Man, this got deep in a hurry! We have a concert coming up where we have to do a specialty prep on a Bosendorfer grand for a concert. We can do that and the guys know exactly what to do to make it happen. We also have a bunch of tunings for 8th grade graduations, outdoor high school graduations, you name it...coming up. In all honesty, we'll spend less tuning time on the latter than we will on the former. The temperament will make little difference in a hot gym.
Residential tunings (as we call them) are sometimes just as the little cartoon depicted sometimes. Humor always has to have a bit of truth to it, and that definitely had that truth! Personally, I thought it was great! I wish whoever it was would come up with skit about doing a professional concert job! That could be funny, also!
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Ted Rohde
Central Illinois
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-07-2019 18:32
From: David Pinnegar
Subject: The Piano Tuner is here
Oh. I haven't wanted to bore everyone having started a thread or two about historical temperaments and getting Fred jumping up and down telling me that modern tuning has been in use since Montal in 1832.
Briefly, as a result of Martin Renshaw's work in the 1960s and 70s and Padgham's book "The Well Tempered Organ" in the 1980s I was aware of organ tuning. Upon listening to a Chopin recital I had the hunch that the organ tuning systems applied more generally and to pianos in the 19th century. Fred would like to tell me otherwise and so yesterday doing an event that probably Ed Foote and Carl Radford and others have probably done in the past, four musicians joined me on instruments that I'd tuned, Alexandra Kremakova performing Sweelinck and Philip Glass on one of my well tuned pianos and Jong-Gyung Park performing Berg.
I've been focusing on temperaments with enough perfect fifths in the scale, but not too many, to create numbers of better thirds than equal temperament and in particular both Kellner and Kirnberger III really shine. The central three octaves have to be tuned without any stretch at all, best done with a machine, and the octaves below tuned to the quint and the 2 octave higher harmonic, and the top end with the usual amount of stretch. Because then we get the notes and harmony in the middle three octaves with 7 perfect fifths, beatless, and supported on a bass that's beatless with the middle octave harmonics, a wonderful purity is obtained in the sound. Stillness, certainty, clean are all terms that can be applied to it. Because it's so clean, out of tuneness brings a dirtiness to the sound. It's really audible. The clinical cleanliness of the sound can be almost crystalline.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JF3YzTG7lU As soon as unisons start to drift or notes shift it's so obvious.
Best wishes
David P
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David Pinnegar, B.Sc., A.R.C.S.
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+44 1342 850594
Original Message------
David P. wrote of "other tuning systems". What are you referring to?
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Terry Farrell
Farrell Piano Service, Inc.
Brandon, Florida
terry@farrellpiano.com
813-684-3505
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