<html> <body> Phillippe, I have compromised tuning on two very different pianos that were going to be played together in order to get them a little closer.  I did it on request with a caveat regarding the results.  The tuning did not sound good.  I'm not inclined to do it again.  Eventually pianos do get appraised alone, and if your work doesn't sound good, you know who gets blamed... Typically when piano duos form they select to pianos of the same make, model and string scale.  Pianos close together in age of the same model usually have the same string scale.  One piano is tuned ideally and the other is tuned to it with an ETD or more cumbersomely by ear. I've had a customer ask me to tune their piano to their organ.  For interest's sake I played A4 on the organ and watched it on the ETD.  There was a good 6 cent total oscillation, warble, three cents above and below standard pitch.  I showed it to the customer and suggested that there would be little problem with a standard tuning under those loose tolerances.  A pipe organ would be different, ambient temperature and air pressure being daily variants to consider. As for a piano with an orchestra; the instrument I recall with the least tolerance is the oboe.  That probably has more to do with standard pitch than stretch, I think.  Most of the orchestral instruments can adjust intonation as they play and do so to match the piano they have to play with.  Not without the occasional inter instrumental rivalry/resentment.  The bowed instruments are tuned melodically while played and the violins are usually sharp above C5.  They generally think of the piano as that annoyingly flat instrument (even though its stretched sharp harmonically).  Most of the other fixed intonation instruments are sufficiently distinguished in tone to have the in-harmony accepted as characteristic.  I recently attended a concert duo involving a marimba and a D I tune, interesting.  There is a story in the archives of this list of a violinist trying to get a tuner to tune her piano to harmonize with her melodic tuning of her violin.  Pianos are necessarily tuned harmonically.  The experiment was reportedly a failure.  There are structural as well as harmonic issues when you start tuning a whole tone or more higher than you should on a piano. Perhaps the most utilized temperament after ET is Moore's "Representative Victorian Well" temperament.  It is quite mild yet very satisfying for those who can't quite accept ET's dissonance.  Young, Valloti Young would probably come next.  I didn't notice much more flavor than this on the last temperament discussion we had.  Google the ptg archives and you will run into some rather thorough discussions.  One technician mentioned to me that he had tuned a piano to Modified Meantone for a historic era performance.  Apparently the composer-in-residence so enjoyed the bold flavor, he requested that the piano be maintained with Modified Meantone saying that he was finally getting what he heard in his head. :-)  I tuned a harpsichord for a performance of the Messiah to Handel's well temperament and the bassist asked me if I was going to confuse them with meantone. :-D  Sincerely, Andrew Anderson At 10:37 AM 2/12/2006, you wrote: <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Thank you Andr= ew, for your answer.   I had read much before asking the question... I understood the theory, but I wanted to know in what measure it was something very strict or if sometimes piano were tuned as if being a "theoretical piano", just for an example to match them with other instrument not needing stretched tuning... So my question was more about usages or fashions than technical...   From your explanation, and from another that came directly on my e-mail, I understand that there are no exceptions to stretching... ok, In fact I knew the problem of tuning very different pianos... but then my question is "how is it usually solved ?", especially when a piano plays with an orchestre.   And about temperament, are there also temperaments more commonly used ? amongst tuners ? and amongst clients ?   Philippe <dl> <dd>----- Original Message ----- <dd>From: <a href="mailto:anrebe@sbcglobal.net">Andrew and Rebeca Anderson</a> <dd>To: <a href="mailto:pianotech@ptg.org">Pianotech List</a> <dd>Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2006 3:53 PM <dd>Subject: Re: temperaments - choosing ? stretched ? not stretched ? <dd>Phillippe, <dd>I am not sure what you mean by a "stretched temperament."  Tuning is stretched on a piano because of inharmonicity caused by the stiffness of piano wire.  When the wire subdivides vibrations after being struck by the hammer it does so losing a little length with each subdivision because the wire is stiff.  The higher the partial, the more length is lost and the sharper the coincident tone.  When tuning a piano aurally, stretch occurs naturally as you match those partials.  You hear the tone blossom or open up, if you will, as you come into coincidence.  Where you place it in that narrow zone is a matter of taste--narrow, middle or wide. <dd>Because different pianos are scaled (choice of wire size) differently, no one recording of reference tones will work throughout the compass.  Sometimes manufacturers will "refine" their scaling in a given model more than once in a year and the same model of piano will actually have a different scale.  The result of different scales is different tuning sometimes obvious at the extreme ends of the compass.  The pianos will not harmonize to a greater or lessor degree.  Actually, a lot of scaling refinement happens at the break from the long bridge to the bass bridge and the break from wound strings to unwound strings.  <dd>An example of how scaling differences can show up in real life happened at a university where my wife worked as a pianist.  They had a NY Steinway D and a Bosendorfer concert grand.  For a concert they chose to have four-hand, two piano accompaniment of the mass choir.  I was attending the concert and during an intermission the choral director approached me and asked/complained why their tuner couldn't get the pianos in tune with each other.  Knowing the person in question was a fine, pre-eminent technician, I knew the problem wasn't the tuning and asked about the pianos.  I explained how different piano makers would scale their instruments differently pursuing different philosophies of sound and that in order for a piano to be "in-tune" the resulting scales must be tuned differently.  The only perfectly harmonious note she could count on would be A4, middle A.  (Even then such different pianos would respond to climate differently and go out of tune differently.)  Steinway with its low tension scale and Bosendorfer with its high tension scale were destined to clash.  Those piano-makers have very different goals they accomplish with their instruments.  The university has since purchased another Steinway D. <dd>This is why guitar tuners do not work for tuning pianos.  Piano tuners are more complex and cost multiples of an ordinary tuner.  There are a variety of electronic tuners offered explicitly for tuning pianos.  The cheap ones have stretch templates that may or may not do a good job of "parodying" the piano you are tuning.  The mid-level ones sample three notes on a piano and then calculate a stretch curve for the entire piano.  The high-end one measures each note you tune and fits it into the scale based on the measurements and records those measurements along with partial strength to influence the placement of other notes.  Scaling breaks occur at many places in the piano.  Every time you change wire size, you have a scaling break.  That will influence tuning.  People who tune relying strictly on their ETD will find that aural checks of an FAC type ETD will reveal tuning problems on pianos that have prominent scaling breaks (usual in little pianos). <dd>As to temperament preferences, Equal Temperament is the most dissonant temperament.  It is also the most flexible temperament, allowing transposition without changing the character of a musical piece.  The further you wander from equal towards just temperament the more consonant common keys and intervals will become.  This comes at a price.  The dissonance will be confined more and more into increasingly dissonant keys/intervals.  The repertoire becomes more and more constrained by the tuning.  I like well-temperaments.  I've enjoyed Barnes Bach on a piano for some time.  The piano sounded much better and more powerful as many intervals were close to consonant.  The difficulty was in the more modern repertoire.  Debussy came across more like sand-paper then the creamy/dreamy sounds you expect from this composer.  Composers that utilized unequal temperaments wrote pieces that took advantage of those inequalities.  When you switch keys in Mozart, Beethovan, Bach etc. you audibly switch gears in a well-temperament.  Modern composers wrote for what they heard on the piano, some advocated for ET.  Understand what you are getting when you choose a tuning and then make your choice. <dd>Good luck, <dd>Andrew Anderson <dd>At 06:30 AM 2/12/2006, you wrote: <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""> <dd>Hi all, <dd>  <dd>I'm currently studying temperaments, and I wonder if a tuner always use a stretched temperament, <dd>especially since this doesn't seems quite compatible with the use of electronic tuning devices. <dd>(for the not aural tuners...) <dd>  <dd>This question, especially since I've a CD with reference tones for a stretched temperament, which <dd>seems quite strange since a stretched temperament should depend on the kind of piano, shouldn't <dd>they ? So what ? <dd>  <dd>subsidiary question : as a tuner, do you prefer to use equal temperament ? or do you prefer to use <dd>another one ? (which one) ... Or do your clients often have their specific requests ? (in this case <dd>what are you commonly asked ?) <dd>  <dd>Philippe Errembault</blockquote> </dl></blockquote></body> </html>