Hi Richard, No argument with most of what you've said here. But I would like to nit-pick just a couple of points briefly (well, I'll try to keep it brief) 1. My aural skills were slipping as I depended more on the ETD. I had worked too hard on developing those skills to have them atrophy and depend more and more on flashing lights. I will agree that I have forgotten a few aural checks that I'd recently learned before I started using an ETD. But they are more temperament related, and I'd tuned for years before that without them. Big woopie. If I need them, I'll find them again. I still scrutinize octaves and unisons and occasionally make aural corrections. Other times my ears try to get in the way. But tuning is like roller skating. There have been periods of time over the years when I focused on other types of work when I might go 6 months or more without tuning a piano. I recently went roller skating for the first time in over 25 years. Yep. Fell hard I think 4 times, but it wasn't long before I was doing turns, skating backwards, etc., just like I'd been doing it all along. If I do depend more on the ETD it has more to do with my comfort level with stability and hammer technique. It's really difficult to know whether I'm tuning with more stability because of the ETD, or whether my stability was just fine with my aural tunings. But I have come to trust the stability/hammer technique with ETD assistance moreso than with my aural tuning. It is reassuring to know that I'm not just relying on my ears for feedback about how stable the tuning is. Could be overkill on my part, but it takes mother nature to knock my tuning out. For me, stability is far more important than the smallest details of the scale. 3. Tuning by ear doesn't really take any longer and is more satisfying personally. ETD'ers seem to believe that "doing all those checks" takes such a long time. It doesn't, not if you're at the top of your game. I can touch up a concert instrument in as short a time aurally as I can "messing with" the buttons and lights of a machine. Agree, somewhat. In general, tuning aurally from scratch isn't much slower. I do aural checks while tuning a piano I'm unfamiliar with electronically, just because I have a habit built into the process carried over from my aural habits. With a really nice piano, I might even go through the electronic tuning in the same order as my aural tuning. Other times, I turn my ears off to keep them from getting in the way. I do feel more confident in the stability with the ETD because if those lights move one crumb, that's something the ears would not have acknowledged. How many times have you tuned with ETD, had that first string locked in, (or believed you had) pulled in the unisons aurally, only to look back at the ETD just before going to the next note and seeing the lights moving? You wouldn't have noticed that in an aural tuning until later when that note wouldn't fit in with checks for other notes. Then you have to come back and refigure the puzzle to find which one caused the problem. ETD instantly identifies it. Much faster. Concert touch ups: I don't TRUST aural touch ups because I've too often found that once you start messing with what's there you can create more problems than you solve and you'll wind up just having to start over with A and redo the whole thing. Someone told me years ago that "you can't just "touch up" an aural tuning" and it has proven to be true time and time again. But with the machine, I can go through and if the lights don't move, I move on. That's much faster than doing the aural checks for every note during a touch up, then finding that to see where this one needs to go, I've got to fix the other ones first. I've done ETD touchups in 10-15 minutes whereas I might have completely retuned the piano if I'd done it aurally. If the piano pitch has changed from an unusual climactic pattern, you can reset the ETD a couple cents and go MUCH faster than restarting with a new A. Low bass is probably the case in point. Once you trust that ETD tuning for that piano, you can check those notes almost as fast as you can play them. But aurally checking the bass is a more complex, slower process. I don't agree that tuning aurally is more satisfying, for me at least. We usually employ the same old procedure when doing aural tuning, which, if you think about it, results in only one way of tuning a piano. I'm not saying always, but once we develop a trusted routine, it's tough to let ourselves break it. Same way, time after time, same rules, same beats, etc. Works better for some scales and not as well for others. You're going to be less likely to take risks to see what happens if you do this or that, opting instead for tried and true sounds you have become accustomed to and learned to trust. But there are so many options for the tuning with the ETD that you can employ by letting the ears not pay so much attention until you're done, and it can be pretty satisfying to hear the different results of the entire instrument. And, with some scales, tuning aurally can be flustering. First time I tuned a Yamaha C5, I didn't want to let myself leave those 5ths that narrow, and kept winding up with octaves that were objectionable. I had to let the ETD reassure me years later that it's ok - these octaves require nearly pure 4ths and objectionably narrow 5ths or the octaves really beat. This goes right along with what David Love just posted about the ears dividing the octave. I agree. I've not noticed that stored tunings are so unreliable. If they are, the differences are so subtle that no one else ever noticed. For the entire time I used my SAT III at the university, I used the same FAC for both Ds on stage and never noticed enough difference to fuss over (and yes, I WAS listening). I've even used that same FAC for other Ds when the fresh FAC I'd just set on that instrument didn't work so well. In fact, lately, I've gone more to trusting some of the library tunings that were supplied with the SAT III more than a fresh FAC. I like the curve I'm hearing with the older program, and all of those tunings were created with the SAT II, so, how long ago was that? And that also ignores whether the FAC numbers are exactly like those of the piano you're tuning, and yet the results will be quite good from piano to piano. The newer program stretches out the bass a bit more than I'm comfortable with, and usually the midrange too (on Steinways, but can have fantastic results for others). But that just goes to show that there are more ways than one to tune a piano, and many different ways work out just fine. 4. I don't necessarily believe tuning is "artistic" as some would claim. I VERY much concur. It's a process of lining up physical harmonics and inharmonic properties of wire under tension, and the little differences will be in how the compromises are made. I've not seen any evidence in my experience that those little differences will be appreciated by anyone other than the tuner(s). Art, by definition, is a form of communication. If nothing is being communicated, there is no art there. Most other musicians think in terms of "in tune" or "out of tune", and that's about it, and that's the way they think about piano tuning. Anything beyond that is subconscious and can even be mistaken for "tone" rather than tuning. Someone with the Steinway C&A department once said that they have many technicians, none of whom tunes the same way, and rarely is there ever a complaint by an artist of the tuning, unless it involves an octave, unison, or stability. Artist complaints are almost always about tone, response and repetition. They also hinted that if one is obsessed over tuning beyond octaves, unisons and stability, it might just be that that tuner is neglecting those other more important duties that affect the artist. After 18 years of aural only tuning, and realizing that tuning is something that is here today and gone tomorrow, the ETD allowed me to accept that it just isn't worth wearing myself out over. So, I focus more on the other things that have a larger effect on the art. Well, I've beaten it to death. Sorry, guys. Nobody else to talk to today, I suppose. Jeff -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100417/9d7603de/attachment.htm>
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