Hi Gregor I'm not surprised you didn't get taught to listen for specific partials as such. And I'm not surprised that what you were taught to listen for was explained in terms of coincident partials. I wasn't either. Nor do many of the older texts really explain things this way. Just so... when we listen to any given interval, there are coincident partials responsible for the beats we here... as you obviously were taught more or less as a side issue. The difference is that many now see how valuable a tool the whole vocabulary is in teaching, communicating, and better understanding the discipline of tuning. Just telling someone to listen to any given interval and tell them to listen for such and such a beat rate is not a particularly effective way of conveying to a young student just what it is you want them to try and focus on to begin with, nor is it particularly conducive to gaining a deeper understanding of how to manipulate all the intervals and their types purposefully and consciously to create any particular kind of tuning we desire. One is left with one simple tuning recipe which one does not really understand and is fairly incapable of doing anything else. Perhaps even under the delusion that there is only one thing that is a <<tuned piano>> and you've been taught it. I was initially taught a F3-F4 5ths and 4ths temperament with no checks other then the last 5th should end up with the the same basic beat rate as its neighboring. Octaves I was taught were confirmed with 12ths and just listening to the Octave in a holistic sense. I got good at this...Tuned without a click for 17 years in a row for a major jazz festival. Was the only tuner on a particular Keith Jarret tour in Europe one year that didn't get the big thumb down by Keith. But when it came to taking a test where other priorities were required of me... I was incapable meeting these. Luckily for me at nearly the same time as my first test I ran into this list and folks like Coleman (who was active at that time) and many others who immediately started explaining my experience in terms of coincidents, and enlightened me to the fact that a thorough understanding of these, applied to tuning will allow you to shape just about whatever tuning priorities/style/requirements is put in front of you. A year later I had completely understood exactly what the Norwegian specifications in reality were... and executed their idea of a tuning without problem. In your closing sentence below... you describe what we all do... at least those of us who on some level or another know what we are doing. But there is a weakness in here that you dont seem to see. You say "Depending on how prominent one beating pair is, the results may differ". Thats not all. Results vary also because to no small degree on what your ears are most sensitive to vary from one day to the other... even your daily mood can influence your consistency.... Fact is when the only information you are working with is what amounts to some vague concept of <<what sounds good>> you put your self in a position where you will tune the same piano differently from day to day without being aware of just how significant these daily differences can be... or even why they are there to begin with. And you are leaving out quite a few steps further down the road you can take that will get you more consistent, efficient, and allow you to make much more purposeful tuning decisions when needed. Not to mention putting you in position to tackle that difficult customer who just points out a note and declares "this is false" or relieve the confusion on that young student who gets lost in not just the mesh of all the overtones mixing together creating multiple beat rates... but equally lost in the vague attempts you will have at explaining what exactly it is you want them to listen to. Tuning has changed since the advent of ETD's and this whole vocabulary of interval types. For those who delve into that base of knowledge and utilize it for its worth its changed radically for the better. And they do not simply slavishly align single partials pairs at the expense of others either. Cheers RicB I don´t think that´s a problem of terminology, at least in my case. It´s right that I never heard about 4:2 octaves before I got into the ETD´s, but I understood immediately what it´s all about because I learned tuning theory. As you mentioned, the principle is just the same. I learned tuning from 1988 to 1991, so my memory may be striking what really happened during my training. But I believe to remember that nobody told me to focus on particular partials. Maybe my mentor was not so good in teaching. But even in vocational school in Ludwigsburg they did not tell us, at least I remember so. I should ask my former collegues about their memory. May be I was actually told to listen to particular partials but I just forgot it and nowadays I do it unconsciously. Anyway, the holistic approach can´t be so wrong. Every partial pair produces beats and my goal is to reduce the overall beating to minimum. My goal is not to set one pair to zero beating to the disadvantage of the other pairs. Depending on how prominent one beating pair is, the results may differ. Gregor -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091115/c1e6376c/attachment.htm>
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