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Having a little fun with the "Subject Line" but, anyway, I am taking a course on piano tuning, I am curious and learning new things. In my course I'm studying chapter 3 which is titled "Unison Tuning & Octave Tuning". To me these are curious procedures and it is not the course's fault that I have questions like what I am going to ask it's me being new to piano tuning.

My question(s) for now are this: (1) what is the point of tuning the entire piano to note then doing a unison, an interval and then an octave check. Wouldn't that just put things out of tune again (remember I already tuned the entire piano)? (2) if these subsequent checks are standard procedure and perhaps necessary which do you do first the unison, interval, octave tuning THEN the entire piano or just the opposite? There is this phrase I see called "Equal Temperament" which I admit I am just slightly familiar with at this point and the definition of Eq.Temp. obviously does enter the equation here and I will learn that when the time comes but for now I think if you could answer somehow my questions in #1 & 2 that would be very interesting news to me....thank you, Duane.

Sure thing Equal Temperament is when the egg comes out of the chicken equally on all sides.

And the chicken is happy too. So we have Equal Temperament all around. Who cares what the piano sounds like; maybe sounds kinda yolky without a lot of albumen.

Choosing to check the unisons first, then octaves, then intervals, the tuning can be made over easy rather than sounding poached.


Usually when tuning, most are doing octaves up or down. The intervals are used as checks as one tunes down the scale or up the scale. Adjustments and compromises are made during these checks. Unisons are tuned pure as you go or later because of muting them off with a strip or some other such method.

Then when the instrument is completed checks are done to eliminate any unwanted bumps or unevenness in the thirds sixths tenths. Like that. Often times more than one pass of tuning is required.

Don’t worry about ET for the moment. Just get used to how things move with the hammer and how things can be changed.

Some of the home study tuning courses are rather generic. The procedure you describe probably works well if the piano is just barely out of tune. With experience, a couple of passes and that'll do it. Use the exact same procedure in a 50 ct pitch raise, and you'll be all day at it. Still, one has to begin somewhere. You haven't wasted your money. Learn the ABC's of tuning procedure first. As you become more familiar with the piano itself and especially how it reacts to your every move, and the rest will come later. A mentor is a big plus in learning how to tune in all of its complexities. The PTG encourages mentorism amongst its RPT members. That is a good place to start.

Yes, don't worry about ET too much at the moment. Though it is arguably the best place to start your education temperament wise, eventually you'll learn - especially if you hang around here - that it really means Extra Terrestrial.

The question really is, why must you learn to tune ET? Until everyone finally gets on the bandwagon and starts tuning the piano, and expecting the piano to be tuned the way it is meant to be tuned, that is, the way most composers and audiences heard pianos tuned when the music was written, we will still be 50 years behind organs, harpsichords and many orchestras.

What is the resistance to tuning a proper temperament? Does it come from the ignorance of the pianists (as a pianist, this is my first guess), or is the unwillingness of tuners to change?

I give you an example. I tuned my piano to Young 1700 a few weeks ago and my piano tuner/tech/cellist friend came over a few days ago to play cello with me. After one piece, he stopped and could not play anymore. He was blown away by the tuning. He said, it made my piano sound better, more rich, more satisfying than any concert grand he had heard over his long life of tuning only ET. He asked me to teach him how to tune Young 17999 aurally, I sent him tuning instructions, and this morning he called and was so excited about having tuned his first historical temperament.

The issue people, is that, when playing in an ensemble, the cello and piano in this case, he said it was so much easier to just play the music, make music, and not have to worry about tempering every bloody note to match ET.

I will never go back to ET.

So when is it going to change?

So when are you going to change?

Historical temperaments are OK, but 99% of your future clientele will expect equal temperament. OK, OK really ... 100% of them will want ET, so that's the one to learn.

You can explore unequal esoterica later if you desire.

This is a volatile subject full of adamant proponents on both sides.

When discussing subjective topics such as ET vs. WT, that have divergent opinions, I like to focus on the facts, in order to help bring the sides closer together.

So, as I see it, here are the facts:

1) Most pianos are tuned to ET, but none of my customers have every requested it, I just do it.

2) ET makes all keys equally out of tune. WT has some keys more out of tune than others.

3) Standard WT favours the key of C (clarification please), which means F# Major has faster beating intervals.

4) While historical piano compositions favoured C Major and related keys (because of the faster beating of unrelated keys like F# Major), modern composers use all 12 keys equally and do not consider the colour that WT would create. So, a jazz ballad in F# Major would have many fast beating M3s which would sound dissonant.

So, while WT has some slower beating M3s in C Major and related keys, and can sound very nice when playing music from the era when WT was popular, and from a composer that composed with WT in mind; ET is more versatile at playing all keys equally and not favouring any one key over another.

I applaud your passion for WT. You will have many friends who share your views, and many who disagree.

A more versatile approach is to understand the music that will be played on, and the musician that will be playing, the piano, and be able to accommodate requests for ET and WT.

(In 14 years of tuning, I have only had one request for HT, and that was from a guy who thought it would help prevent cancer. I know WT would sound more pure with music from that era, but tuning a piano like that, would mean modern music would not sound right in all keys.)

Thanks Mark for your views. Having played an extensive range of repertoire from pre-Bach to late 20th century classical music and jazz, I can tell you that it is a wonderful experience to hear the differences among the keys. While I can't comment on key choices by late 20th century composers, it is apparent when playing early 20th century composers and before, that they chose the keys in which they wrote to make use of the beat rates of the various intervals. Debussy sounds fabulous in Db, which is a very shimmering key. Gershwin is amazing in the same key. All of Beethoven, every key, is incredible. Chopin has never sounded better. And Prokofiev, my god, he was a genius at using key colour. It is all there for the pianist, who has the courage to go against the lowest common denominator approach to music.

Just finished tuning my grand tonight. I use ET because I need to improve gradually about stretching octaves, tuning unisons and so on. I'm no expert but enjoy tuning my own piano even if it takes me much longer than a pro. When I feel more confident, I will try to use a mild UT. I actually use UTs since many years on my digital piano. But of course, it's another story on an acoustic because of inharmonicity. I suppose that because of the stretching needed to accommodate inharmonicity, any UT that needs to widen intervals more than something like 5 or 6 cents could easily end up sounding pretty harsh (this is not so much a problem on a digital piano since the samples' partials don't interact, etc.).

You raise a very valid point regarding stretching when using a UT. I have struggled to maintain the shape of my chosen UT while not compromising the octaves too much. This works well from A0 through about A6. The overall stretch at the bottom is much less (10-12 cents versus ~25 cents). The top also has less stretch. I found the best compromise was to use either 16:1 or 8:1 octaves for the lower two octaves, depending on which partial was beating loudest.

Could you please cite what predominating temperament Prokofiev's, Gershwin's, and Debussy's pianos were tuned with, and be specific about the source of that information?

I'm not trying to start a fight- I just want to see the facts behind your opinion.

I visited a piano store a couple times that's known for using something other than ET on the floor. On one hand, it was an interesting experience. On the other hand, I felt I couldn't evaluate the tone of the instruments fairly because I was distracted by the key "coloration" of the unequal temperament.

Start with Rollingball.com

It provides, based on Jorgensens magnum opus, "Tuning", a timeline of temperaments in use and the timelines of composers. This is just one source for temperaments in use at a given time. You will find that Rachmaninoff, Stravinski, Prokofiev, Debussy, Satie, Ravel, Gershwin, and Schoenberg all lived at a time when Victorian Well and Quasi-equal temperaments were being used. If I remember correctly, the mathematics for ET were not worked out until the second decade of the 20th century.
Hope this helps. Please, please play for a week in Young 1799. You won't regret it.

Perhaps this is the educator in me talking, but this website doesn't give enough information to glean a definitive answer on any level. The temperaments were being used primarily where and by whom? The chart is somewhat misleading because they show the composers' entire lifespans, which isn't the same as the time periods they were active as composers and musicians.

Are you referencing Young 1799 as the temperament that Debussy, Prokofiev, or Gershwin had on their piano when they were composing? I have not knowingly played on a piano in this temperament, though I have concertized on an older Broadwood in an unequal temperament once and sometimes practiced on a modern piano that was regularly tuned in an UT while I was in grad school (the techs did this to a piano or two from the inventory, for fun).

As with any history, unless you were there, what we have is published treatises of the day, anecdotal writings, knowledge of conventions of the time, technological advances, including the mathematics necessary to define those advances, and conjuecture, based on, in this case, the choice of keys for the compositions written by the composers in a given era. It is therefore, a best guess. What can be said with conviction however, is that they did not play in ET. You do not play in ET, no one plays in ET, since, on the piano, it is an impossible goal. You might be surprised to learn that newly built organs are designed around an UT, usually Werckmeister III, a temperament around Bach's time, and no one, in their right mind, attempts to tune a harpsichord or a clavichord today in ET. I know this from living in the world of HP for forty plus years. It has been an epiphany for me to discover that a piano, an instrument I have played for fifty-eight years, always tuned in some attempt at ET, can actually be tuned in a WT, and sound vastly superior.

Sorry, I forgot to answer your question. I use Young 1799, as it is a beautifully designed WT. It is usable for any repertoire. I cannot say whether or not it was used by late 19th, early 20th century composers.

Mwm

Do you know of any recordings of scales, intervals, chords, etc. that bring out the differences between the keys of a WT?

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Greetings,
Yes, you can go on to CDbaby and enter the name "Katahn". I have a pair of CD's on there that use temperaments. On the "Six Degrees" recording, which uses six tunings for six different pieces, there is a free, three-way, comparison of temperaments used for a Mozart fantasia. I have, in the past, had trouble keeping the three tracks listed as free, seems that the CDbaby people aren't used to things being given away. At least one of them should be gratis at any one time. You can hear the same piano, same pianist, same microphones, etc. in WT, ET, and MT. ( Some have even preferred the MT version, accepting the jarring dissonance as the price to be paid for pure thirds!).

Anyhow, for the commercially able, the "Pathetique" on the Beethoven recording was done on a Werckmeister style of tuning that provides a full 21 cent comma for the middle section's Ab passages. It is tempered as far as keyboards were normally tuned, and represents the extreme for use of dissonance. We thought, "It's the Pathetique, let's go for the deepest pathos we can". It is pretty tense,but does set quite a stage for the rest of the sonata.
Regards,

Thanks Bosendorff for the links.

Hello thanks for chiming in. I never heard Debussy stated something about Young. References please.

I somewhat suspect that part of the UT use is there to distract the mind on a less than ideal tuning. But I heard interesting exemples at the piano, rare, but really.

Now Et is used for "portability" if that word is OK.

It can be made interesting and it can be made dull and unfocused.

As UT certainly.

To me that's the egg, but it is just me.

Thanks Ed for your contribution to the UT movement. I actually prefer the MT version of the Mozart as well.

I find is so strange that, in an artitstic field such as music, there is such a resistance to trying anything new (or in this case old). Does everybody eat at McDonalds now, and not create interesting and different meals at home? No matter how one looks at it, ET is McDonalds - comfort in knowing that the tuner, player, listener will not be disturbed from their safe, average, experience.

From an artistic and from a mathematical perspective, ET is the Lowest Common Denominator - the smallest interval is exactly the same size for all intervals - How boring!