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Is it just me, or do all electronic keyboards vary drastically from ET. Every keyboard I check, doesn't matter how expensive it is, has uneven M3's, varying P12's and octaves, and just sounds horrible, IMHO.

In my course, after we get a small taste of evenly increasing M3's, I like to turn on an electronic keyboard if one is nearby, and play chromatic intervals, to show the students that the accepted opinion that electronic keyboards are "in tune" or at least ET, is false, and that only an acoustic piano has the potential to really sound in tune, from the perspective of octaves anyway. (I don't want to get into the ET is/is not in tune, etc. discussion)

Does anyone know why this is?

My theory is that a perfectly tuned ET on an electronic instrument must sound horrible; no resonance, so the intentional untuning creates a quasi resonance.

There must be some reason. Korg, and Roland, and Yamaha, wouldn't spend millions on research and development for these instruments not to spend time and money choosing a decent tuning. Do I have my rose coloured glasses on again?

Good question, Mark. I've never heard a keyboard in good ET. Invariably an interval or two will be hopelessly astray. Rather surprising considering that the so-called "exactness of electronics" is on its side. Perhaps it shouldn't be, though. Behind electronics is fallibility directing its course.

Now there's a case where there needs to be a better standard!

I have the same experience, Mark. I think it has to do with relative ignorance on the part of the engineers designing the keyboards. It's not their area of specialty.

I once had a long conversation with a Kurzweil engineer while working on a piano. He was a programmer for synthesized piano tone (in the division where they actually do these recordings). It surprised me that I ended up teaching him as much as he taught me.

Priceless! Thank you for posting this.

Thanks for the informative discusion

It's a pleasure Bob!

Mark the instruments using a sample by note should be better, but often one sampled note is used for the four next so they will have the same iH , same spectra, ect

Now if the sampled notes electronic keyboards are made in America they probably have a reverse well tuning on them.

Again something the diabolic America is trying to sell us poor Europeans

I feel the strong hand behind that

No, Mark, it is not just you. I have noticed the same thing. I have also often read that a beginning technician should use such an instrument as a model. Even Dr. William Braide-White made such a suggestion.

I have learned a lot from many great PTG mentors, to be sure: Owen Jorgensen, Jim Coleman, Sr., Virgil Smith and Franz Mohr among them (and placed in that order of importance).

Mark from South Africa chose to name names and went nuts on another thread with his own wild speculations that have nothing at all to do with my experience nor motivations but they do constitute a libelous attack. I'll let them stand, however so they may appear forever on his own record.

I never did read any of Rick Baldassin's material but I did attend a lecture where he talked of the importance of the three contiguous M3's to create a framework for the initial temperament octave. He was not the only one, of course. Bill Garlick (another great mentor), Dr. Al Sanderson and Jim Coleman, Sr. had also advocated their use.

In 2003, when I set about to finding new ways to help people pass the PTG Tuning exam, I specifically avoided ever reading any of Rick Baldassin's material because I did not want to be influenced by it in any way.

I have also never read any of our friend from Germany's material. While I attended one lecture of his, I hardly understood a word he was saying. I still have no clear idea of exactly what he does. I don't agree with the idea of an ET within a pure 12th as being optimum either, so if he uses any tone clusters at all, they are not what I do and not how I use them.

It stands to reason that if something exists, any number of people will discover it independently of each other. No one that I know of ever advocated the use of two pairs of octaves, F3-F4 and A3-A4 to prove that the initial set of Contiguous M3's is correct.

Only Jack Stebbins has found another way of doing that which I never use or have ever written about except to also recommend it and disseminate that information for those for whom it would work any better than my own idea. It does work better for some people because it involves a lower set of of M3's which can be more easily discerned.

Franz Mohr gave me a lot of inspiration which is one thing he is quite good at. But I have news for everyone: His temperaments are not strictly ET but also are not RW. He cannot give you specifics in words about what he does. He is a true artist, so his tunings vary from one piano and one circumstance to the next even though he says and what he aims for is always the same goal.

I do agree with Franz Mohr about the use of an ETD. If that is the only way a technician knows how to tune, by letting a such a device calculate the tuning and not set the pin properly, the results will not be superior. They may be adequate in many circumstances but not up to today's standards for Concert and broadcast quality tunings.

Jim Coleman, Sr. and Virgil Smith heard one of my tunings in 1992 and inquired as to what I did with the octaves. What later became known as the "Mindless Octaves" was deemed a very good idea. Jim Coleman asked me to describe what I did to Dr. Sanderson who later recalculated his tuning curve to attempt to reproduce that idea. It is still in use today.

The fact is, that we all have influenced each other. What is written on Jason Kanter's site about the EBVT is misleading. What he is talking about was not what I had been doing by ear for many years but putting it into actual writing. I had as much trouble doing that as Frans Mohr would have had. It was only after Oweb Jorgensen helped me find the exact words that the exact Temperament Sequence in writing as it has stood since 2007 was finally realized.

The others were correct in their observations, yes. They knew a lot more about electronic tuning than I did but they could only tell me that what I had come up with was not quite right. It was only Owen Jorgensen who could help me solidify the idea that I had long been able to do instinctively but only by ear. A lot like the way Franz Mohr has always tuned.

The accusation of plagiarism is a serious one! I have never copied anyone's material and used it as my own. I have, however read and studied the material of many authors and combined ideas from each to come up with new ideas of my own. The material I have published either on here or in the PTG Journal is intended solely to help other technician understand tuning better and to find ways which may work for them when other methods have failed.

Since I am a PTG member of 30 years, my goal for the last 10 years has been to help technicians, either long term professionals or beginners alike to learn the skills necessary to successfully pass the PTG Tuning Exam. I also look for and advocate ways to make piano tunings sound more musically beautiful (WT). Any other motivation that anyone may ascribe to what I do is their own imagination.

ET is so embedded in the culture that it is an automatic assumption that it will be used exclusively and without question. So much so that I don't ever remember a contract ever specifying ET.

Many instruments are not true ET. Celesta are either old Mustels at 439 unstretched and flatter than the piano or modern Japanese or German at 442 with the treble stretched unconscionably. Sharper than the piano. Nobody ever thinks to retune or even replace a celeste.

Xylophone notes are so short lived and hollow that any finnesse of pitch is not really noticed. Tubular bells are so complex in tone that their pitch is always suspect. We think we have problems with inharmonicity. Unharmonicity would be a better word.

Metal bar Instruments can vary in pitch from 440 to 444+ in the same studio. The use of tuned percussion in ensemble is a cliché in movie writing for eerie scenes and the more out of tune with themselves, the more eerie it al sounds. Have a listen next time you see a scary movie.

With all this going on, what do we do with the piano? The situation that I'm in, the duties are shared by 5-6 highly experienced tuners who are scheduled so that whoever can get wherever with least inconvenience is scheduled to tune the piano there. This means that all the concert pianos are a bit like the PTG examination piano in that they are seen by one or other of the team who each correct for drift every few hours or few days so that an optimum ET tuning is always in place by consensus. We know the piano is in tune at the best ET of any instruments in the studio.
Up there with the Hammond organ which is not quite ET because it is not possible to put a fraction of a tooth in the tone wheels but is extremely close.

Due to the nature of my lifestyle, if there is ever an intonation problem that involves the piano in a recording situation that needs immediate attention, I am the one that deals with it. The only time I had to deal with a problem that involved temperament was the the temperament wobble between F# & A#. The piano was perfectly in tune but, in the sparse context of the writing, it sounded strange to somebody in the box. As it happened, they decided to use the take that way even though I offered to retune temporarily for that particular passage.
Think, if the piano had been in WT, that is usually one of the excruciatingly wide intervals and would have been noticed by everybody and his dog, particularly his dog. If the piano was in reverse well, it might not be so noticeable and I would not have been called in and lost out on the extra fee.

Pitch is currently a bigger issue than any of this. One of our concert halls is having a festival of foreign orchestras this month and one or other of the resident orchestras is playing their regular concerts between the foreign orchestra visits. The pianos are at 442 for 6 weeks so our orchestras are having to play at 442 when a piano is Involved. Phlegmatic bunch, our musicians here, not a bit pretentious so they're flexible enough to take it in their strides.

Dear Bill,

I am so confused what you are talking about here.



This is standard practice in any 'stack of 3rds' temperament.



This comes down to splitting hairs with definitions. Due to variations in inharmonicity, ANY excellent aural equal temperament tuning will vary from being strictly equal, especially in terms of RBI's to favor the more important SBI's. So all progressions will not work out all of the time simply because of where the harmonics occur in the instruments.

Can you delineate for me what this term means that you keep using, reverse well?

Agreed with many other of your good points. If you are interested in knowing what Stopper is doing, it is solved in the thread 'Stopper's Temperament'.

Perhaps because that's the wrong question... Kindof like:

Should there be a standard flavor of ice cream? Isn't it vanilla? If not vanilla, then what flavor?

Here's one takeaway on these discussions - the little secret that doesn't often come up, but gets danced around as we discover that there is quite a range for what is accepted as ET:

To most uneducated techs and musicians (I'm talking about uneducated, inexperienced in playing/hearing a variety of temperaments) it really doesn't matter what the temperament is as long as it doesn't draw attention to itself - how different that needs to be would be a good experiment... What matters most is the quality of each unison and how the octaves relate to one another across the range of the keyboard. Virgil Smith wrote of "beatless octaves" (that were proven to be impossible by scientific standards), Bill writes about "mindless octaves" - some ETD designers and users (myself included) have spent a great deal of time to find ways to guide the machine to find a stretch that allows the piano to resonate across the octaves.

Now once we move to an educated sample - clients of those techs that offer multiple temperaments and show how to listen to the differences, then we find that there are still lots of people that either don't hear the difference, or it just doesn't matter to them. A very, very small percentage do prefer ET, but a larger percentage prefer "other"... But that "other" isn't singular, it is a range, a choice offered up to the one that is to make music with the piano.

So my question to those trying to declare a standard is:

Why are you so against choice for the consumer?

Ron Koval

I am not against choice for the consumer. But if the consumer wants a different choice, the consumer has to specify what it is and be there to approve it. Otherwise, I will assume that they accept the standard.

The last time I had anyone try to do that, they called at the last minute to get the piano tuned, then they called back saying they wanted it at another pitch, then they did not show up when I was scheduled to tune, and then they complained about the tuning when I came back to pull up a string I had replaced. I told them, fine, get somebody else to tune it the way they wanted, and went home. The next day, the production manager called me and said he did not blame me at all. I am still tuning there. The performers have never been back.

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Mr. Davis,

As one who prefers the "other" category, as illustrated by this quote by Mr. Koval, I take exception to your rather misdirected address of drivel as drivel.

"A very, very small percentage do prefer ET, but a larger percentage prefer "other"... But that "other" isn't singular, it is a range, a choice offered up to the one that is to make music with the piano."

I would accept the logic of one of the most respected tuner/technicians in a major metropolitan area, such as Chicago, as being more substantial than opinion from a "Piano Tuner & Technician" located in an undisclosed location, without accreditation or certification, the name of whose company is unsearchable and unlinked, and has a blank profile at Piano World.

Credibility does seem to be an issue.

after temperance leagues, now we have temperament league !

Honestly, it is refreshing to read all that from so far.

BTW the "best shot of those dumb Broadwood tuners in 1850 and a hair" temperament, on a fine Steinway, gave the very convincing comment "the piano is not very well tuned" .

AT the question (after rehearsal) "does it add something?

the answer was : "nope, sorry" .

Probably also a dumb pianist (they are all)

Same thing on an old pianos, : almost unsuspected. In the end helps by distracting the ear from hearing the old wire and unevenness of tone of an old soundboard.

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unecessary response deleted

Drugs?

Religion?

Psychiatric Condition?

This is too totally weird.

Neither Mr. Koval nor I referred to Mr. Mohr or other theoreticians of tuning temperaments. It was you and Mr. Bremmer who introduced them. I have great respect and regard for Mr. Bremmer, however.

I have never claimed to be a Jesuit. I have studied at, and received a degree from, a major Jesuit institution, however. Logic was part of my curriculum.

All, I knew I should never have entered the fray. On this thread and the other.

I must withdraw as I forsee no end to this controversy and there are many better and more educated than I, who I am sure will continue with it.

All of this is taking up far to much of my time and I have much more important things that need my attention.

To good acquaintances, all the best!

To not so good acquaintances, all the best!

My sincere apologies then for calling you something that you are not!