Interesting that you should like this tuning so much there David. Stopper uses his own version of the P-12th tuning stumbled upon independently in a far more pragmatic approach by myself, and essentially used without being so defined by hundreds of tuners through the years who place a lot of weight on the major 6th double decime (10th) test. Essentially a P-12th is a very moderate stretch...that pushes the stretch in the killer octave area out there a bit more then octave priority tunings usually do. Jim Coleman did some looking into the Tune-lab P-12th approach I came up with a few years back and there is some of his commentary in the archives on it. The interesting part about this is that just about everyone I've ever run into that uses one or another P-12th approach just ends up loving the tuning and specifically mention their enthusiasm for the stretch achieved. Personally, I find the P 12th approach to generally cause a too narrow bass and have come to rather lean heavily on an acceptably quiet 9:3 coincident pair as part of my tuning tests. This tends to push the bass notes lower then a P-12th tuning would. I find there has to be a nice compromise between what a P-12th wants and what the 9:3 coincident allows for. At some point in the bass...looked at from an octave priority perspective... the 4:2 and the 6:3 become more or less identical in terms of beat rates... nearly 0. At that point I let the 9:3 come into the picture. If its <<annoyingly>> fast...... then I need to push a bit wide. I havent gotten into counting beats with this yet... one just finds a good compromise. In anycase... that you like this approach of Bernhards re-enforces something I've suspected from your own discussions on tuning on the list for a long while now. That your tuning ends up very close to a P-12 result. Cheers RicB Special greetings right back at ya, Bernhard. The Fazioli suite was on my floor (the 36th) at the Hyatt; on Saturday, after my 6-hour marathon of teaching, I followed an impulse to turn right into the Fazioli suite rather than left into my room, and what I found was magnificent: a 6'4" piano, which I had played and enjoyed on Thursday, was now luminously beautiful; I played a little, and immediately asked some guy there who had tuned it; he pointed to you, hunched over a computer with Rick Baldassin in the corner of the room. I played some more; this piano was tuned in a manner extremely close to my protocol and stretch; it sounded, to me, like a million bucks. My only quibble---and a teeny one, at that---was the slight imperfections in the unisons, but the tuning was awesome. Then, as is my wont, I expressed my satisfaction to you rather joyfully and forcefully---hope I didn't freak you out with my enthusiasm, brother. That was one great piano tuning, Mr. Stopper. Thank you. xoxxoDavid A.
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