>> For a minute there I wasn't sure if he was using a tuning >> fork...or......a cat-a-tonic..... > > Now now, that cat was just fine, minding her own business and watching > the thunderstorm roll in when she was intruded upon and chose to Bach > off rather than complain. Yup, sorry about the thunderstorm noise on the video. It was a blustery day. A couple of hours earlier we had had high winds and one-inch hailstones. Still rumbling a little during the tuning demo. When I came in this morning to practice (Chromatic Fantasy & Fugue for next weekend's gig), I learned that the cat sometime in the interim had left me three nice samples of puke on top of the harpsichord. Fortunately he missed the soundboard, strings, keys, and the stacks of music pages. He concentrated his efforts on defacing the painted lid. A dustpan and half a dozen baby wipes later, we're good as new. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9IqD_04G0s Anyway, the temperament works nicely on piano too. I've had it on our church's piano for more than two years now, and it plays everything. Last week I did the Chopin Berceuse (D-flat major). More often I set the thing from an A fork instead of a C fork. Get the F-A going with its slight sharpness, plug in the F-C-G-D-A 5ths with their consistent 1/6 comma quality, and away we go. My little shortcut to establish the G *exactly* where it belongs halfway between F and A: use a C that's temporarily pure below F, and a D that's temporarily pure below A. From that C and D, get the G going so the C-G 5th is making a duplet beat against the triplets of the D-G 4th. Voila. Then, average out the C and D later (within F-C-G and G-D-A). Explanation: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl/larips/practical.html http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl/larips/tetrasect.html Maybe I'll do a short video sometime on that technique, too, since it's useful to set up any type of meantone or modified-meantone temperament accurately. It gets the core 5ths/4ths to be evenly spaced (properly) in just 2 or 3 minutes, with no guessing. Any interest? Anybody else here already use such a technique with two temporarily-pure notes as markers? Bradley Lehman
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