<HTML>In a message dated 12/30/00 10:53:36 AM Central Standard Time, pianolover88@hotmail.com (pianolover 88) writes: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">Hi ed, I'm just curious, if you get a reaction like that to your "modified" tuning, why not tune ALL your customer's pianos like that? Also, can I program this tuning into my SAT II? Thanks!</BLOCKQUOTE> I thank Ed for his post because after all, this is really my area of greatest interest and expertise.  Ironically, I too had an experience with a Steinway L yesterday that is worth telling about. I received a referral to this very nice, talented lady who lives in a nice house in a town about 20 miles away.  She had bought her Steinway from the local dealer about a year ago and after a year of being less than satisfied with it, she ended up trying my services. Now, I am not opposed to talking to my clients about the difference from Equal Temperament (ET) and the way I usually tune a piano in the Equal Beating Victorian Temperament (EBVT) that I designed 9 years ago, I have just become so used to providing it as the usual way that I tune a piano and I am generally far too busy to get involved with a discussion that will severely cut into the time I have available.  Most of the time, I "just do it", as they say.   I also do not consider it to be a "modified" tuning as you put it.  That implies that there is only one "normal" way to tune a piano and what I do is some kind of alternative.  While I understand that probably most people think this way, I have long ago reached the conclusion that Equal Temperament (ET) is but one choice and even though it is the most common choice, it is the very last choice that I would ever make. I had to make this trip in yet another snowstorm, there now being well over 3 feet of snow on the ground here.  It is very cold outside.  This means that just to go outside, you have to put on a hat, heavy coat, gloves and boots.   In weather like this, you have to take your boots, hat, gloves and coat off as soon as you get inside.  The lady gave me a towel to wipe off the snow that was half way up my legs.  So, just getting there, getting out of the car, getting inside and getting up to the piano is an odyssey in itself. Now, because it is so cold, the air in most environments here is severely dry and so even though the piano had been tuned only 3 months before, it was nearly 20 cents flat.  She also said before I even got started that there was a range of the piano that sounded "dull" to her.  It seemed to be the treble section and after I listened to it, I determined that it was indeed too soft sounding from A4-A6.  I said, OK, that is a Voicing problem and I'll be happy to take care of that but in order to do so, I'll have to go get something out of my car. "Oh phooey!" she said.  But she went to get my coat she had hung up, I put it, the hat, the boots and the gloves back on and went out to get my hammer hardening solution and the applicator bottle.  When I came back in, she immediately asked if that was something I was going to "spray" on the hammers.  I could see immediately that I would have to explain that this is what Steinway concert technician would do and that it would not ruin or cause any unalterable effect. This has been a recent topic.  There are all kinds of voicing methods and theories.  I always look for methods that give me the most, best, quickest, easiest, least risky, etc., results.  New Steinway hammers are known for being on the soft side.  Particularly in a home piano like this one, the thinking is that once the hammers have been played and need shaping, the tone will develop of its own accord as the string cuts into a harder portion of the hammer. There are however, many instances where some "instant gratification" is desired.  This can be at a concert performance.  The great Steinway Technician, Franz Mohr was often called upon to "do *something*" and being a very gracious man, he always found a way.  He told about having tuned for Alicia de la Rocha and having essentially the same problem very shortly before a performance. He got the idea to use some very dilute keytop & acetone solution and put it right on the striking surface of the hammer.  It would be dry in 20 minutes, he reasoned.  After the concert, Alicia exclaimed, "It was a miracle!"   Franz, being a devoutly religious man, liked that kind of compliment. Taking a cue from this kind of experiment/experience, it makes a whole lot of sense to me to use this idea in many circumstances.  My solution is very dilute, it looks like whey or what skim milk might look like if you cut it half with water.  With my applicator, I merely put a scant drop or two on each striking surface to the right side.  I leave the left side as untouched as possible because this is the part of the hammer used when soft pedaling. It took all of 3 minutes at most to treat A4-A6.  I put the action back in a prepared to tune.  I did notice that there was a remarkable amount of wear on the hammers for only being a year old and that the spacing needed correction.  It is common for the whole action to start to drift to the left because the packing on the left side of the action cavity begins to compress.  This leaves the centering of the hammers opposite of the way the should be, slightly to the right for maximum soft pedal effects. It might be said that the "proper" thing to do would have been to file and align those hammers and see what kind of tone resulted.  But obviously, the circumstances did not permit that.  I had 4 more appointments and she had to leave in about 2 hours.  To produce some kind of good, positive results in the usual time it is considered to take for a piano tuning is what was incumbent upon me, not doing what is theoretically "best".   I decided that when I had finished tuning the piano, I would suggest to her that I do the filing, alignment, flange tightening and touch up regulation the next time she wants the piano serviced if she is pleased with the results so far.  In all likelihood, the filing I would do would go beneath and strip away any hardener I had applied regardless of whether my efforts had produced little, just right or too much effect. The tuning needed to be at pitch and done very well.  This was not the time to say that I could only produce a rough tuning and that I would have to come back.  The tuning pins were tight, springy and "snappy" as in the recent post by Phil.  I had no time to complain about this to anyone, I just had to knuckle down and get the job done. I used my usual custom program in my SAT for a Steinway L.  I did the initial pitch raise of the entire piano in about 15 minutes, "snap, crackle, pop".   Putting the strip mutes right back in, I went through each section of the piano again twice.  One rough tuning and one fine tuning.  Any stubbornness was ignored in the rough tuning.  No sense fighting with springy pins.  After the rough tuning, I played "chopsticks" (loud, hard test blows) through the entire section to make whatever was unsettled reveal itself.  This allowed for a quick and easy fine tuning with extra time needing only to be spent on the occasional stubborn strings and pins.  The result was a performance level tuning. She could hear when I was finished and came out.  I told her about the recommendations I had and put the fallboard assembly back in, putting a little grease on the keyblock lag screws which had been so tight you could hardly turn them.  They went in easily. She sat down and got out a book that I saw was Chopin literature but I didn't see exactly what.  She started playing some of the very advanced literature and spoke once, saying "yes" then again as she played a passage into the treble and exclaimed in a raised voice, "YES"!!!, with a big, wide eyed grin on her face. She played just a bit more, then stopped to write out my check and to ask for my card.  Just as with Ed, she added a nice little chunk over and above what I had asked for.  I had arrived at 10 am, nearly to the minute in spite of the weather and I saw on my watch that it was now 11:30, just time enough for me to make it to the next appointment which was scheduled for Noon. Now, the whole concept of the difference I make in the way I tune the temperament and octaves is about as subtle as the voicing difference I made.   As it turns out, I was lucky in that my hardener brought up the tone just the right amount without the least bit of any "ping-y" sound.  That is real voicing efficiency: 3 minutes and no needling needed to fix any too bright sounds. I, of course, know about the "Best Broadwood" Temperament and have tried it but long ago found it to be less desirable than what I could come up with myself.  The "Best" merely means that this is the one temperament among the Broadwood Factory styles that is closest to ET.  It is called "Best" because the idea at the time was to really tune ET but the habits of the tuners of that era always produced a remnant of the Well-Tempered Tuning style that was most common in the 18th and early part of the 19th Centuries.  Skip Becker RPT who has written a long series of articles on the history of tuning prefers the "Usual Broadwood" which is a little more unequal. The EBVT I designed has about the same inequality as one of the Broadwood styles but is far more meticulously and purposefully crafted rather than being just the results of certain habitually used patterns that were not fully understood.  It retains 4 pure 5ths the way early 19th Century Well-Temperaments do and is loaded with the Equal Beating (EB) phenomenon which produces effects that virtually no other Victorian era temperament has. It causes the piano to have a distinctly different character for each and every one of the 24 Major and minor keys and yet produces no sounds that the "contemporary ear" usually find objectionable.  In short, I consider it to be a distinct refinement in the way the modern piano should be tuned, not a modification for some specific or unusual circumstance. I also use the Equal Beating principal to tune the octaves, something which no program such as the FAC program or any of the calculated programs for other Electronic Tuning can quite match.  It is however, quite simple and easy to do and in my opinion, produces the very best compromise by providing a solution to the two most fundamental problems there are in tuning the modern piano:  The Pythagorean Comma or in other words, the discrepancy between the results of tuning pure octaves and pure 5ths (the reason why *tempering* is necessary to begin with) and the other major obstacle, Inharmonicity.  I use, in fact, the second dilemma in order to mitigate the first.  I literally fight fire with fire. Unfortunately, no one can understand and put these concepts into practice by using an FAC type program and that is why I do not.  So, Terry, there's nothing wrong with trying out what Ed suggests and has done but if you really want to get everything out of the piano that it has to offer, you'll have to learn to do some creative aural tuning.  You can use your SAT to record and preserve what you do, the way I do but you can never expect to get those results from a calculated program. I'm glad I was able to offer you the referral to my sister who badly needed her piano tuned when I could not be there immediately for her.  She was quite pleased with your work, no doubt about that.  Most people who listen to a piano I have tuned say they cannot recognize the difference between my tuning and ET although they consistently say it is a superb sound.  It takes a direct comparison like those that were done at the Convention in Providence and at a Regional meeting in Chicago where we compared the EBVT with Virgil Smith RPT's ET. The effect is subtle but inviting.  It consistently produces the wide eyed grin and exclamations of pleasure that Ed talked about in his post.  That is why I do it.  It is my feeling that it is the very best sound that I am capable of producing.  Therefore, I have every reason to do it, as my own personal level of standard practice.  It makes the pianos I service have a quality that is at least as good as, if not a cut above the very best that is available anywhere. I'll be out in Southern California within the next few months and will do the EBVT for that Disney producer both in his home and in the production studio.   I'm hoping that some great things will come about by his experiencing the difference in what I am able to do and the way pianos are usually tuned these days. Bill Bremmer RPT Madison, Wisconsin</HTML>