Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Listen to my piano tuned with Pure 12ths ...

Yes. Your perceptions are right. That was my point about testing and tuning plain single octaves and smaller intervals throughout the piano in the other thread.

While it is not a bad idea to use matching upper partials to tune but this can never be at the expense of the lower partials which are the most readily heard by just about everybody. This means taking greater care of the smaller intervals.

In the instance that you point out there is also a 5th present. This also has to be tuned.

This is the type of tuning that will prompt a call back. Something every tuner wants to avoid at any level of work. You can say at the call back " yes it sounds lousy because the 12th is perfectly in tune, listen...." or you can tune it where it sounds best which is making the lower partials coincide as far as possible. A call back is still a call back. What is the point in doing a tuning that has to be explained?

While your feeling that it might be an unusual inharmonicity in the wire is well founded, it is Not an untuneable situation, also the reason for checking all the smaller intervals particularly octaves, 5ths and M 3rds. Check them all the way up and down the piano even if the 10ths &17ths pan out. A fast M3rd in the killer octaves can sound a bit screamy. I have never come across bass strings in a U1 that can't be tuned. We occasionally come across a string wound in such a way that the inharmonicity is very high and upper partials so strong that ordinary voicing won't eradicate it. There is a cure for this but it is not the case here.

While you can tune that ( or any) Octave with the fifth in the middle as a cluster and employ beat cancelling but only if the fifth alone and the octave alone sound good.

So called advanced tuning has to be approached with caution if it results in any basic intervals sounding bad.

Using upper partials to tune is nothing new and it has it's place but never ever if the result sounds bad but, to be fair, in this particular instance, the upper partials were suspect also.

Having said that, the 19th can be a culprit sometimes. Also, while a tuner might get a cheap thrill out of faster and faster 10ths and17ths in that goes woth the glorious rumble of a flattened off bass. This can be extremely annoying to fine musicians and actually sound comical in a musical context to the serious listener.

I have seen small pianos where the 12ths don't line up when it is normally in tune. While I haven't seen one since I heard about people tuning purely by 12 ths. I can imagine some disastrous tunings if the smaller intervals aren't checked and favoured if they are more audible than the 12th. (and they most always are).

Strictly speaking, a 'pure' octave is not possible. Purity implies all partial in an interval matching. An octave can be 2/1, 4/2 or 6/3. A covered wire that is tuned to the 12th is not necessarily any of those, again, another reason to check the smaller intervals.

Many tuners, particularly those electronically led, decide on one type of octave and doggedly stick to it loyally. The vagaries of wound strings dictates that we can rarely do that. If you are tuning the piano as you find it and not involving yourself with tone regulation then each octave has to be tuned on a case by case basis dePending on which harmonics are most prominent in each case.

Does it make much difference to the melodic intonation? Pedantically speaking yes but the differences are so minimal that, as you observed, perhaps it's better to have the more readily heard smaller intervals sound good.

There's an ancient adage among musicians that says that "its only good when it sounds good".

Hi Allan,
Upon listening to this again, yes there is an upper-partial beating between the low Eb's. I still use this Yamaha U1 upright today, and every time I have to tune it, I don't much look forward to nearing the low bass range. You may or may not know this, but there are different partials that you can tune to way down there, and since you cannot get them all to line up at the same time, you have to make choices.

Rxd, during the time this recording was made and the reason for making it in the first place, Jeff (UnrightTooner) and I were having a discussion about tuning entirely in 12ths, and whether or not that was feasible and what would the overall stretch end up sounding like. I disregarded normal checks that I perform today (in 2013) for the sake of demonstrating that yes, it could be done, and like the thread title says "listen to the results".

Allan, I have never liked the sound of the bass in my upright either, no matter how it is tuned. It is the Achilles heel of Yamaha uprights. There are some false beats down there and they persist no matter where I choose to put them. The reasons why I keep playing and tuning this piano are: One - it's paid for (ha ha), Two - the touch is perfect, fast and light), and Three - it has a really nice treble and high treble area. When it's freshly tuned up there, it sounds as good as some nice grands I've come across!

To all, I no longer tune with this 12th method solely, but I do still use it to varying degrees in the high treble when the piano allows. Thanks for listening!
-Erich

Thanks, Erich. I understand your reasons better now. Since it is an old video, was a demonstration of something else and you no longer tune quite that way, nevertheless it is a worthwhile tuning and I hope you won't mind me using it as an example

The pure 12th produced a less stretched tuning than I had thought but still stretched more than I would. This example was inside my bounds of tolerance except for odd places.

When I first heard it, I didn't bother listening to the tunes you played.

To be entirely fair to the 12th system, this particular interval was one of a few that did show some discrepancy when you played a row of twelfths and 17ths. You might check the particular notes involved sometime and see how it does line up.

What I do not get is how the 5ths could be tuned "pure"

They could be 3:2 pure or 6:4 pure but not both.

Then it is easy to mistake before both sides (and a 6:4 5th in medium range sound really "plain" and empty, while something done "acoustically pure" is often sounding a little tempered, to me)

For that reason I am unsure it is easy to avoid tempering as a starting sequence. May be I do not understand the point.

For 12ths they have a lot of "give" and are really not precise to be used directly, unless one can play both notes together, they allow similar mistakes than octaves.

Chasing for the DNA of intervals is certainly more interesting. then we begin to listen to color and avoid "beat fighting"

In any case one may learn to recognize what is a nice sounding octave it is an octave that have some life, be it due top higher partials beating slowly, it have a nice sudden "jump" when the good fit is passed on.

Now you tune the next one and the first retracts... so being at the edge of the beat is a common way to tune octaves.

All:

Here are my general thoughts about pure 3:1 12ths tuning.

It is much more demanding than mindless octaves which rely on an inferred 4th (the difference between the 12th and the double octave). If one 4th is a little wider than another, it doesn't matter. The note being tuned is a compromise. But when pure 3:1 12ths are tuned the temperment must be a clinical ET otherwise the resulting octave will be different than its neighbors. If an octave doesn't sound right, but the M6-M17 test proves a pure 3:1 12th, then the inferred 5th is in error, PERIOD. I do not think it is possible to get the 5ths right without actually tuning the fifths.

Myself, I do not find the stretch to be excessive, especially when a descending arpeggio going to the low bass is followed by detached notes in the high treble. I think this is the strong point of a pure 3:1 12ths tuning. I have to agree that it is challenging to tune in the highest octave. On a good piano I can hear the beat to G7. On others, well it is hard to hear a beat even with octaves. What I have taken to doing is playing two-handed up-and-down chromatic arpeggios to compare the resulting octaves. On most pianos (the average being a console) it is not possible to make them sound clean regardless of what you do given false beats and general condition. But on a quality grand, this will show up any errors in the tuning.

The term "marshmallow zone" was used in discussing 12ths. The term originally applied to a discussion of hammer technique. I would rather use the term "aurally pure" in respect to tuning 12ths. It can easily be argued that any reasonable attempt at a stretched ET will result in aurally pure 12ths. When I tune 12ths, I tune clinical 3:1 12ths, not aurally pure 12ths.

When wound strings are involved, or even the lower part of some unwound tenor sections, it usually happens (again, the average being a console) that no interval or even unison can be aurally pure. Rather than trying to tune an interval the best it can be, finding the least bad tuning for the most common intervals is my goal. I do so by playing the octave along with the 12th above the note being tuned and looking for a place that is least obnoxious. I do not try to tune clinically pure 3:1 12ths when wound strings are involved. It is a jungle there, not a lab.

the "pure 12th" sound definitively too dry and cold, to me.

With occasionally a sense of stretching that embarrass my listening (between mediums and soprano for instance, coherence is lost in some musical circumstances.)

Then when tested in arpeggios I could accept way more stretch, I bet that a piano tuned with 2 bps/octave could sound acceptable if only arpeggios are played.

The "incoherence" occurs when a melodic part is supported by chords in the mediums or low mediums.

Played together it just sound too much at the edge to me. This is more perceived by an external listener than a pianist.

Also noticed, if improvising, the tendency is to go directly to minor tonalities, they sound clean, calm and pure. Major tonality are then often too active and one prefer avoid them.

the limits of stretching...