Virgil's Natural beats

[Ron Koval]

Hi all,

Just now catching up from a busy weekend.  This topic is of great interest 
to me as well.  When I first joined the guild a few years back the speaker 
at the first meeting I attended was Virgil Smith.  I remember thinking that 
"that guy doesn't know what he's talking about, but really tunes a nice 
piano."  Now I didn't know anything about Virgil, or the guild at that 
point.  It was really hard for me not to "throw the baby out with the 
bathwater".  But the fact remained, that was a nice sounding piano.  I had a 
chance to sit down and plink a little, and I liked what I heard.

Part of the introduction of Virgil's presentation talked of his past as a 
piano performer and student.  He took up tuning out of frustration with the 
quality of tunings he was finding.  So I think people are on the right track 
when they talk about using "musician" ears, rather than "technician" ears.  
Then, it should be possible to work backwards to see if the tuning choices 
can be replicated looking at the individual partials, or the interation of 
the same.  As an aside, I've noticed over the years that performers will 
prefer sounds that tuners may not.  One example is the rebirth of 
alternative temperaments.  Another example is a piano in my care (one of two 
onstage), an older Stieff, that has a lot of 'zing' in the back and front 
section of strings that makes tuning a challange, but the performers pick 
that one a lot, over a newer piano with a 'simpler' sound that is easy to 
tune!

So, to get to the 'natural' beats.....
I think we're going to need some data here.  I really like graphs, and 
enjoyed the article by Jim Ellis in the journal.  Since his graphs showed 
that there CAN'T exist truely beatless octaves, we need to see how beatless 
'natural' octaves look.  From using RCT, and doing a bunch of graphing 
myself, I've noticed that there is sometimes a difference between what is 
calculated, predicted, and what ends up on the piano.   Virgil has always 
said that the problem with the edt's is that they only focus on one partial. 
  Recently, again with RCT, I've been tuning 'problem' pianos by calculating 
multiple tunings using varying partials to tune with.  I've found that I can 
get more 'harmonious' octaves in my final pass with this method. Yet this is 
still tuning by only one partial.  We need to see what is happening before 
we can replicate it.  Virgil hears it, and is trying to explain it.  Beats 
within beats?  Combinations of beats?  Cancelation of beats?  Voodoo?  Just 
because the terms are ambiguous, or we don't understand how it works yet, 
doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

The fact still remains..... that was one nice sounding piano.


Ron Koval

Chicagoland


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