Greetings, Since she was going to be unavailable in July, in preparation for the temperament classes this year at Reno, I asked Enid Katahn to play the demonstration pieces on a Yamaha Disklavier. I will be taking the disk with me, and Laura will have a Yamaha there for the classes, (pss. Laura? I really need a Disklavier grand for these two classes!!) I suppose anybody that has presented classes numerous times will notice that they are all different. Even with my original outline, charts, murals, etc. to keep me on track, the 90 minutes always take a different route to completion, and I always learn something new everytime I do this. This year will be different, in that I will have transposition available, and we can compare the selections in various keys. It is rather amazing to hear what happens to say, the prelude in C# when it is played in C on a well-tempered piano. Tonality, what a concept! We have a couple of the instruments at Vanderbilt, so I went over this morning to tune one for the session. (I figure she would have an easier time playing if the piano was well tempered). I found the piano to be 15 cents flat from the middle up, and I had one hour to have it ready. Soooo...... I put its FAC into the SAT III, a Young template on top, added .5 to the double octaves and took a pitch raise measurement on A4. The first pass took 12 minutes,(the SAT can listen to two strings at once, and with a little practise, the user can discern the stopping of lights for one string while the other is spinning the lights like crazy). The second time thru took another 42 minutes and I had the piano ready to go, at pitch, in its new tuning. I have a hard time believing that that could have been done aurally in 54 minutes. The piano sounded fine, (as fine as a smallish Yamaha upright can sound!) Not only is the tuning technology available today astounding, but the Disklavier is impressive as well. It recorded Enid's playing so close to what she had done that I couldn't tell the difference. She mentioned the pedal wasn't exactly like she felt she had played, but otherwise, it was a true rendition of her playing. She also caught a couple of things that had escaped her as she played. Reno will be my last Guild temperament presentations for a while, as it is time for more (and new) voices to be heard on the subject. From what I gather as I have traveled around speaking on the temperaments these last three years, there are many techs out there now that are multi-temperament familiar, so I know that there is increasing knowledge and perspectives that we could all profit from. Hope to see as many as possible of the list in Reno. Regards, Ed Foote RPT Nashville
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