etd's and ears

[Avery]

Annie,

At 02:47 PM 2/15/2007, you wrote:
>[Feeling akin to the puppy that blunders into No Man's Land (while 
>the movie audience weeps, of course <g>)....]
>
>Something I've been thinking about lately: when using an ETD, I tune 
>from one end of the piano to the other, but when I tune aurally, I 
>start in the middle and work out.  There's no reason not to tune 
>middle-out with an ETD, as far as I know, but I haven't.  (I use a Cybertuner.)
>
>So, at least two questions:
>*  is the sequence of tuning part of the differences between ears and ETDs?

Probably. I use an SAT III but I ALWAYS start from the temperament 
octave and tune out. I guess that's because I was an aural tuner for 
app. 25 yrs. before I ever started using an ETD. That way you can 
check the temperament ever how you want and you can perform any and 
all aural checks going out from there. If I hear something my ear 
disagrees with, I change it. You can't do that very easily if you go 
from bottom to top. The only time I do that is when I'm performing a 
pitch raise!

>*  does anyone do middle-out with an ETD as a matter of course?

Yes.

>In light of the recent discussion of how the piano reacts to the 
>changing stresses of tuning, it seems as though a bottom-top 
>sequence would certainly torque things around quite differently than 
>middle-out.

That I really don't know. But it seems that if it's a "normal" 
tuning, it wouldn't make all that much difference as far as torque is 
concerned. I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong. :-D

>Another question related to stress:  strip muting the piano and 
>tuning one string for all notes before pulling in the unisons vs. 
>tuning all strings in sequence........

In non-critical situations, I usually strip mute. On our D's, and the 
piano faculty pianos, I have the "checked" tunings stored in memory, 
so I usually tune all three strings at once going up from the 
temperament. I find it usually gives me better stability because I 
can see if the pitch changes any. That's how I did it for Olga Kern's 
recital that Les Bartlett posted about. Abbey Simon and Enrique 
Graf's recitals, also.

Avery Todd
University of Houston

>Thanks, as always!
>
>Annie Grieshop
>
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