[pianotech] Clarification on P-12ths

[David Ilvedson]

I would be interested in Jim Coleman's take on Bernard's tuning concept.   I don't know if he still is on the List...?

David Ilvedson, RPT
Pacifica, CA  94044

----- Original message ----------------------------------------
From: "Richard Brekne" <ricb at pianostemmer.no>
To: "Pianotech List" <pianotech at ptg.org>
Received: 3/9/2009 2:38:40 PM
Subject: [pianotech] Clarification on P-12ths


>Hi Bernard

>As per your request here is a brief recount of what Andrés visit to 
>Bergen around 2000 had to do with my own P-12th journey.

>André was here doing the first of his now well known hammer replacement 
>seminars. Not that he'd not done classes before, but this seminar was my 
>concept and one that he has developed and refined in the years that have 
>passed since then. I'd replaced a set of hammers on a Steinway C and 
>balanced them ala Stanwood more or less, and he was to do a regulation 
>and voicing seminar. We had 6 participants and 3 days if I remember 
>correctly. 

>Naturally in the course of such a seminar tuning discussions come up, 
>and indeed in one of these André did talk about the major 6th - double 
>10th tests for dealing with treble octaves.  And the context was indeed 
>octaves.  No mention of 12ths was made and no mention of you or anything 
>to do about you was made. This method for getting nice treble octaves 
>was one of several tossed back and forth by the participants and nothing 
>was really new to anyone. After all... this way of approaching octaves 
>goes back a long ways for whatever that is worth. 

>It was a timely reminder for my part as I was already on the P-12ths 
>path and looking for an alternative to the single partials ETD's 
>approach. Indeed I got into quite a spat with a couple folks at the time 
>because I'd suggested that the single partial approach available at the 
>time was limited at best. I'd already started using Tune-lab to direct 
>reference several octave coincident pairs in effort to simulate a kind 
>of multi-partials ETD. Rick Baldersin's book had a lot to say on both 
>octaves and other intervals tests... including the 12th.  I'd been 
>reading in old journals at the same time and bumped into a few articles 
>of interest that were also relevant to the 12th interval.... so quite 
>naturally I used Tune-lab to simply impose a pure 3:1 12th on a piano to 
>see how that would work... and I reported the findings here on pianotech 
>and on CAUT.

>I remember Ron Koval (I think it was)  immediately shot a hole in my 
>first attempt at a 12ths temperament region pointing out that I'd simply 
>taken the 19th root of 3 and increasing each successive note from and 
>including D3 to A4. The hole was obvious enough... it resulted in a 
>straight line instead of the familiar curve.  So I devised a way of 
>using Tunelab 97's tuning curve editor to address that.  I tuned D3 and 
>A4 to 440, then D4 to a 6:3 octave with D3 and A3 to a 6:3 octave with 
>A4, and aurally adjusted the both A3 and D4 so that their respective 
>5ths against D3 and A4 were ok to my ear and that their relationship 
>together as a 4th was also ok. I then manually sampled the resulting 3rd 
>partial of A3, D4 and A4, accepted the 3rd of D3 as 440 entered these 
>values into TL97 curve editor and used Robert Scotts then so called 
>quadratic interpolation to generate a curve. I had to make three curves 
>actually and combine them as the editor only accepted 3 values at a time 
>for this. I then expanded this in similar fashion so that the final 
>curve was from D2 to F6. 

>Now to what degree André can be said to have influenced me in this whole 
>process I can not say beyond saying that he told me nothing really new, 
>but that combined with all the other things I was reading, thinking 
>about, doing it was just one more bit piece that encouraged me along.  
>How much one can trace any of this back to your influence on André is 
>not for me to say. But in this indirect way, it must be acknowledged 
>that through the grapevine you may have indeed created a ripple effect 
>that reached my shores.  To be truthful with you tho... I'm quite sure I 
>would have headed here anyways.

>Personally, I'd say that if you had influenced André in this matter at 
>some point, then that fact speaks more to your standing as a respected 
>technician in Europe in general then it touches on this issue, and in a 
>far more meaningful way... and you have much to be proud about. Both 
>Mensurix and your PureOnly tuning software have gained significant 
>degrees of respect over here and it should be just a matter of time 
>before at least PureOnly starts selling stateside as well... which I 
>would encourage and look upon with satisfaction.

>Now... I hope you will retract your longstanding accusation that I have 
>consciously stolen this from you and admit the obvious, that my own 
>P-12ths journey was quite independent of your own, if not completely so 
>in reality and that we can once and for all put this side of the whole 
>subject matter behind us.

>Cheers
>Richard Brekne