1/2 cent difference on unison

[Billbrpt@aol.com]

In a message dated 98-02-04 12:01:53 EST, you write:

<< I sat in on that session, and it was not during Council, but during a
 meeting that occurred later in the convention for those who were interested
 in the subject of standardizing pitch.  IAPBT (International Association of
 Piano Builders and Technicians) members had the opportunity to be there as
 well.
 to the best of my knowledge, there was not a + or - tolerance discussed
 when voting for a resolution that A440 be the recognized pitch.
 
 Keith A. McGavern >>

   You are correct, of course.  I was at the Council meetings, that meeting
and at the IAPBT meeting and was a delegate to it.  It's been long enough ago
that I find it hard to seperate all the meetings in my mind. But I do seem to
remember the tolerance of 1 Hz. being written somewhere.  Perhaps it was in
the Journal discussions of whether always tuning to Standard Pitch was correct
or whether it is OK to let the pitch "drift" with the seasons the way many
technicians here in the Midwest do.  Having 1¢ as a tolernace for pitch seems
awfully small to me.  In the exam, effectively, if you are off by 1 Hz, your
pitch score will be just below 80 and you will fail the Exam. 

   That was also the Convention where the Baldwin Recital was tuned in 1/7
Comma Meantone with tempered octaves.  The Japanese were crowding all around
the instrument afterwards and discussing the way it was tuned.  There were
many people who expressed to me how thrilling the tuning sounded including Jim
Coleman and the Head Technician from Yamaha, Kenzo.

   Each year, I receive a beautiful Japanese designed Christmas card from
Kenzo who encourages me in my work and tells me to persist saying he knows
that those who pioneer a cause meet with much unkindness and hateful
resistance.

   Then there were others who made hateful, ugly and threatening remarks to me
and Kent Webb.  I received a hate filled, threatening letter afterwards
warning me that there were those in PTG who knew what I was up to and that I
had better stop it.  Other practitioners of the HT's have been met with
similar cowardly acts of bigotry and ignorence.  Some of those perpetrators
are on this very List.  They feel that they hold the only opinions about
temperament which are valid and correct and can say anything they please which
denegrates and insults a fellow technician but if someone disagrees with them
or tries anything like the punishment they freely dole out, watch out!

    From what I gather here, by the information supplied by those who know,
PTG has never established any standard for either pitch or temperament.  There
are only the tolerences for the RPT Exam which, as Jim Bryant correctly
states, is only a criterion for establishing the status of Registered Piano
Technician.  The Exam has nothing to do with any generally accepted
professional standard.  Outside of the context of the Exam itself, it can only
be cited as a point of reference in discussion or to make a hypothetical
example.

    As I stated in my previous post, if a tuning had to be good enough to
score 100% in temperament, pitch, unisons, stability and the various octaves
in order to be considered "normal" or of a professional standard, no one on
earth who tunes a piano has ever done it yet!

<<If it were an absolute requirement that our pitch be within 1¢ of A440 and
our temperament be absolutely equal to a tolerance of 1¢, in order to sound
good or even be usable with other instruments, we would all have to be far
more exacting in
our work and our tunings would become unusable far sooner than they actually
do.>>

>From what people on this List have so plainly asserted, any tuning that one
does in ernest must be considered professionally done and beyond all reproach
unless the person who does it actually knows what the quantitative values of
its deviations from true ET are.  Then it is unethical unless the technician
informs the customer of the facts.  On the other hand, if the technician
doesn't know where and how large the deviatiions from ET are, it is not at all
incumbent on that technician to find out or to make any changes in proceedure.
In other words, "What you don't know won't hurt anybody, what you do, will!"

Bill Bremmer RPT
Madison, Wisconsin