned and "somewhat strange". Its ludicrous to think lesser informed people have the capacity to differentiate on notes that are altered by fractions of a cent and pick up on it in a musical context with any real idea of whats going on.

Bill, please don't imply here that some snowball effect is happening with EBVT. All the postings and musings in this forum alone come from the same few cohorts as they originally did.

A good temperament that effectively helps convey music, stands on its own and needs no town cryers suggesting its usefullness. This is how ET got established to where it is now. The public spoke and the public validated it. If something better comes along, it should be able to find its viability on its own merits, not smoke and mirrors recordings, marketing hype from a few followers...and last but not least, ludicrous ascertations that the majority of tuners are not actually tuning ET.

Your Emmeryness,

Please go rant in some other thread. Please address your people without ears and hold a solemn service in pythagorean ritual to continue your blabbering.

Marty, pick up a tuning hammer, tune a few thousand pianos, and then come back here with your profile adjusted to reflect that which you presently don't have. Then preach to the tuners on what they should or should not be doing. My comments relate to the quotes and it is an "A" and "B" discussion....why don't you "C" your way out of it if you have nothing other than insults to add.

Your's is not a discussion. I don't need to tune a single thing to read and understand that you merely want to badger Mr. Bremmer. This thread is to appreciate EBVT and not to berate it.

It is you who should hike your way out.

Ryan, do you have a Soundcloud account? It's free, and it's an easy way to share audio. You just upload and then you can share or embed a link. Of course, you can do it the way you did this too, but some people probably won't download.

F is one of my favorite keys, and it's a really smooth key in EBVT. As for judging the tuning, don't worry; audio recordings from our cell phones make it very hard to really critique a tuning since the recordings aren't the greatest.

I ran some test chords this morning on a Kimball console I was tuning. Just a little Am-F-C-G-Dm-F-C progression with a short 1-octave broken chord at the end. Really smoothed out this instrument.

http://soundcloud.com/ldigiorgi/test-chords-in-equal-beating

And yes, you heard middle C bobble at the end. I fixed that.

I still say that 95% of the general music listening public (maybe more) don't even know what a temperament is. They hear music.

When we're called to tune their piano, they expect that the piano that sounded bad will sound good after we're done. Sometimes after it's done, they say that it's never sounded so good, etc.

Point being, our job is to make the piano sound the best it can. I think that's what matter to the customer, not some scientific explanation of why their ears should hear this over that.

All tuners personalize their tunings in some way, ET or not. Stretch techniques vary, some tune different size octaves, some slightly modify temperaments to satisfy their tastes for 5ths or 3rds, etc.

I want the piano to sound the best it can sound. Sometimes ET fits the bill, other times it doesn't. Overall though, I still like the sound of EBVT over ET.

Marty, the threads are for discussion...not for parroting blind accolades on a temperament 99.9% of tuners don't care about, or tune.

On the forums' title page directly under the Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum heading it says....

For Piano Tuner-Technicians and for posting technical questions.

Because of this forum criteria, I feel less out place here than you should be feeling Marty. I certainly feel less out of place than the same handful of non techs who come here and use up bandwidth to post countless recordings.

If the purpose of the recordings are to highlight the non ET, than I highly suspect the key choice favours the better intervals and avoids the worse ones. The less informed public should be aware that if you adjust ET in a way that favours some intervals as being more just, THERE IS A COUNTERBALANCE OF REMAINING INTERVALS THAT WILL STAND OUT WORSE COMPARATIVELY. This is why ET rules.

I don't really care if a very small amount of B.B. followers tune non-ET. They are certainly not around my area. In fact, I've tuned EBVT3 last week for a client....because the client was curious and wanted to check it out. Its not my job to dictate taste when rendering a tuning nor am I insulted if a clients taste in temperament differs from my own. EBVT and its variants sit in a file on my ETD called "user temperaments" along side of 20 or so historical temperaments that rarely get used. Now if that client points out that B and F# played together beats twice as fast as a fourth normally does in ET and really stands out, I'll just mention not to play those notes, or use ET instead...LOL