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"I simply cannot believe that a piano will vary by an entire semitone due to humidity. It is far more likely that the calibration of an ETD would be off"

Yikes! What ETD in use today varies by even 1/10th of that amount? Even the cheapo needle tuners don't shift by any appreciable amount. They may be set wrong from the factory, but that's another story... (tuning forks, however...)

50 cents may be on the extreme side, but 25-30 cents is common. Less in the bass, and more in the low tenor. (Another Chicagoland vote)

I've used quite a selection of machines over the years, currently the Verituner. However, that being said, I've always used the machines for one string and then set the unisons by ear. I never thought that someone would set all the strings by machine, but I recently met someone who did. Two hour tuning minimum...

Even though I trust my Verituner, on "tough" pianos I still will check the octaves going down into the tenor break. On very few instruments, I've made some adjustments. You may know some of those instruments with wound strings creeeeping up into the temperament octave...

Ron Koval

Mine came from Chicago! It's a fine old Deagan. You can't get anything half as good today. Still, I do check it against other forks I have.

I was talking to Bobby Hutcherson about Deagan the other day. He visited there many years ago. He said that the guy who tuned the tone bars for vibraphones. He worked in a basement room three stories underground. After getting the bar to pitch, he would work on the harmonics. Each bar would take many days to tune. All done by ear, of course, since the tuner was blind.

To comment on the many thoughts being brought up in this thread:

I've been tuning for 35 years and tuned for over 20 of them entirely by ear. When I first got my Accu-Tuner II (which I am still using) in 1991, I found it to be terribly cumbersome. I kept thinking to myself that I could do it "faster, better and cheaper" by ear and for about two years, that was true.

Eventually, I did learn to use it to my advantage and although it does help get an ordinary tuning on an ordinary piano done more quickly, I still consider the main benefit to be the reduction of overall stress.

Tuning qualities: Not all pianos are created equally and so the attention paid to each one depending on the circumstances can't be expected to be the same either. I normally tune and service 4 pianos a day and I think many people who are professionals do too. However, there are many factors: extended service on any given instrument, long distances between customers, weather, amount of demand during peak or slow season.

Recently, I tuned 10 pianos in one day for a solo & ensemble event at a high school. I started at 9 am and was done just before 5 PM and took about 45 minutes for lunch. They were all on the high school auditorium stage and the stage hands opened them up and put them back together for me. I showed them how to do minor repairs and adjustments while I kept hammering away. The following day, I tuned 4 more and took the boys out to lunch and took off early on that Friday and for the rest of the weekend. It was hard, yes but the Accu-Tuner, ear plugs and stopping occasionally to stretch and massage my arm made it possible and tolerable. I wouldn't want to do that very often.

I may also on another given day, spend the entire day preparing a piano for a concert. Even if all I have to do is tuning (which is rarely the case), I could still spend 8 hours getting a tuning as close to perfection as I know it can be and also be stable. When I use my Accu-Tuner, I never use it's calculated tuning program, the FAC. I prefer to use the Accu-Tuner to measure and store what I determine to be my goal by ear. So, essentially, my tunings are still aurally determined but the Accu-Tuner helps manage a difficult job. One analogy might be that of an accountant who uses a calculator. The accountant can add, subtract, multiply and divide but the electronic device helps manage and store a large amount of data.

Stupefying pitch volatility: I live about 150 miles from Chicago on an isthmus between two lakes. While plus or minus 50 cents is about as bad as I've seen, unprotected pianos do go drastically out of tune in this climate, from one extreme to the other. Pianos with climate control or under other well managed conditions do much better.

The school pianos are the most frustrating. You just know the poor kids hardly ever hear a piano that's really in tune at standard pitch but there are a few exceptions and they are remarkable: well placed pianos that have humidity control that is kept operating and properly serviced. Those pianos have a professional quality sound at all times. Mny of the others have the cracks that you can see through in winter and which close in summer. They make me ask myself, "Why am I even doing this?"

For the 26 years I have been tuning in the upper midwest, I have routinely accepted the fact that I will always have to tune each piano at least twice. When I go back to Los Angeles where I grew up, I wonder how people can make a living tuning where the conditions are so mild? The last time I tuned my brother's piano (which does have humidity control) in Huntington Beach, it had been 4 years since it was previously tuned and took all of 15 minutes to get it done. It just hardly needed any adjustment at all. My sister's Kimball Studio on the southern end of Los Angeles, the piano we all grew up with and which I first learned to tune on has no humidity control but it is in an interior room, away from sun and drafts and barely needs adjustment when I see it about every other year.

Yet here in the upper midwest, conditions are very volatile. The concert grand I have taken care of since 1992 at the community college theater *always* needs a pitch correction. I usually go in with the idea that I will have to tune it 3 times to get a tuning that is good enough for a concert and I know it will be good for only a day or two at best.

It's all relative to the circumstances.

Bill, great post. Well said.

What a luxury to have an entire day to prepare for a concert! I usually have to do it while the lights and sound are being set up, often right after the movers have delivered it. The first time I got a CFIIIs, there was packing material still on it, so I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the previous time it was tuned was in Japan. But it was SO much better than the old CFIII!

Don Luis dice"--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
repair...rebuild...etc...for my is very import, and I very happy when I listen, when I look..the piano for my repair..for my tunning...¡..then I am a piano technician...I tunned by ear only...but I am I piano tunner too...I think the piano ..."

I know that in Latin America piano tuners and piano technicians are different occupations. Here in the USA It is required that a piano technician is also a piano tuner

Thomas, the hand and the ear walk together in the piano tuning..this is very important. In my country don´t have a piano technician school, piano tuner and piano technician is one.

As an example of Chicago humidity, I recently tuned a Yamaha studio, moved from the humid gym to a drier, small theater 2 days (they said) before tuning. The outside temp had been 60 F all week. The piano was 25 cents flat at tuning on Saturday (a smaller room is usually less humid than a large room and the outside temp had dropped 20 degrees.) On Sunday morning, the outside temp dropped another 25 degrees to 15 F. The call came in on Monday, "the piano is out of tune."

On Tuesday, I raised the piano another 15 cents. On Wednesday, the outside temp was back in the 60's with rain. The call came in again, "the piano is out of tune again, we are moving the stage Steinway into the room instead." On Friday, I raised the pitch on the stage Steinway 15 cents.

The hvac system in this college sucks all air from the outside. Humidity inside goes up and down like a yo yo. Cold dry is overheated, and the winter humidity is only about 8%. The roof top humidifier was disabled years ago because the stage curtains got mildew one summer. (I doubt if the humidifier was even on in the summer, but thats their excuse). So Pianos here are 50 cents sharp in August, and 50 cents flat in February.

Most schools are not quite this bad, but humidity changes definately keep us busy here in Chicago.

Here in central New York State, I find pianos to be much like the Chicago pianos I've read about in this thread - amazing pitch swings.

This morning's tuning is a good example. A 1909 Everett upright. I tuned it last October, had to lower the pitch. The woman called me 2 weeks ago, wondering why the bass had gone so far out of tune. When I arrived this morning, I was glad to find the bass had actually stayed fairly close to pitch. The rest, however, had dropped about 50 cents from A-440.

In October, the action was nice -- played well. Today, all I heard was click, click, click, rattle, rattle, rattle. Loose flange screws, some hammer heads coming unglued, too.

Piano sounded great when I left. I'm sure it will sound pretty bad by the middle of June, if not before.

Just a thought. If you tune by ear, do you end up with well temperament or equal temperament and how would you know?

Most will end up with a reverse well temperament when tuning aurally.You can tell one from the other by their beat rates when setting the temperament.

I just stick with equal temp myself. I'm satisfied if all the interval beats gradually increase in speed as you go up the scale. That wouldn't happen with a well temp. It is the sudden beat difference in well temp that makes some keys sound dark while others are more pleasant. I'm sure a "reverse well temp" wouldn't sound very pleasant.

I tuned my piano the other day using a well temp. file from the verituner and using a custom stretch someone showed me from the VT user forum. It turned out remakable nice. Much better than all the ET tunings I've done on that piano. It started me thinking, do we really tune in ET or WT when tuning by ear? Are we really in the ET era or have we migriated back, or maybe never left WT? The WT sounded so much better to me.

The majority of people who play the piano are used to "some degree of ET." The degee of perfection of ET solely depends on the tuner who is doing the tuning. If I were to begin using WT or any of the other "designer" temperaments, the vast majority of people I tune for would know the difference, and not consider the piano in a good state of tuning. People who have advanced beyond the beginner level of playing readily know the difference in sound. In other words, they know when the ET tuning is correct, by the beating of the various intervals.

The question has been asked, how an aural tuner can properly tune using ET, implying that an ETD can only assure fine tuning using ET. Aural tuning takes years and practice on many many pianos to achieve. There are many aural tuners out there who have a very limited degree of knowledge and experience. On the other hand, there are ETD tuners who tune strictly by what the machine is reading and they fall almost as short of what the aural tuner is trying to achieve.

There is just no way around a properly trained and practiced ear when tuning pianos.

Going back to the above statement I made about WT and "designer" temperaments. Based on my experience, accomplished pianist who primarily play classical pieces, are far more likely to enjoy an alternate tuning temperament.

This is the very first time I have ever seen anyone but myself acknowledge that commonly made errors when attempting ET often result in a backwards version of a well temperament, the so-called reverse well. I've been saying it publicly for years and there is an article about it on my website, (http://www.billbremmer.com/ReverseWell.html), so the idea must be slowly taking hold. It will be part of my series of articles for the PTG Journal but will probably not appear until sometime next year.

The answer to the question about how aural tuning ends up depends on the skill and the scrutiny given by the tuner. There is a lot of debate about when true equal temperament came into practice. Some people want to believe it was 200 or more years ago. I personally believe that most aural tuners and even some electronic tuning device users are still struggling with it.

A true and perfect equal temperament produces no "colors" or effects. Each key or tonality is exactly analogous to the other. Whether many people truly achieve this kind of complete neutrality or not, I would be the first to acknowledge that it has long been the *goal*. But failing that goal, even by just a little, one inadvertently introduces effects into a tuning. If these effects run roughly opposite to what a well temperament has, it will surely make for a really bad sounding tuning.

That is to say, if a mild well temperament seems to make the piano sound "better" or "warmer", somehow more interesting and musical, unintended errors which produce the opposite kinds of effects will produce a tuning which really does sound sour, chaotic and off key, no matter what is played on it.

There has been a rebirth of interest during the last 20 years of alternative ways to tune and temper the piano. Once true perfection of equal temperament has been possible through both advanced aural tuning techniques and electronic tuning devices, people have begun to look beyond that goal and have questioned whether it is really the ultimate and best compromise for the piano. Many people are still under the impression that a tuning must and should be equal temperament, otherwise it would inevitably be something completely unacceptable. Yet, at the same time, the either/or folks seem willing to grant a wide degree of tolerance.

It is within that range of tolerance that I began to work about 15 years ago. As strictly an aural tuner at the time, I had an "ear" for how far one could go before being "busted", so to speak. There are people who have an interest in tuning harpsichords and fortepianos in authentic, period temperaments and that is all well and good. But to tune a modern piano in an extreme 16th through early 18th Century temperament is to produce effects on that piano which would be intolerable for general use.

However, most music that is enjoyed today, no matter which century it comes from is tonal in nature. Composers of today seem to still choose a key to write in the same way they have for centuries. Choosing a temperament which is aligned with the cycle of 5ths as any well temperament is but which also does not deviate radically (more than a few cents on any given note of the midrange) will bring out a character from the piano and virtually all music which is played upon it which has largely been unknown, undiscovered and unheard of until very recently.

The fact that we can all communicate the way we are via the Internet, that we have organizations like PTG and forums like this one and in particular, scientists with no preconceived prejudice about such issues as ET vs. WT who have invented such marvelous electronic tuning devices has made this new area of interests possible and exploitable.

Recently, I found this post in the Pianotech archives:

"At the risk of stirring up the recent food fight, I would like to recommend that folks interested in the topic could download the Verituner manual <http://www.verituneinc.com/veritune.asp?id=33> and read chapter 8 (pp. 83-117), for further information on unequal temperaments."

I read the Verituner manual pages on the use of unequal temperaments and found it to be the most fascinating, up to date, nonjudgmental offering of alternatives the *default* tuning known as equal temperament I have ever read anywhere. Now, everyone knows that unless you know what you're doing, you should use the default settings. You can't go wrong, it has been provided for you by people who know much more than you do.

But that alone should create a distinction between people of differing sets of interests and ambition. There will be those who will just use what has been provided, just the usual, keep it simple, don't take any risks. The same possibility for alternatives will spark the interest of those who are more curious and who have more ambitious goals. There will be those who, knowing of other possibilities and having heard of other's enthusiasm about what they've discovered and heard, will want to try these ideas to experience them for themselves.

It's all up to you as an individual.

That hyperlink to ther Verituner manual didn't come through in my last post. Here it is in black & white:

http://www.verituneinc.com/veritune.asp?id=33

Bill,you showed me the light years ago.No more reverse well.

Bill,

Which stretch would you suggest using with your EBVT temperament in the verituner? Probably an impossible question to answer without konwing the piano, but if you had to pick one of the three (clean average, expanded) for a Steinway B, which would it be? For now I've been using a modified stretch by Ron Koval and the Broadwood Best temperament.

Since I use a different method entirely to determine stretch, it is hard to say but the closest would probably be the expanded, especially with a Steinway B. Be open to other choices under different circumstances though.

I'll be very much interested to find out what differences you perceive between the EBVT and the Best Broadwood temperament. They are both Victorian style temperaments but there are substantial differences. The word "best" merely means that it is "milder" or closer to equal temperament than the "usual" Broadwood.

There are two features about the EBVT which I consider to be important: it is the very mildest well temperament I know of that still has 5 pure 5ths. It also has a much higher incidence of equal and proportionately beating intervals than does the Best Broadwood. These conspire to make the harmonies in the simple keys (those with no or few sharps or flats) sound much closer to pure than they really are. This savings avoids harshness which would otherwise be intolerable in the complex keys.

Please let us all know how you perceive various kinds of music to be affected, especially ET vs. EBVT and EBVT vs. Best Broadwood.