Octave Tuning

[Andrew & Rebeca Anderson]

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Matthew,
The easiest piano to tune is a concert grand 9' or more.  The hardest, one 
of the little wurli spinet monsters where the lid just clear the top of the 
sharps.

Good luck finding an easy one. ;-)

Andrew

At 11:13 AM 9/29/2004 -0700, you wrote:
>Thanks for the replies.  I am practicing my tuning on a 1913 Hinze 
>upright.  Is that doing me more harm than good here?  I think it is hard 
>to hear lots of stuff on that piano, but then again, I am a beginner, so I 
>don't know if it's more the piano or more me not having trained ears 
>yet.  I know lots of families with much newer pianos, should I try to hook 
>up with one of them and maybe work it out with them to practice my tuning 
>on it?
>
>Matthew
>
>BobDavis88@aol.com wrote:
>Matthew writes:
>When I tune the temperament octave (A3-A4), it needs to be a 4:2 octave, 
>correct?
>
>No. Read the many replies which said that it should usually be wider than 
>that.
>And one way to test this octave is to play the A two octaves above the 
>lower note as the test key, to hear the partials in the octave, am I right?
>
>Not exactly, but read Don Rose's comments on ghosting.
>   If the octave you are testing has no beat whatsoever, you have a 
> perfect temperament octave, is this true?
>
>No. There is no such thing as a beatless octave. An octave which is not 
>beating at one level, such as 4:2, will be beating at all other coincident 
>partials, such as 2:1, 6:3, 8:4. The higher the beatless coincident is in 
>the chain, the wider the octave. A good compromise octave is usually 
>pretty quiet, though,
>
>Matthew,
>
>If you have kept this trail of posts on octave tuning, please go back and 
>re-read it, and the links to which you were referred, including the ones 
>to the AccuTuner manual Appendices F and H. People are happy to spend time 
>helping you, but you've got to do your homework and read the replies. At 
>the risk of repetition, I include, directly below, a copy of my post from 
>last week on this subject:
>Bob Davis
>-------------
>Matthew's original question was how to tune a 4:2 octave. Several people, 
>myself included, sent the tests, aural and visual. Whether that [meaning 
>4:2] is appropriate for the temperament octave on a particular piano is a 
>second question. Tuning so that "the 10th is just noticeably faster than 
>the third" might produce a good width of octave, but it is NOT a 4:2. 
>[It's wider]
>
>A clean 4:2 octave IS wide at 2:1, and narrow at 6:3. Most aural tuners 
>naturally gravitate towards a temperament octave that is very slightly 
>wide of 4:2 ("the 10th is just noticeably faster than the third"), which 
>will be substantially wide of 2:1 and a tiny narrow of 6:3. This gives an 
>octave that is pretty clean-sounding, and produces fifths which are pretty 
>clean and fourths that aren't too trashy. Any octave size can be divided 
>into 12 equal half steps. A true 4:2 octave will produce cleaner fourths 
>and more movement in the fifths, and on most pianos will be unnecessarily 
>narow. However, on some pianos with high inharmonicity, a wide temperament 
>octave added to a clean octave below, will produce a double octave that is 
>too noisy. It's a balancing act.
>
>
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