Dear reader, let me first give my thanks to Mr. David A. Vanderhoofven for his "long" report on the tuning course and to Mr. Allan Gilreath for mentioning the "piantung.zip". Since my daughter gets piano lessions I try to collect information on piano tuning. A professional tuner told me, that it took him seven years to master it. He does no longer use strictly equal tuning. First he asks the customers, which kind of music they would play. The classical beginner pieces in the first years are mostly in the range from Fmaj (1flat) up to Amaj (3sharp). He will then use some kind of modified Werckmeister tuning centered around those keys,with little stretch.Thus his pianos sound much better than those of the competitors and the other piano tuners don't understand why,he says.People who play jazz or modern stuff, get a different tuning.He would not reveal the exact working of his system to me because,he says, I am still too dumb to follow his explanations. That's why I am working into this matter now, and I want to learn the theory.For the same reason I bought a digital piano which offers 6 different temperaments. The newer types have a feature called "microtuning", which allows fine tuning of each individual key. I also bought the KORG "Master Tuner" model MT-1200, which also allows for microtuning. Have you ever listened to a real pure Cmaj chord? Switch back then to "equal" temperament and notice the dissonances. I can only confirm, that it sounds like vinegar. This is the material, which pours out of all the radios and TVs all over the world, because all the misguided and miseducated musicians lost the ability to notice the mistuning of their instruments. "Das Wohltemperierte Klavier", the "Well Tempered Piano" by BACH is not meant to be played in "equal" tuning. Bach had devised his own system of tuning, which is little known today. Thanks to the Japanese electronics and microtuning we can get Bach's sound back in our livingrooms! Now I am busy with lengthy calculations of different frequencies, beat frequencies, and formulas to analyse the temperaments of my digital piano. But there is much more to do: I have the feeling, that there are about 50 worked-out and fully tested systems of piano temperament tuning. Organs are different, but also of interest. But it is hard to get information. Please everybody, drop me a line, or better, publish it here, if you can help a dumb but not deaf Austrian on the way to understand sound and music. Thank you for reading this. yours sincerely, Helmut Wabnig wabi@net4you.co.at
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