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Oh no, did I miss something in the more than 100 pages of this thread which I have lost track of?

I'm assuming the latest recordings are of the EBVT III which I have already tried.

Every so often I make some videos for my website, and even pay a local jazz pianist to come in and perform for the recordings. Maybe Mr. Hyman would also accept the offer.

Ha....very good Nick.

All you can do is ask the fellow(Hyman) and hopefully he will be able to spare the time.
I don't know of any pianist that can resist a freshly tuned instrument whatever the mathematics of musical scale may be.

Hello Nick,

Glad to see you again! Dick Hyman is one of my favorite artists. He is a monster pianist, deserving of the very finest piano but I know for sure he has not always had that. I have a recording from the Musical Heritage Society where he performs at Chung's Chinese Restaurant on a piano with bass strings gone tubby from the grease in the air from the kitchen! The music is fabulous anyway.

I would be particularly interested to find out how he likes or dislikes the contrasts in key color that he finds in the EBVT III. Jazz typically uses a mix of keys, thereby often hiding key color contrast but depending upon the context, you can still hear it. I often tune for two local Jazz artists who also compose and have been my customers for 30 years. One has a Steinway, the other a Mason & Hamlin. They have both embraced the EBVT III and have me tune for them when the perform publicly. One had me tune for his CD made in 2002 which is on my website but all of that will soon be replaced with music recorded at GP's, including some tracks recorded by Dick Hyman for the LX system. I particularly like his interpretations of Fats Waller compositions.

I agree with you completely about unisons. You can't do better than zero beat. GP's piano is very challenging to tune and keep in tune yet he has managed to produce broadcast quality work with which I am very impressed.

Thanks Nick! My tuning expertise with these unisons has improved with time and practice thanks to Bill giving me some good tips. As Bill mentioned, my piano is very difficult to tune, and getting it to stay there is also not easy. I am still not happy with that aspect...but will just keep going at it.

Yes, that was the LX...what a great opportunity to have Dick Hyman visit you and try EBVT III in person! I hope he accepts your invitation!

Credit goes to Patrick (pppat) for his excellent mic position, and his suggestion we use 44.1/24 bit on the Korg....those 2 suggestions made for some well recorded sounds.

We sure did accomplish a lot Bill...am honored you feel that my replication of your tuning is worthy enough for your website!

Hi Bill,

We had made so many recordings those 4 days...65 to be exact, no wonder I missed these 2!

Gregg did a nice job here, and while there are some wrong notes here and there, understandable given we had only a few days to record etc, it's still great to hear how EBVT III brings out the colors and contrasts of the music.

"Carousel Waltz" http://www.box.net/shared/pa4l748p69

Chopin "Fantasie Impromtu" http://www.box.net/shared/fybdrxvnd0

(If you can download these then listen to them through headphones, the quality is much better than the box.net player, as is also the case with all the mp3 files I have posted)

Hey GPman, I am wondering (might be slightly OT here), how often do you take out your tuning hammer to touch up the tuning trying to keep it at this level?

Hi Victor,

My ears are so attuned to any out of tune unisons now, if the unison is not of 'broadcast' quality, I am there with the tuning lever....(woe is me) .......which is just about after every time I have either the LX or Ampico play the piano....it's like a concert pianist is playing every day. The middle and lower part of the piano, the unisons stay where I put them pretty much.....it's that 5th-6th octave area that I am constantly cleaning up the unisons. Those last recordings, I had just finished tuning the whole piano....and between each piece, I cleaned up just about 4-5 notes in that 5th-6th octave area.

GP, You are experiencing what a standby recording session technician goes through, only you are both the recording engineer who calls for "Tuner!" and the tuner!

Here is a link to the classic Steinway tuning file I use for virtually any Steinway grand (and many other pianos) as a basis for tuning the EBVT III. It can actually get many pianos very close to what they ought to be in the EBVT III with just a little aural verification, particularly in the wound strings. The amount of stretch both high and low is quite moderate.

It was originally done several years ago for a woman who is a cellist and who lives in the far west suburbs of Milwaukee. I am a frequent guest in her fine home which has a chamber music concert hall attached to it. She often hosts concerts of chamber music with very high caliber musicians.

Somehow, her circa 1890 restored Steinway Model D had such a perfectly and predictably smooth scale, that the tuning I did one day on her piano has worked for me ever since for any Steinway. I use it for the Steinway model D I tune for the Janesville (WI) Performing Arts center that included the concert of the Boogie Woogie artist, Michael Kasehammer, George Winston and a host of others with no changes at all to the program except that I always tune the low bass wound strings aurally.

I also use that program with no changes (except as noted) to tune the Steinway D at the Madison Technical College for all performances. In both cases, the Janesville and Madison College theaters, I rebuilt the actions of both pianos with genuine Steinway parts, even though I rarely offer my services as a rebuilder. They made me do it!

The Janesville piano has now been operating for 20 years with the action parts I installed and have carefully maintained. The Madison College piano has now served for 3 years. There has never been a negative comment in either venue about either piano but each has often elicited positive and voluntary praise from the artists.

I owe much gratitude to the training I received from both Bill Garlick RPT and Scott Jones RPT at the Steinway factory on how to really make a Steinway sound like one. All was made possible through my membership and long term RPT credentials with PTG and association with a local Steinway dealer.

Next month, I will tune for Steinway artist, Stephen Hough at a local (big) church venue where the music minister and pianist engaged me as the resident technician, solely on the basis of preference for the EBVT III. Both the previous technician and any technician from the current local Steinway dealer were turned down for the service of the newly acquired Steinway Model B because they could not tune the EBVT III.

I feel very confident that as more artists and the public become aware of how much more enhanced all music could sound from their piano, the more they will embrace the EBVT III and other alternative temperament designs.

I fondly recall after spending a day with Jerry Groot how he, a technician all too familiar with the piano to really sit down on a Saturday night and play it, did so with a gleaming smile on his face the entire time. There really is something to enjoy that lies beyond the norm of standard practice.

Any technician is encouraged to try the data on this file and report back with reactions from both the technician's and the pianist's perspectives:

http://www.box.net/shared/7ddnja0h84

Bill,

Thanks for the link, I am going to try this tuning on a S&S B I will tune in a few days.

But: In your file the values for B6 and B7 are missing, in fact the last row of the third table is missing.

Oops! The last row got edited off somehow! I will have to fix that and repost the link when I do. I will have to delete the file from my boxnet account now so that nobody else gets the file with missing information. That chart took a long time to make. In the end, it had two pages but the second one was blank. I finally succeeded in cutting off the blank page but it appears that took the last row with it when I did. It will be a pain trying to restore it. I already tried!

In the meantime, the values for B6 & B7 are:

B6: +14.0 B7: +38.0

Thanks Bill. I figured out B6: 15.5 and B7: 36.5

So I was wrong in both notes.

I'll try it.

You weren't off by much. I fixed the tuning file and the format is even better now. I was able to edit the original post so the link is there but here it is again for your convenience:

http://www.box.net/shared/7ddnja0h84

Interesting. For comparison here are the offsets as computed by my program using a sample set of Steinway D inharmonicity measurements:


Kees

Kees,

"authentic" recordings like the one you suggest have been tried many times before, but the trick is to NOT go for replication, only for simulation.

The "dead-on" recording techniques are, to me (and to a majority of sound engineers) inferior to what we are capable of "tricking" the ear into hearing utilizing the stereo standards (NOS, ORTF etc.)-

Quite many replication techniques have been proposed through the years. I have still to hear something as convincing as NOS, or ORTF.

Thanks GPM, these guide marks are remarkably simple, yet powerful. Please share them with anybody who have been mislead into believing that high quality stereo recording is set aside for a chosen few.

To recapture:

1) keep the chosen setup (in this case, NOS), and put that setup in the spot where the piano sounds good.

2) Record in a higher resolution than the final output (24 bit ~144 dB, 16 bit (CD or MP3 quality) ~96 dB. Recording at 24 bits, you can technically 'waste' almost 50 dB and still end up with a good quality recording in the final output file.)







Haha, yes - and if the piano player is moonlightning as a piano tuner and a recording engineer, the picture is complete! (Has happened to me quite a few times since I joined this forum…)

@Jake,

sorry I missed your post and didn't reply until now. Yes, I'm sure I did - I have no memory of doing otherwise, and NOS is my 'second nature' stereo setup

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for the compilation of instructions...very helpful.

Here is a fun piece, a fox trot, "I Got Rhythm" by George and Ira Gershwin, in EBVT III, taken from an Ampico roll and encoded for the LX system. I also added the video on my YouTube page. This time I tried the piano lid at half-stick, with the NOS config as well. Not sure I like it as much as the full lid.

"I Got Rhythm" http://www.youtube.com/user/AmpicoGPM#p/a/u/0/7BkXCp2x0ow

"I Got Rhythm" Stereo Recording: http://www.box.net/shared/ubkt10xg8y

GP:

Was the boxnet thing and the youtube thing recorded at the same time? So the boxnet is at half-stick?

Fun stuff!

--Andy

Depends what you want. If you really want to know "what it actually sounds like" binaural is the way to go

If you want the best sounding music you can improve upon reality somewhat. So for 99.9% of people that are recording music you are right.

For recordings showing the difference between tunings realism is the most important I think.

On as side note I've used these binaural mikes a few times when shooting videos of incredibly important historic events like my kids learning to walk and it really captures the moment in every detail aurally.

Kees

... given that you record, and reproduce it all, with your own head as a combined mic stand and target

To me these techniques have been useless for sharing any sound experiences with others, as the recordings are highly personal. But I find it a fascinating method, for sure.