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Here are a few more fun Ampico Fox Trots. Still working off of the 5th tuning, and cleaning up some unisons. I brought out my Rode NT5's and tried the Omni capsule...quite a difference in sound. Enjoy! GP

1. "Sheherazade" Fox Trot, melody by Rimsky-Korsakov, played by Felix Fox on the Ampico, in EBVT III, Original Roll http://www.box.net/shared/p8q018z1ko (Avenson STO-2 Omni Mics)

2. "Beautiful Ohio Blues" 1-Step, by King, played by Shipman&Joyce on the Ampico, in EBVT III, (4 hand piano arrangement) Newly re-cut roll by Sierra Music Rolls http://www.box.net/shared/9qvhj277ce (Avenson STO-2 Omni Mics)

3. "Musical Comedy Favorites" No.2, played by Adam Carroll on the Ampico, in EBVT III, http://www.box.net/shared/ce154jp7ki (Rode NT5 Mics, Omni Capsules)

Thanks GP, I always enjoy hearing your piano. I think the instability issue is a combination of factors. The strings are still relatively new. You did have all the tension off for the Wapin bridge conversion. I suspect that the Wapin bridge itself does present some string rendering problem. There is the heat from the player system. Your tuning and hammer technique are always just barely pulling the strings up to pitch.

On the last, you need to perform a pitch raise tuning on any section that is generally flat first before you can expect that section to really hold. I am not familiar with how the RCT calculates that but from what I have heard, it can do that for each note as you go. You need to consult your manual for it.

Generally speaking, it would be calculating a pitch 25% or 2.5 cents sharp of however much the string is flat. If you just bite the bullet and do that first as you may remember seeing me do it, you will actually make it a lot easier on yourself. I have quite often commented on that here. I almost never try to tune a piano just once. I vividly remember the comment from George Defebaugh at the first convention I attended 31 years ago, "You can tune a piano a lot faster and easier [less stressfully and more successfully] twice than you can fight with it once."

If you consider that after a pitch raise tuning that is targeted at +2.5 cents above pitch, all pitches will drop approximately by that amount but you expect a flat piano to hold after just one pass, you are expecting something that just won't happen. What is, in fact happening, the piano just goes flat again is actually normal.

I have often seen the comments by tuning novices who dread having to tune a piano twice. The whole ordeal seems so daunting that doing it once is as frightening as invading the beach at Normandy, doing it twice is just imponderable. Then, they ask how they can raise a piano a 1/2 step in just one pass. It just ain't gonna happen!

If the whole piano is flat, which I suspect it may be the next time you attempt a full tuning, use the pitch raise function. Don't try to be as precise as you would in fine tuning. Just bring each string up to the pitch raise target pitch as quickly as you can and move on. Go through the whole piano and run the player system. Run rolls that will play as much of it as possible. The tuning won't be very good and the player system will knock some notes out more than others.

You can let that pitch raise tuning settle for a day if you want or just while you're taking a break from tuning. After the pitch raise tuning, you will find the piano will accept a fine tuning much better.

If during the fine tuning or anytime you tune the piano, if that treble section is the only part that is sagging significantly, run the pitch raise function in that section only, give all the notes a good pounding and then start over fine tuning. If you don't do that, the section that was flat will go flat on you while you are trying to tune it! I would not expect otherwise from it.

Thanks for the tuning tips Bill. I have never used the "overpull" in RCT or Tunelab.

Because I am not a pro-tuner, I don't relish the thought of going over the piano twice, as it already takes me 3 hours to just tune it once. LOL...but I am going to give all of this a try!

Bill gives good advice GP. It may seem like more work going over it twice but as it is now you are having to go over it again later anyway. You won't have to deal with different sections dropping below pitch if you use overpull. If you tune your friends pianos again the tunings will last longer too.

Thanks Byronje3....I tried the overpull function in Tunelab...I must have not done it correctly when setting it up, as it was telling me I had to overpull anywhere from 89-101 cents...may piano was not that flat. If I had tuned the piano with those overpull figures, I surely would have had a lot of broken strings the higher I tuned. I read the manual, but must have done something wrong.

In any case, I tuned it in the normal mode using the Iphone Tunelab. As i was tuning, I noticed that 1 section of notes in the upper treble, 4-6th octaves appx, were SHARP...the rest of the piano was not...so that tells me I was not paying attention to the Tunelab, and must have tuned several octaves incorrectly. (on the wrong octave)...so this time, I made sure I was on the right note/octave. The tuning turned out much better, as you will hear on this roll. Save for the few unisons that are out, the EBVT III really shines here..rich harmonies and contrasts, a very beautiful sound.

This "Rhapsody in Blue" was Ampico's answer to not being able to hire Gershwin to record it, as he was under contract with their competition, Duo-Art. Adam Carroll, one of their excellent pianists, arranged and played this, adding a few Fox Trot rhythms to the piece. It was a VERY popular roll, probably mainly due to that great theme.

Original Ampico Piano Roll, "Rhapsody in Blue" by Gershwin, arranged and played by Adam Carroll on the Ampico, in EBVT III http://www.box.net/shared/vqs94kf781

If you would like to see the piano in action, here is the link to my YouTube page. Enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/user/AmpicoGPM?feature=mhw5

GP - you can use either of your saved files to "see" where different sections of the piano are before tuning. RCT seems to me, to be a bit easier/more intuitive (and more accurate?) when it comes to pitch adjusting. Any piano over 5 cents out will benefit from the overpull mode. Done right, you should get many "freebies"- strings not needing touching on the second pass. (all platforms work by measuring the initial pitch of the unison and then applying varying percentages of overpull to the calculation - 10-20-30% or more by section)

I've been missing because I decided to follow Bill's advice and "just do it" and tune. There's an upright disclavier at the college I hope to record.... needed to practice on a few pianos first! (and get a video camera working) I hope to post a link soon.

Ron Koval
chicagoland

Ron, thanks for your advice. For me, the Tunelab was very easy to pre-measure the notes. In fact, it gives you the option, at least the Iphone version does, of pre-sampling every note, which I did. At the end of the measuring, a warning came up saying that there was too much of a difference between adjacent notes to use the overpull safely? I just re-measured, in over-pull, the C major chords on the piano, which is another option, and here is what I have from the Pre-measurements:

Bass Bridge

C1 +38.3
E1 -341.6
G1 -176.6
C2 -183.6
E2 -345.1

Tenor Bridge

G2 -280.8
C3 -213.5
E3 -340.9
G3 -278.6
C4 -0.6
E4 -341.4
G4 -278.4
C5 +4.9
E5 -330.5
G5 -278.4
C6 +20.0
E6 -343.0
G6 -286.0
C7 -247.5
E7 -0.2
G7 -283.3
C8 0.0

What do these figures mean? Are they in 'cents'? This is what Tunelab tells me when I clik on to tune, using the overpull with the above figures:

"Over-pull Warning"

"Some over-pull pre-measurements differ from their neighboring pre-measurements by more than 80 cents. If this is not expected, then you may want to go to Over-pull settings and "Edit pre-measurements" and delete the erroneous readings"

As an example, using the above figures, Tunelab is saying, with EBVT III selected, that the over-pull offset for A0 is 6.4 cents, A1-29.5 cents, A2-45.4, A3-44.9, A4-50, A5, 6, 7, are all at 50 cents because I set the parameter to no higher than 50 cents for the whole piano for saftey. Are these figures correct?

I began to tune AO with these settings, and I was pulling up the pitch way to high it seemed, so I stopped it and went back to the normal tuning. So I am not sure what I did wrong, if anything, or maybe these readings are correct? The piano was not that flat from A440 to begin with. Any suggestions? Can anyone who uses the Over-pull features in Tunelab, explain the figures I ended up with?

Sorry for all the questions, but I have never used the over-pull feature in either ETD. I have not explored the RCT overpull yet.

Ron, I look forward to your recordings as well. Many thanks, GP

That Sherazade sounds fantastic, both piano recording and playing. Thanks.

I just noticed a small artefact, you can hear it best at 0:25 - 0:30 but also at other places, some ticking in the background like a metronome but like someone is softly tapping on the floor. Maybe it's some mechanic thing.

BTW here you report the player is Felix Fox

On the link you report the player is Vincent Lopez

And what is EBVT III?

"If you would like to see the piano in action, here is the link to my YouTube page. Enjoy! smile http://www.youtube.com/user/AmpicoGPM?feature=mhw5"

I am often amazed when I see these. How is it possible to press so many notes at a single time? For example at 1:40 I count 12 notes pressed apparently at once, spanning almost the entire piano! These are recordings of human players, right? Is this a single human playing?

Exactly, BDB, When I took my first job as an outside tuner for a large international company in the 1960's much of my work was following a Hungarian gentleman who must have been in his 70th decade then, so my experience of him and others of his vintage is relevant to this discussion. He could tune a beautiful E.T. (everything was 4 times per year under contract, only rarely was there a twice a year contract, and the concert and studio work was, of course, daily. so everything stayed in tune very well and often there was almost nothing to do except exhibit piano tuning-like behaviour.) Occasionally, though, when he thought he could get away with it, perhaps, I would come across a piano where he had tuned an unusual temperament. It occurred too often than to be just the way the piano had drifted. From what I analysed then with my knowledge of historical temperaments, (There was some studio harpsichord work with this job) it was a modified well temperament of some sort.
I simply don't understand the current fad for maligning Braid White, since it was from his book that I learned to use major thirds and sixths in my work, first as checks and later as starting points. It was an extremely valuable and practical book when I was first learning all those years ago and there was little else available and I luckily picked up his book in an outdoor secondhand bookmarket. Let us, please put it in it's historical perspective. Must we scorn the base degrees by which we all ascended?
Anybody with a sense of adventure and a smattering of intelligence is going to depart from the ways that are generally taught sooner or later. The older tuners were thinkin' men I knew many of them who would have been in their heyday in the 1920's and '30's. They were fascinating men to drink with (and we were taken out drinking regularly by management, sometimes as a very pleasant disciplinary measure if they wanted us to be aware of something,) and they were all different as human beings so we can no more generalise about then than we can about now....

This stuff is not new, nor are the arguments but it all still fascinates me. "Plus ca change......."

The preponderance of reverse well that I have encountered for over 20 years and the number of times that I have witnessed an examinee who tried to use a 4ths & 5th temperament fail a tuning exam tell me a completely different story. How the few managed and went out to bars to talk about it were far outnumbered by the many who tried, failed and were left to obscurity. Today, You Tube reveals what the reality is. So does the 50% fail rate of all first time attempts at the PTG tuning exam.

Ah I just saw that EBVTIII is a tuning Temperament. Sorry for that question, search came up with the last page and I didn't notice

(Hm...Tuners and bars. I have to ask--were tunings usually done before going to the bar or after leaving it? Has another variable contributing to wide variations in ET tunings been revealed?)

GAAAAAAACK! Warning - something is waaaaay wrong with that. Try again. I'll look at mine again and try and offer some hints...

Ron Koval

Rxd:

Bill failed the PTG exam using a 4ths and 5ths temperament sequence. It was one he got from a correspondence course, not Dr. White's sequence. I think he is still bitter. But regardless of anything else, it is a poor workman that blames his tools.

The examples of "reverse well" in YouTube that were posted did not sound half as bad as the example "EBVT" funeral march that I said sounded terrible. I could not say for certain that any of the recordings of "EBVT" sound good, because for the most part, they are in a single key, and even just intonation will sound good in a single key.

I have not listened to most of grandpianoman's recordings because I do not like the sound of his piano. I am concerned that it needs tuning so often, however.

Ron, def a GAAAACK moment! LOL....not to worry, I did not tune my piano with those overpull figures. Robert Scott has contacted me and I am going to do the pre-measurements again.

BDB, you seem to be in the minority, but that's fine, to each his own. It really does not matter what anyone thinks, it's what I think that's most important. I love the sound of my piano now, have never heard it sound better than with this EBVT III that Bill made for me. Unless something comes along that will make my piano sound better than EBVT III, I will continue to tune with it. The one area that I DON'T like yet, are the 5th-6th octaves. As soon as I tune it, then come back to check it, it's a bit flat...but this was the case when I was tuning in ET, so it's not EBVT III's fault.

This last tuning, it stabalized a bit more than in the past, so I am hopeful. Also, I think my hammer technique is not quite there yet. Couple that with how hard the 2 machines play the piano..it's like a concert artist playing it everyday, plus the heat of the Ampico motor in the belly of the piano, and the vinyl cover that covers the whole underside/belly of the piano...all these factors probably have something to do with the tuning stabilty, especially the unsions in the treble.

Wouter79, no problem.

Mostly before, sometimes after and, regrettably, often instead.

A minority in that I am willing to buck the trend perhaps. This whole thread has come to seem like a bunch of people trying to convince themselves that this temperament is better than it is.

Who's bucking the trend??