David, you certainly have bought into the PTG tuning test as the ultimate reality for tuning quality. I tend to approach the issue of tuning quality in a more ( .... global? .... ) manner. Maybe it's partly to do with the way men and women view reality, though we don't want to start a gender war. In general (and one can't make blanket assumptions) men tend to focus very tightly, and use the left hemisphere. Women, with 12 connections across the corpus callosum instead of one, use both hemispheres and blend a lot of different aspects of a problem instead of focusing on just one. (as in, CENTS DEVIATION FROM THE ACCEPTED NORM!!!) So, sometimes women seem sort of scatty to men, air-headed and all over the place, but from their own point of view, they are blending many different aspects of a situation, so they experience a more complicated reality (and will tell you about it BY THE HOUR!) Tunings are more than just cents. Octave stretches are subtle. There is no RIGHT versus WRONG. Would you like for your aural tuning to by 85% RIGHT? Or 100% RIGHT? I don't think tuning works this way, on a musical plane. And when you propose equally "solid" unisons, as if they were a single, known quantity, I don't think unisons work like that, either. Unisons combine with voicing to give the piano a tone of voice. Of course one doesn't want them wandering all over, but staying put is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the character of unisons. This is highly individual. Each tuner (and sometimes even the less officially skilled ones) imparts his or her own voice to a piano. This voice is part of what certain (but certainly not ALL) ETD tuners may lose contact with. Thinking "Right, Wrong" by the hour might blunt that sense of the subtle tone of voice, which also has to take into account each piano's own unique character. Some instruments seem almost TOO human! This is one reason I <shudder> when people talk about needing to get through 5 pianos a day, five or six days a week. Not just because I'd crash after trying three a day for a week, and be fit for nothing for quite awhile. Of course this bulk work does need doing, and families need supporting. The machine tuning, intelligently used, will get these pianos to an acceptable state in a short time each. But something personal is lost in this quantity of overwork, IMO, and that personal activity with a piano, especially a good piano, can deliver something to a customer not measured in percentages. Consider someone (the poor silly) who has a somewhat (oddball? but sweet) sense of tone and a wonderful sense of stretch, but maybe his unisons aren't "solid", maybe they even have some beating, but the way he glues them together gives a sort of charming (if eccentric) personality to an instrument. Ted Sambell has a lovely story about an old lady who cried after he tuned her old neglected piano because without the beating unisons her piano didn't "sing" anymore. So he carefully put exactly the same little beat in the left string of each and every note. (Hi, Ted! I hope I'm remembering this wonderful story right.) And then she told him, "Well, at least you finally got it right!" Continuing on with my own hypothetical silly tuner story ... suppose his temperament isn't so hot, either, but by long practice he's got it figured out so that most of the fifths of the common keys are nearly beatless, the fourths of the common keys are tolerable, and the mess gets shoved into places less likely to show up when playing simple music. (And lots of customers play only simple music.) In essence, this individual version of not-quite-equal seems to me to be a common 19th century approach to tuning. Now, adding all this up, when people without much contact with high quality concert tuning play simple music on the old uprights this guy tunes, it sounds .... well, very nice. And he probably would get about 40% on the PTG tuning test, if that. Tune it spiffy-perfect 100% PTG standard -- well, they might absolutely despise it. For other customers, it would be pretty awful, no doubt, but I find customers tend to figure out who suits them, if they have a variety of piano techs to try. You talk about fighting the public image that a computer tuning is less musical than an aural tuning. That very persistent image was earned fair and square about twenty-five years ago. How stubborn this idea remains once established is something tuners should probably have guessed before they pulled out their SOT's and ignored complaints from their customers by telling them that the machines were right. I take everyone's word for it that the quality of the ETD tunings bears no comparison with the earlier ones, and this stereotype of machine tuning has been fading for awhile. I don't hear it nearly as often as I used to, so ... there's hope for the digitally enhanced piano tech. Many probably don't hear this complaining at all anymore. In this discussion we've been talking over and over about "highly skilled" on both sides of the aisle. I'm not sure I'd use that term exclusively. Perhaps it might be more realistic to say that some aural tuners (SOME of them, mind) are "differently skilled." Susan Kline On 1/31/2011 12:44 PM, David Love wrote: > > The real issue to me boils down to this. I don't think that it's a > comparison between the tuning of a **highly skilled** aural tuner and > an end user (let's put all the other etd benefits aside for the > moment). And It's not necessarily about the highly skilled aural > tuner who has decided to employ the use of an etd for various reasons. > The issue, as I've mentioned, is for the person who is deciding how to > approach this task with respect to their customers. So, if you define > "highly skilled", by the Virgil Smith standard (and of course there > are others who meet this standard as well), most aural tuners, > especially newer ones, are not highly skilled. Many, in fact---even > RPTs, may never be. That isn't to say they didn't pass the RPT test > but the skill level varies, if we're being honest. I would guess the > average pass rate of the RPT exam is about 85% (don't know for sure) > and there are many associate members who wouldn't yet pass or haven't > passed at 80%. Some of these are plying their trade as aural tuners, > or being encouraged to because of what is (erroneously) believed to be > a lack of "musical quality" of an etd tuning. But for arguments sake > let's say that aural tuners perform on average around 85% in terms of > accuracy as measured by the RPT test. And let's further assume that > this has to do with temperament/octave setting and that both etd and > aural tuners in this comparison tune stable and solid unisons. Using > an etd that same aural tuner can hit the target spot on as dictated by > the etd, if they were using one. So I'm a customer and my "tuner" > comes to me and says, "I can tune your piano aurally and I'm an RPT > but I usually hit the RPT standard at about 85% pass rate. If I tune > it with this etd I can hit the standard at very near 100% though the > tuning will be a computer generated tuning based on its reading of > your piano and not a custom tuning curve as I see fit. Now I prefer > to tune aurally because it gives me more personal satisfaction and a > sense of accomplishment but you're the customer. What would you like > me to do?" Well, I can tell you what I would say as the customer. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20110131/4510f86b/attachment.htm>
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