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GP, thanks for posting those. Didn't Patrick also play those on the Disklavier in ET? We should all hear those too so we can hear the difference.

Byron, thanks for your comment. It was great to meet you at the convention and thanks for attending my class. I hope that information helps you to pass the exam some day.

Kees, the vibrato you hear has entirely to do with the amount of stretch used in the lowest octave. If more conventional stretch had been used, the beating you hear would have been much faster, not slower or "pure". I'm afraid also that if the piano had been tuned in 1/4 meantone, what Patrick played in that example would not have sounded very good at all. Meantone is a very highly restrictive temperament!

Furthermore, because of inharmonicity, the pure Major thirds of Meantone cannot be maintained across three or four octaves the way they can be on a pipe organ. I have tuned 1/4 comma Meantone on a piano only a handful of times but each time I ran into a dilemma when going upwards in the 6th octave and higher and in the Bass. If the M3s, M10s and M17s are all maintained as completely beatless, the octaves become narrow! The same thing happens in any temperament if all of those intervals are made equal beating. This means that even if that example had been tuned in Meantone, you would have heard beating on that last note one way or the other.

Welcome back Bill!....Yes, I forgot that we recorded Patrick playing the "Equal Temperament" version of the EBVT III diminished chords series....this was recorded and played back on my Yamaha Digital Disklavier, Model DGT2IIXG in ET. Recorded direct from the outputs of the Yamaha, no mics were used.

Byron, I think you are right on both accounts.


Diminished Chords in Equal Temperament http://www.box.net/shared/kusmk5take



EBVT III version as in the above post

1. http://www.box.net/shared/5dhsvufjge

2. http://www.box.net/shared/9gh67aqris

Bill, welcome back.

If, as you say, the pure M3s of meantone temperament cannot be maintained across three or four octaves, because of inharmonicity, does the same not hold for any temperament? It would appear to me that no matter what temperament is used (equal, unequal, equal-beating...), inharmonicity skews it towards the extremes of the piano. In fact, I would submit that it has to be skewed, because the different intervals relate to different partials, and these have different inharmonicities.

As you indicated to Kees: that last E-flat chord in Patrick's impro is influenced to a large degree by the stretch, and (what follows are my words) not so much by the temperament.

Hence my question the other day, inhowfar the "pipe organ effect" is really attributable to the choice of temperament, as opposed to the choice of stretch. We've had tons of posts about temperament, but very little "hard and fast" has been written about stretch... I, for one, would be very interested to read more!

Mark, thanks for your comments. If you read carefully what I wrote, you will see that I did say that it applies to any temperament. Some tuners insist upon making M3s, M10s and M17s all beat equally. At some point, that will lead to narrow single octaves. When I have tuned 1/4 Meantone, I had to allow for a slight beat to occur in the M17 in order to avoid a narrow octave.

I agree that the "pipe organ effect" has to do with both temperament and stretch. I seem to get the most amazing effect on small pianos with high inharmonicity and pianos such as a Steinway which are known to have higher inharmonicity. Only when I stretched out GP's Mason and Hamlin piano (known to have low inharmonicity) to the max, did I finally get somewhat the effect that I hear every day from most other pianos.

Oops, quite right, it's there for all to see... my bad.

It's been a month already? Tempus fugit. Welcome back Bill. Now things seem right again.

Here is a little Jazz Improv that Patrick did for us late in the evening, played on the M&H in EBVT III. Lot's of good bass energy towards the end, which EBVT III seems to flourish in.

WTG Patrick!

Jazz Improv http://www.box.net/shared/lfykx0qa4q

One thing I have noticed in listening to these files played by the box.net site...the files sound better if you dload them first, then listen. For some reason, there is a bit of distortion using the box.net player.

Sounds like the blues to me. Excellent work, Patrick!

Glen

The vibrato sounds very good. In no way does it sound to me like anything is out of tune. I just "know" that it must arise from beats. If you had tuned in 1/4 MT I think the improv. would have sounded great too, since of course Patrick then would have stayed within its limitations.

A hybrid tuning might be fun, tuning some region in ET-like, and another in just/MT like. There may be some "forbidden" octaves but such an instrument would be a lot of fun to improvise on.

This is common practice in Persian piano tuning as you need sometimes both Eb and Ep (about 1/4 flat) but never at the same time. So one region is tuned with the flat, the other with the 1/4 flat.

Kees

Kees,

You should know that the EBVT was developed over time entirely by listening. I actually started with a temperament from Owen Jorgensen's Handbook of Equal Beating Temperaments, the Rameau-Rousseau-Hall 18th Century Modified Meantone Temperament. By its name, you can tell that it is a composite idea.

It has a pure M3, C4-E4 and no beat rate specifications at all. Everything is arrived at by equal beating comparisons. I didn't like to have to assign a beat rate specification for the EBVT because that is always subject to error. However, 6 beats per second at F3-A3 is about as easy to get right as it could possibly be. If a metronome is set to 120, F3-A3 will beat at 3 beats per tick. One can set the metronome, get a triplet pattern going in ones mind and replicate it on the piano with sufficient accuracy.

The temperament could be tuned from a C fork with C4-E4 starting at 6 beats per second. That would be the classic way of starting a Well Temperament. Many WTs start with C4-F3 as a just 5th. My sequence simply gets you to C4 "through the side door".

Initially, I had F3-A#3 (B-flat) also as a just 4th the way many WTs do. Unfortunately, that created an overly wide A#3-D4 M3 and a F#3-A#3 M3 that was not wide enough for a WT. I had to find a way to temper the just 4th without a beat specification. Until Owen Jorgensen found an easy and obvious solution, I could only temper that interval "just a little". He found that if I simply copied the tempered sound of G3-C4, it worked perfectly.

D4 is placed equally beating between G3 and A4. That was taken from the Rameau-Rousseau-Hall (RRH) idea. It created a nice A#3-D4 M3 (once the F3-A#3 4th was tempered). From that M3, the A3-C#4 M3 is copied. That idea also came from the RRH idea.

So, you see, it was a long, slow process of finding a way to put it all into words but from 1992 onward, when I first came up with the Victorian style concept, I could always get what I wanted simply by listening and making compromises. Causing one interval to beat exactly like another is, of course, always subject to error but in aural tuning, the possibility for error is minimized. Those who have tried the sequence have sometimes found that they had to make slight compromises for it to work. I believe those compromises simply corrected slight errors in replicating equal beating intervals or making an interval that was supposed to be just a little tempered without hearing or realizing it.

The same goes for the ET via Marpurg. If one can really get all the just intervals beatless and all of the equal beating intervals equally beating, the temperament would score a perfect 100 on a tuning exam. A year ago, I managed to do that for Randy Potter on video. Immediately following that, I recorded the same procedure for PTG and I think I could have scored another 100 but I forgot under the exposure of the live camera to tune one of the final steps and that spoiled it. Unfortunately, that is what is seen on You Tube but it's all good because even having forgotten a step, the score was 95 (the scoring procedure was not shown on the video that was released).

In my class at the recent convention, I scored only an 80 on my first attempt but aurally, the temperament sounded far better than that. It was thought that I must have made some error in the reading and scoring procedure. The exam process itself takes examiner error into account. Reading and scoring isn't up to just one person, nor is the master tuning. We all can make mistakes in haste and under exposure such as a demonstration before a class. Aural verification of points would have bettered my score but that was not done. In the second attempt, my Marpurg scored an 88. After a few quick aural corrections, it was improved to a 98.

I mention all of this because as solid as the written procedure is for the EBVT and EBVT III, even I can't always replicate it perfectly by ear. If I have a well scaled piano, the calculated program often yields about as good of results as I can get with aural tuning but the mistakes it makes are never those I would make in aural tuning. Therefore, to create a program like the one I did for GP, I use my ETD to lock in the aural decisions I make as I go.

I always start with A3 at 0.0 read on the 4th partial. When I do that, F3 at 1.0 inevitably creates a 6 beat per second F3-A3 M3. I can then get A#3, C4 and F4 by direct interval on the ETD. I simply set the ETD to the proper coincident partial, play the already tuned note, stop the pattern and tune the new note to that and it creates a just interval. If F3 is 1.0, then F4 is 1.0 and that creates a perfect 4:2 octave. C4 almost always reads 2.0. E4 in the EBVT III almost always reads at -2.0. F#3 almost always ends up at -2.0 in the EBVT III as does C#4. The other notes can vary slightly from one piano to the next but after years of using my ETD to construct the EBVT and EBVT III, I have learned to anticipate the results. [I always read C3-B4 on the 4th partial and C4-B4 on the 2nd partial].

I get the octaves all by matching partials. What I have tuned in the temperament octave always registers elsewhere on the keyboard both high and low and automatically includes the inharmonicity. The 7th octave on GP's latest tuning, for example is tuned as 8:1 octaves from C7 to E7 (the notes C4 to E4 are played and the 8th partial is found by the ETD reading in octave 7. Whatever that figure is, the notes are tuned to it). F7 to B7 are tuned as 12:1 octaves (A#3 to E4 are played and F7 to B7 are tuned to their 12th partials). C8 is tuned to C4 (16th partial, I think).

I did all of this on video. A man who tunes part time but who is also a wedding videographer came to GP's house, set up lights, microphones (one for voice one for the piano) and 5 or 6 cameras at different angles. He will use his skills to edit the raw video and produce a DVD. Randy Potter will market it. I won't have anything directly to do with that but it should be available some time in the future but who knows when?

Anyway, the way GP's piano is tuned was all done by the piano itself telling me when it is in tune with itself according to the temperament idea and the octaves by direct interval. From F#4 to E4, there is an exact compromise between the octave and the 5th. From F5 to E6, there is an exact compromise between the double octave and the octave-5th (mindless octaves). From F6 to B6, the octaves are 6:1, C7 to E7 are 8:1, F7 to B7 are 12:1 and C8 is 16:1.

C3 to E3 are an exact compromise between the octave and 5th. G1 to B2 are all perfect 6:3 octaves. Only the low Bass, A0 to F#1 is tuned entirely by aural perception. It was deemed (between Patrick and I) that 6:3 octaves were too narrow. The ETD reads on the 6th partial in that area, so tuning perfect 6:3 octaves from G1 to B2 was easy to do but another direct interval match could not be done so easily. For the lowest Bass, I simply pressed the damper pedal and flattened each note from where it had been tuned as a 6:3 octave and listened for the best match with all partials sounding above. I played the octave above, octave-5th, double octave, double octave-5th and triple octave above each note and found the best aural match. That probably sent the lowest notes into the 8:4, 12:6 and 16:8 matching partials.

I encourage you to explore wherever your mind leads you.

The class participated and made some suggestions as to where to put certain notes the first time. Before the first scoring, imperfections could clearly be heard, but it still passed at around an 80. The Marpurg tuning looked easier and scored better.
I liked the way you then aurally whipped the temperament, low treble, and bass octaves into a score of 98 so quickly.

It was a fun and educational experience.

Patrick played for us a Norwegian Folk Song (Finnish)?.... on the M&H...I don't know the title...Patrick if you read this, let us know the title...it's a very nice piece!

Norwegian Folk Song (Finnish)? http://www.box.net/shared/l2553oa4ha

Patrick, nice piece! Congrats! I've read you passed your PTG exam.

Bill, welcome back.

GP, as I have understood it, Patrick lives in Finland and does speak the Finnish language but his mother tongue is Swedish. He lives in a west coastal area of Finland which is populated by Swedish migrants. They speak an older dialect of Swedish which he says many Germans find easier to understand than the modern Swedish dialect.

Patrick and I discussed how all of those Germanic languages have a common origin when we met in Las Vegas. Many words for common objects and every day verbs are similar in all of those languages. Only time and distance has caused them to evolve separately into different languages.

English shares those common roots as the tribes of Angles (from which the names England and English evolved), Saxons and Jutes migrated to the present British Isles from present day North coast Germany, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden during the 5th Century A.D.

The Anglo-Saxon tongue developed until the mid 11th Century when England was invaded and subsequently ruled by the Norman French. The result is that today, English is a composite language of roughly 2/3 Germanic origin and 1/3 French/Latin origin. Many of our common words bear a resemblance to the words of any of the Germanic languages while intellectual, abstract, legal and scientific terms are more often of French and Latin derivation.

It is interesting to note that English is therefore a closely related language to French. There are hundreds of words that are spelled identically and hundreds more that contain only slight variations and/or diacritical marks (accent marks). They are easily recognized in writing but when spoken are often mutually unintelligible because of how differently they are pronounced. Somehow, we can more easily recognize and understand words from the Germanic languages that are similar and sometimes identical to English.

Please excuse the tangent here. Patrick has become our colleague and has embraced the topic of this thread. He offers us cultural enrichment and diversity. Not only does he offer us a unique cultural perspective, he has shown repeatedly an outstanding aptitude for language learning and acceptance of our culture, highly skilled musicianship and adaptability as a musician and a very firm grasp of piano technology.

My source for the above information is from a treasured book in my personal library which I have long studied called "The Story of English" by Robert McCrum, William Cram and Robert MacNeil (the latter of the well known, McNeil-Leher Report).

The Folk melody heard in this offering is, as I recall from an ancient Swedish tradition. To me, the plaintive mood reflects what happens to the spirit during the long, dark Winters of Northern latitudes.

Enjoy the EBVT III recordings, everyone! There are many more amazing offerings to come!

Thank you Rafael. I look forward to more of your insights and contributions as well. You too, offer us unique culturally diverse insights, musicianship and a very firm grasp of piano technology.

Patrick performed far better on the two exams he passed, written and tuning than I would ever have expected. Upon review of the missed questions on the written exam, the conclusion was that he really knew the concepts but was only confused by the wording of the questions which are intended to be challenging. They are written in North American English but will often stump native speakers.

The only question which Patrick truly did not know the answer to involved what I consider to be trivia but that any North American piano technician of experience would know. As an example, "Why are hammers labeled 10 pound, 16 pound, 20 pound, etc.?" The answer would never be guessed by someone not in the business: The sheet of felt from which the hammers are made weighs that amount.

Here, we use the English measurements that are obsolete in virtually all other countries of the world. If a sheet of felt were identified by weight in any other country, it would be by a metric unit of weight. Patrick told me that it is not by weight but by density that felt is graded in other places.

My advice to Patrick was to take the written exam just to see where he stands, not expecting that he would pass it. I expected that there would be far too many concepts of which he had no knowledge or experience but he apparently knew virtually every topic!

I advised that he attend as many classes as he could which he did but not to attempt the tuning exam just yet. He had his mind made up and did it anyway. Coincidentally, I was chosen to be on his exam committee but only as the "third wheel" so to speak. I did not conduct the exam nor do any of the reading or recording of the results.

I participated in the aural verification of errors of which some were confirmed and others nullified. Even if all had been confirmed, however, Patrick would still have received superior scores in each category! As it was, his results as a completely aural tuner qualify him to train to be an examiner if he wishes to do so once he takes and passes the technical exam. (Patrick gave me express permission and encouragement to talk about his results, otherwise such comments are forbidden, even if they are laudatory).

I did operate the new standardized key striking device which is used in the Stability portion of the exam. The device is designed to remove all possibility of inconsistency in how forcefully the keys are struck. Patrick did not receive a perfect score but it was still in the superior range at 94%. This means that just two of the 24 notes tested managed to change barely over 1 cent when pounded three times with extreme force. It is rare to receive a perfect score.

Of note to you in particular, Rafael, I reviewed the Spanish version of the written exam and found it to be useless! Luckily, no one has tried to use it yet. The Examination and Test Standards Committee Chairman (ETSC)gave me his approval to find suitable colleagues to review and correct the translation.

What I found was that a cheap (or maybe "free" one from the internet) translator program had been used. While most of it was good, there were glaring misinterpretations that a low grade translator program would be expected to produce. The first question that I saw that caught my eye in English was, "What is an appropriate amount of overpull to use when raising the pitch of a structurally sound piano that is 60 cents flat?"

The botched translation was, "Qual es la cantidad apropriado de arribatracción para emplear quando subiendo el tiro de un piano estructuralmente sonido que es 60 centavos plano?"

(For those who don't know Spanish, that would have read something like this: What is the appropriate quantity of uptraction to employ when lifting the throw of a structurally noisy piano that is [always] 60 cents level?)

Rafael, we can use your knowledge and expertise in sorting out these gaffs! We also need to review a list of terms. We need terms that are general to Latin America but particularly those which are known and used in Mexico. I hope you will want to help.

The ETSC chairman also asked me to pursue a similar project in a Canadian French translation. The British often use terms that differ from those in North America and the same goes for differences between Canadian and European French. Castillian and Latin American Spanish have similar variances. It will be quite a challenge!

Hi all,

I'm sorry that I haven't been able to contribute so much for the last week or so. I'm on a family vacation in England and Belgium, and the wireless is a little bit erratic.

I like this little sound sample, because it mimics the modulation technique of the romantic composers.
1) Hit a diminished 7th chord,
2) Lower any note by a half step and you'll get a dominant 7th that will lead you to a tonic in a new key (major or minor).
3) Thus, from that one symmetrical, tonally extremely vague diminished 7th, you can easily reach four new tonal centers.

If you are aware of this modulation trick, you will hear it in the music of Brahms, Schubert, Schumann aso. It can take you from common keys to remote keys in the span of only a few chords.

I use this all the time in teaching music theory, but it gets an extended meaning when it's played in an EBVT III tuning, because the arrival upon the tonics will sound different not only in pitch, but in energy (or if you'd rather prefer: brightness and darkness) as well.

Thank you Patrick, It is yet another example of how you are able to combine your musical expertise in a technical way with piano technology.

We are all looking forward to experience the more extensive and advanced music that was recorded.

Bill,

As a general rule, I prefer to do things in their original language. For instance I speak spanish (mexican), frech (from France, not Canada, Belgium, etc.) and I can write and read in english (USA). (I barely speak in english).

So, if I were to take the PTG exams I would prefer the english version, even if it is not my mother tongue.

Anyway, I'll be glad to help with the translations. You can PM or e-mail me.

I guess Erus, who speaks a very good english and also "mexican" spanish could help us also.

Hahaha, I can see it now...44.5 Newton felt, 71.2 Newton felt, and 90.0 Newton felt. Before anything says I'm crazy...I will remind everyone that the kilogram is not a unit of weight.

O.T.

Yes, it's true. We should speak of Newtons instead of Kilograms. But to overcome this nonsense someone has invented the Kilogram-force which is the weight of a mass of one kilogram.