On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 2:10 PM, Richard Brekne <ricb at pianostemmer.no> wrote: > Hi John. > > You'll have to write Stopper to see if he is still selling aural licenses. This certainly extends the limits of incredulity. A license to tune P12s???? No thanks, I'll pass. <G> > You can get well into the ballpark by setting D3 and A4 to 440, tune D4 to > a pure 6:3 octave to D3 and the same for A3 to A4. Fudge both A3 and D4 > equally to get an acceptable 4th... then temper the rest of notes in between > D3 and A4 accordingly to fit. > > Once thats done from D#3 upwards use the major 6th and double 10th > comparison to achieve P-12ths all the way to the top. You can similarly > tune downwards with P12ths until things start sounding a bit tight (narrow, > tense).. then use 6:1 or 6:2 aural tests the rest of the way down. > I had to tune my mom's piano today (Steinway M redesigned and rebuilt by Ron N). Fiddled around with how to do this. (It's not rocket science, but would take some time to think through it well.) I ended up just doing what I normally do. The end result is pretty darn close to all 12ths being pure anyway. That's my preferred style: stretch the temperament as much as I can get away with without P4s being too busy. Tuning open unisons helps it along, which is how I was doing it today. Though I wouldn't claim to know all about the science behind Stopper's methodology, I'm willing to wager that the end result is what many of us achieve every day ... by just listening to what the piano tells us it wants. The Stopper details seem to be scanty, so we're left to guess a lot of what a Stopper P12 tuning sounds like. I did hear the one he did (was it Rochester?). Sounded quite nice, but some things were not to my liking. The treble was a bit too stretched in the treble, and I'm one to do a stretchy tuning myself! <G> And there were some 12ths that were not pure. However, this may have been due to the pianos being sharp -- always so darn cold in those hotels -- and then drifting sharp after they had been tuned according to the ETD. Also, things change as unisons are tuned. My mom's piano didn't have all the 12ths pure at the end of the tuning, though they all were during it. (It happens, as we all know. A better time to study the post-tuning intervals would be after a piano was tuned twice.) So, those of you who have access to the OnlyPure ETD, some questions (and we'll assume a decent piano scale of at least 5' 8" in length: - Is A3-A4 generally between 4:2 and 6:3, and usually more of a 6:3? - Are P5s nearly pure in a "normal" temperament region? I.e., F3-F4 - Are P4s beating a little faster than 1 bps in a "normal" temperament region? - As you are tuning the middle strings of the treble, does the double octave below beat about 1-2 bps until the other strings are tuned to it? Then, it decreases to just less than or equal to 1 bps? E.g. F3-F5, and I'm assuming tuning unisons as you go. - Does the bass go from a tad larger than 6:3 octaves to 8:4, then the lowest 5-6 strings between 8:4 and 10:5? (Except on very large pianos, which might be 10:5 or even 12:6) Somewhere along the line, I think many of us end up at the same place while arriving by different paths. I'm certainly willing to be taught. But I'm not buying into tuning voodoo. <G> Also, I'm thinking this out loud. I've heard that in Europe tuners prefer to tune more narrow octaves than we do here in the States. Is this true? If so, I've a sneaking suspicion that what Stopper might have done is simply expand everything from what is the normal in Europe. Any chance of this being the case? In other words, instead of tuning 2:1 or 4:2 octaves for the temperament octave, his octave is between 4:2 and 6:3. Granted, he would have arrived at this by mathematical means, and I certainly applaud him for doing so! I personally think 2:1 octaves sound horrible, unless you're in the top octave, and have properly expanded everything below it. But even then, I like to go a bit above a 2:1. So if someone has been used to listening to a piano tuned with primarily 2:1 octaves, there is no doubt in my mind that a P12 tuning would sound absolutely fabulous! And I would indeed be proud of that "discovery"! But it doesn't have to mean than no one else has been doing it heretofore. It is certainly fascinating, and I look forward to hearing more ... specifics. -- JF -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20090307/a3a1fd08/attachment-0001.html>
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