In a message dated 3/14/99 8:11:16 AM Central Standard Time, rootfamily@erols.com writes: << ood Morning Ron and Bill, Bill - I have no problem will Reverse Well getting an upper case designation because it describes a specific sequence with certain preconditions - like HTs, no? The results may actually get fairly close to ET depending on the scale. I think you overestimate the extent of the problem, however. As Ron points out, Reverse Well will not get you a passing grade on the RPT exam, yet we've been upgrading new members with an objective exam for almost twenty years, and a considerable number of members who took the older nonstandarized versions actually studied the subject and learned how to set an equal temperament that compensated for inharmonicity. Do I recall that you actually said recently that you had no objection to ET? I recall that you've condemned it in the past, but on closer examination, you were really talking about RW, right. So in future - and I'm sure it will come up again - please do me and the rest of us a favor and refrain from condemning ET when you really mean RW. Ron - I thank you for your efforts to get RW clarified. It took a lot of work and got you flamed. (sort of like my efforts to improve the quality of posts on this list :-)) I agree that it would be more constructive to discuss the practical and theoretical ways of avoiding RW rather than complaining about how often we find examples of RW in the field. But when I attempted to discuss this on the list recently, there was very little discussion. Someone with little knowledge of the subject would have learned about the benefits of contiguous thirds, but little else. You challenged Bill to accurately describe the sequence that resulted in an RW temperament. He finally did, and then accused you of being a practitioner despite no supporting evidence that I could find. So post your own tuning sequence and prove him wrong. Carl Root, RPT Rockville, MD >> Thank you for your post. Ron wanted a *brief* description of what Reverse Well is and I gave it to him twice. This was not good enough for him, so I wrote the long version. It seems to me that Ron expected that I could not define it and when I did, he wrote what he was planning to write anyway, some kind of nasty, condescending, inflammatory response. Frankly, it happens every time the subject of temperament comes up. Not just here, anywhere. It also demonstrates that temperament *is* an emotional issue for many. It seems to me that what I said threatened Ron's peace of mind and really made him wonder if he is making the errors that I identified. I stick with what I said before, you really need to know how a Well-Tempered Tuning sounds before you can be sure that what you are tuning is not a backwards version of it. Ed seems to think that anyone attempting to tune ET might only make small, insignificant errors that wouldn't really matter. This may be true sometimes but that is not what I was talking about. I am talking about *obviously* uneven 3rds, the kind that WT's have, only in a reverse order. I encounter far more of it than I would really expect to. I pointed out in an example to Don R. that I had encountered a Yamaha console that was tuned by an RPT of the highest standing in his community. He had attempted to tune the ET with pure 5ths but ended up tuning such a blatant Reverse Well that I could hardly believe it myself. His Ab3-C4 3rd was almost pure, thus leaving the C4-E4 3rd *way* beyond the point of being what is known as a Pythagorean 3rd, that is, way in excess of 22 cents wide. I know this individual can tune a good, even row of 3rds but he must have devoted all of his attention to getting the 5ths to sound "pure" without even listening to the 3rds in this instance. Can you imagine playing the first prelude (in C major) of Bach's Music for the Well-Tempered Clavier on this piano? This customer could not tell me in factual detail what was wrong but he really thought it was awful. While I don't think that members of audiences get up and leave when they hear a poor temperament, I don't think that is a reason to dismiss what I have said as unimportant. Once, when I was to sing at a wedding, I asked permission to tune the Yamaha C7. The music director was reluctant saying that it had just been done recently and "wouldn't need tuning" at this time. I finally persuaded him to permit me but he also warned me not to tune one of those "Mean" tunings, that the piano was kept in ET. (And this guy has a Masters degree in music). He said, "We need to be able to play in *all* the keys". I listened to the temperament and found it to be a very bad example of Reverse Well. All three keys at the top of the cycle of 5ths, C, G and F had *very* rapidly beating 3rds. F#3-A#3 was nearly pure. There was one wide 5th and one 5th a narrow as you would find in a 1/3 Syntonic Comma Meantone (7 cents narrow). I, of course went ahead and tuned the piano the way I wanted to and the music director who accompanied my "Ave Maria" and other good stuff said it was "beautiful". I did not tell him how bad I thought the tuning was, I just did my own work. But since the University of Wisconsin has a Yamaha C7 set up for the PTG RPT Tuning Exam and I just happened to have it in my SAT in the Exam pages, I scored the piano against it both before and after. The tuning presumed and believed with such faith as you would expect from a cloistered nun to be ET and for which there was so much trepidation about the deep, dark evil of something other than that, got a score of 52 in the temperament. Mine got a score of 73. I looked at what the SAT identified as "errors" in my temperament and saw that if I changed only three notes, F3 by -0.3, C#4 by +0.3 and E4 by +0.1, my temperament would have "passed" at 80. Those figures are so small that they would have had a negligible effect on the temperament if I had chosen to change those notes, which I did not. Needless to say, trying to educate that music director on what Reverse Well is would have gone less than nowhere. As for passing the PTG RPT Tuning Exam, you could, in fact, pass it while tuning a very mild WT, a Marpurg I Quasi ET and yes, a Reverse Well, so long as the errors were relatively small and the total number of errors in the temperament do not exceed the limits of tolerance. I demonstrated this at a Chapter meeting many, many years ago. This is however just a theoretical question. I have seen people fail that exam who actually tune a good sounding temperament and I have also seen people pass at the minimum level with errors that really stick out. And yes, I have seen people pass who tuned just slightly unevenly in a Reverse Well pattern. Several people seem to think that I am against ET and that I have "condemned" it as you said. I may have made remarks that lead people to believe that but what I have always maintained is that I recognize that ET is considered standard practice but I personally choose not to tune it. I think there are ways to make the piano sound better and more interesting than standard practice. Because ET is the one and only way that tuning is usually taught and because most people think of it as the only way to tune, the understanding of Cycle of 5ths based tonality has been completely lost. Therefore, the tolerances many tuners have for what should be ET are very liberal. They are so loose that very often, a temperament which is meant to be ET does indeed have tonal distinctions but unfortunately, those distinctions are disorganized and so is the music that is played on them. My own experience with temperament has gone full circle. When I first learned to tune, I had a C tuning fork and I carefully tempered my 4ths and 5ths according to what the book said. I was not looking for pure 5ths, I tried to temper them like the book said to but because there was no way that the book explained to compensate for inharmonicity, I mistakenly tempered my white key 5ths too much. I had the same problem at the end of my sequence that I have described when explaining Reverse Well except that instead of overly tempering black key 5ths, I had to make them closer to pure to reconcile everything. In short, I was tuning a WT without knowing what it was. When I first took my PTG Exam in 1978, before the standardized version, I was told that my temperament was "Sweet & Sour", not ET, it was "Apprentice" level and therefore I did not meet the standards required to be a "Craftsman". Then I attended my first Convention in Minneapolis in 1979 and saw George Defebaugh and Jim Coleman. Much of what they said at that time was over my head and the rapidly beating intervals that George was demonstrating seemed very difficult to discern or distinguish. It didn't take long though before I caught on to it and learned to use contiguous 3rds. I passed the new Standardized Exam in 1982, then qualified as an Examiner Trainee in 1983. Then came Lucas Mason's book, "The New Tuning" (sic) and it confirmed what I had been gravitating towards, the ET with pure 5ths. I made the same mistake with this as many people do, I started concentrating on the 5ths and thought that the 3rds were less important. Then I became aware of the HT's and when I encountered a piano I had tuned before, I sometimes found that I had a slightly Reverse Well pattern. The technician that got me started on the HT's, Timothy Farley RPT of Madison told me, "If you are going to make errors in your temperament, you might as well put them in the right place". Ironically, George Defebaugh said something along the same line when he talked about the difficulty of tuning a spinet. He said, "If you are going to compromise anything at all, do it in the key of B because no one who has a spinet ever plays in that key". The audience guffawed cynically but there was quite a bit more wisdom in that statement than I think he even realized. The use of the SAT had nothing to do with any of this. I bought one mainly so I could get certified as a CTE. I just could not conduct an exam very well because I didn't know how to operate it efficiently. I was told I would have to buy one myself and learn to use it if I ever hoped to be certified. It took me a good two years before it was anything less than an encumbrance to my work. I have never used it in the FAC mode and believe it or not, I don't even know how to do that. I have always used it in the direct interval mode to help set up a very accurate aural tuning, then I record my tuning and use the SAT in a program mode with aural verification. It is truly amazing to me that I, who had learned so much from Jim Coleman 20 years ago, have him asking me now about temperament and octaves. I only consider myself an ordinary technician and often assume that because I learned virtually everything I know that is important from PTG, everyone else in that organization must know the same things, more or less. Well, by now, I guess a few more people know what Reverse Well is than did before. I put the words in capitals because it is a proper subject. I could say that I consider Reverse Well as a *capital* offense against music but that would just be a joke. Regards, Bill Bremmer RPT Madison, Wisconsin
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