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On pianos with short strings in the bass the tuning is much more
difficult. On spinets the fundamental is weak to
non-existant. There is a mess of resonances that make picking out
the useful harmonics difficult. I have run into some nice little
pianos, cleaner sound, but they have been the exception.<br><br>
Andrew<br>
At 08:23 AM 9/30/2004 -0600, you wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>I must disagree with you on this
point. I tune every kind of piano and bigger is not always
better. Infact sometimes the smaller ones that you mention will
just fall right in to place. The beats can be heard in them all,
sometimes on larger pianos, especially in the bass there are so many
choices it is tough to know where to go. I will agree that your
concert grands tend to get tuned more often so it is often a matter of
just tweeking them, but don't discount practising on pianos of lesser
quality. I have one student that passed his PTG tuning exam aurally
with flying colors and I asked him how many quality pianos he had worked
on prior to taking the exam. He said that he could count them on
one hand. Most were older instruments in the far North of
Canada.<br><br>
<br>
Chris Gregg RPT<br><br>
<br>
At 09:48 PM 9/29/2004, you wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Matthew,<br>
The easiest piano to tune is a concert grand 9' or more. The
hardest, one of the little wurli spinet monsters where the lid just clear
the top of the sharps.<br><br>
Good luck finding an easy one. ;-)<br><br>
Andrew<br><br>
At 11:13 AM 9/29/2004 -0700, you wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Thanks for the replies. I am
practicing my tuning on a 1913 Hinze upright. Is that doing me more
harm than good here? I think it is hard to hear lots of stuff on
that piano, but then again, I am a beginner, so I don't know if it's more
the piano or more me not having trained ears yet. I know lots of
families with much newer pianos, should I try to hook up with one of them
and maybe work it out with them to practice my tuning on it?<br>
<br>
Matthew<br><br>
<b><i>BobDavis88@aol.com</i></b> wrote:
<dl>
<dd>Matthew writes:
<dd><font face="arial">When I tune the temperament octave (A3-A4), it
needs to be a 4:2 octave, correct? </font><br><br>
</dl>No. Read the many replies which said that it should usually be wider
than that.
<dl>
<dd><font face="arial">And one way to test this octave is to play the A
two octaves above the lower note as the test key, to hear the partials in
the octave, am I right?</font><br><br>
</dl>Not exactly, but read Don Rose's comments on ghosting.
<dl>
<dd><font face="arial"> If the octave you are testing has no beat
whatsoever, you have a perfect temperament octave, is this
true?</font><br><br>
</dl>No. There is no such thing as a beatless octave. An octave which is
not beating at one level, such as 4:2, will be beating at all other
coincident partials, such as 2:1, 6:3, 8:4. The higher the beatless
coincident is in the chain, the wider the octave. A good compromise
octave is usually pretty quiet, though, <br>
<br>
Matthew,<br>
<br>
If you have kept this trail of posts on octave tuning, please go back and
re-read it, and the links to which you were referred, including the ones
to the AccuTuner manual Appendices F and H. People are happy to spend
time helping you, but you've got to do your homework and read the
replies. At the risk of repetition, I include, directly below, a copy of
my post from last week on this subject:<br>
Bob Davis<br>
-------------<br>
Matthew's original question was how to tune a 4:2 octave. Several people,
myself included, sent the tests, aural and visual. Whether that [meaning
4:2] is appropriate for the temperament octave on a particular piano is a
second question. Tuning so that "the 10th is just noticeably faster
than the third" might produce a good width of octave, but it is NOT
a 4:2. [It's wider] <br>
<br>
A clean 4:2 octave IS wide at 2:1, and narrow at 6:3. Most aural tuners
naturally gravitate towards a temperament octave that is very slightly
wide of 4:2 ("the 10th is just noticeably faster than the
third"), which will be substantially wide of 2:1 and a tiny narrow
of 6:3. This gives an octave that is pretty clean-sounding, and produces
fifths which are pretty clean and fourths that aren't too trashy. Any
octave size can be divided into 12 equal half steps. A true 4:2 octave
will produce cleaner fourths and more movement in the fifths, and on most
pianos will be unnecessarily narow. However, on some pianos with high
inharmonicity, a wide temperament octave added to a clean octave below,
will produce a double octave that is too noisy. It's a balancing act.
<br><br>
<br>
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