[pianotech] aural tuning

[Susan Kline]

On 1/26/2011 9:49 AM, Les Koltvedt wrote:
> I started out using an ETD, still do but am being mentored in aural.  
> I find the ETD eases some of the stress of knowing which side I'm on 
> and how close, esp in the ext treble where you can get out of ear shot 
> very quickly.  Lately I've been checking the ext treble with double 
> octaves and octave and a fifth, see where that leaves me on the ETD 
> and adjust accordingly.
> Les K
> LK Piano
>
> -----------------------------
I like the sound of your approach, Les K.

If you are extremely close on a note, and can't tell in which direction 
it needs to go, give it the smallest possible nudge to the downside, as 
small a motion as you can manage, like just the tiniest tic. Then you 
know which side it is on.

The extreme treble presents some problems. Jim Coleman, Sr. used to give 
a very interesting demonstration in his convention tuning classes. He 
would play a note in the middle of the piano and the same note three 
octaves higher (with no tests) and have the class decide where it should 
be tuned. When he filled in with the intervening octaves, and measured 
it with a device, it was always really sharp, like a quarter tone or 
more. And a roomful of piano tuners had decided where to put it.

I'm not sure if he described it just like this, but it seems to me that 
he was demonstrating melodic tuning versus harmonic tuning. Melodic 
tuning always wants to be much higher than harmonic, especially after 
long jumps. This can be seen by how high some violinists play in the top 
octave. It's a different way of hearing.

Put this into context for concert work. A soloist is playing a passage, 
which ends with a jump over two octaves to one shining treble note, 
perfectly exposed. If someone has tuned the top end so the octaves are 
beatless and the chords sound good, this single note will invariably 
sound flat, and kind of skimpy and ungenerous. On the other hand, if one 
puts it right where it wants to go for this kind of playing, that note 
will sing with beauty, but if the pianist plays chords or single octaves 
way up there, they will sound bitter and ill at ease.

So, I think of tuning the top octave or octave and a half as calling for 
"tempering", but in this case tempering between melodic and harmonic 
tuning. One should also pay attention to what is being performed, if one 
is lucky enough to get to a rehearsal, and see if the particular stretch 
suits it. I recently went to a dress rehearsal of a Shostakovich 
concerto, and found it crammed full of exposed double octaves, which 
weren't sounding wonderful, because my stretch was a little too great 
for them. I retuned so double octaves were better than singles, and it 
sounded a lot better. Other pieces would have sounded worse.

One place where in the past I have disliked ETD tunings is that I hear a 
dip around octave five and six, and then the very top seems to go sharp 
to compensate. I think that this was much more the case with the less 
sophisticated machines, and today's probably do a far better job. Still, 
the strain between the two kinds of listening should be heeded, IMO. 
When all is well, one can play all the notes with the same name, in 
successive octaves, and also in double and triple octaves, and they all 
proclaim that they are REALLY the SAME NOTE. If the octave stretch isn't 
quite right for that particular instrument, they are just kind of the 
same note, more or less, as if they were saying "what are you EXPECTING 
of us??"

YMMV, as they say .... "your mileage may vary"

Susan Kline

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20110126/c0d2a08a/attachment.htm>