Tunings, Temperaments

Seeker

I found this video superbly done and highly informative although you will have to watch it on YouTube so he can continue surviving as an independent content creator. [(
I found the creator, Naochika Sogabe, to be a wonderful musician, and he has put a lot of effort into explaining temperament issues in an engaging way. You might also note why he only streams his music on YouTube and eschews Spotify. As another independent musician, I share his pain. In any case, I hope you find some value in watching this video.

twocats

Thanks for sharing! I thought the picture of the waves was particularly illuminating.

I'm planning to have a slight temperament put on my piano at the next tuning. My old tech had to retire and he had this own temperament, and since then I've been able to hear the crunchy thirds and sometimes other intervals (we've been trying different amounts of stretch and it affects different intervals) of ET. My current tech said he had a client who liked the slight temperament; fingers crossed!

clavierhaus

We have been blessed with the existence of the Well Tempered Clavier for more than 300 years now and it was groundbreaking in its concept of equal temperament throughout all major and minor keys, completely obliterating any notion of preferrable keys for certain interval tunings.

Not only that: These days we are blessed with technology that enables us to skip all beat counting and screwing around with weighing certain intervals, rechecking every 4th, 5th and major 3rds every couple of notes, praying that it's somewhat correct. That technology is so advanced that it calculates the inharmonicity of each individual instrument and adapt the necessary stretch for each individual note on the fly in absolute perfection.

And yet people talk about individual temperaments as if Bach had never existed, human ear imperfection was fiction and ETDs an invention of the evil.

Seeker

clavierhaus And yet people talk about individual temperaments as if Bach had never existed, human ear imperfection was fiction and ETDs an invention of the evil.

True, but not me. I don't feel that way at all. I tune my own pianos with Hakki's PiaTune and an iPad ( - an ETD-). I like the way the 3rds ring more from step to step through the initial temperament setting octave. That said, for all we have gained in being able to play in many keys, we HAVE lost some of the aural spice which differentiated keys using different temperaments. Listening to Sogabe's lute playing, I am aware that things sound DIFFERENT though even with a very well trained pair of ears as a musician and a tuner, I was NOT able to identify just HOW they were different. I found his explanation/thesis that there were lute composer players who used the wolf tones expressively to be fascinating.

In any event, I hope folks find his presentation informative as I did. He doesn't dive all the way down into the details that would drive a tuner's discussion. Rather, I think he gave enough detail for the "lay audience" to grasp the essence of what he has found to matter as he plays music from the period before the adoption of equal temperament.

Peace.

JohnCW

clavierhaus We have been blessed with the existence of the Well Tempered Clavier for more than 300 years now and it was groundbreaking in its concept of equal temperament throughout all major and minor keys, completely obliterating any notion of preferrable keys for certain interval tunings.

Calling a 'spade a spade' the above is just completely wrong. From Wikipedia "A Bach Temperament refers to the way the composer Johann Sebastian Bach tuned his harpsichords and clavichords for the interpretation, among other pieces, of his masterpiece Das wohltemperirte Clavier (1722 / 1740-1742). There exists little certainty on how this temperament is structured. Bach did not leave written instructions on how he tuned. He was famous for tuning his keyboard in a swift and easy way, but it is not clear how. It should also be kept in mind that Bach's musical education was based on the meantone, the "dominating" keyboard tuning during the Baroque period (ca. 1600 to ca. 1750)."

However one thing can be certain, Bach did not tune his instruments in Equal Temperament.

twocats

I definitely hear the thirds and/or sixths being off with ET, even with my current tech using the inharmonicity calculator for my piano to calculate the optimal stretch. I miss the sweetness of my old tech's tuning and hope trying out things with my new tech we can figure out the best recipe for a good tuning!

Seeker

twocats A few thoughts on hearing the thirds and sixths being "off". You might do a few tests, which even if you can't hear beats as well as your tech, could be informative.

7 - 8 - 9 - 10 are the bat rates for F-A, F-D, G-E, C-E with F being F3 (the one below middle C).
You should hear things beating incrementally more quickly..

Another test is to play, chromatically, a rising series of major thirds starting at F3. Each step up should beat a bit faster than its predecessor.

If the temperament 8ve on your piano passes those tests, then you have a well tuned ET temperament 8ve.
The next place to look is for the "stretch". You can do a variety of checks yourself. Start with 10ths, 8ves and listen to how things progress.

Love to hear your findings. Post a recording hear of the tests and folks might be able to help.

twocats

Seeker currently my piano has a non-optimal stretch... we've been playing around with that to deal with the stuff I'm hearing. It's a bit of a long story. Thank you for your suggestions but I don't really have time to look at that as I have quite a lot on my practice schedule 🙂 But there are two other things we may try and if I still don't have a tuning that I'm happy about I'm willing to put more effort into it!

twocats

clavierhaus You must now contact the "moderators" and tell them that my reply is offensive and not nice. Best way to have it removed so you can stay in your uninformed comfort zone.

The best way to not have your comments be moderated is to stop being offensive and to be nice. I wasn't the person who reported your comment on the other thread but I did agree that it was inappropriate.

JohnCW

clavierhaus Until we finally got to ETD that did away with approximations and did the real thing on the fly.

Best you stick to a subject you actually know something about. Good aural tuners have been tuning accurate Equal Temperament for at least 100 years, long before a computer could even be imagined. All an ETD does is codify and simplify the principals aural tuners have used for decades.

If you actually want to learn something about the development of various temperaments over time till the methodology for an accurate ET was published by Howard Willet Pyle in 1906, try reading the 'bible' on the subject "The Perfection of Eighteenth Century Temperament, The Lost Art of Nineteenth-Century Temperament, and The science of Equal Temperament" by Owen Jorgensen. A good bedtime read, being only 3 inches thick.

navindra

clavierhaus You must now contact the "moderators" and tell them that my reply is offensive and not nice. Best way to have it removed so you can stay in your uninformed comfort zone.

Humor is entirely allowed!

I get it, I've been in the middle of intellectual arguments where nicety is apparently not an option. I've seen corporate cultures where nice gets laughed out of the room. I've even been in the middle of tech arguments on PW where I'm not proud of my interactions in retrospect.

Is that what PianoTell culture should be like? Why? I, and many others, cherish the friendly vibe here. I think it allows this site to be some different. The Vienna thread is simply an amazing example of that — without that thread, I would not feel the sense of wonder for Vienna that I do now.

With that said, I'm all for light touch moderation, the line can be ambiguous at times, but sometimes it's really not.

Once piece of feedback I received is that I shouldn't edit flagged posts. It's preferable to hide the post temporarily, send feedback, and ask the author to edit the post themselves (or retract it). I think that's a good piece of feedback for the future and we can make that official so that nobody is surprised when it happens.

Nightowl

navindra Light touch moderation is great, and hopefully will be sufficient for most people.

I didn't see the comments that were deleted on the Vienna thread, but it was a really interesting discussion and the information that was posted by @clavierhaus provided great insight into how things are, from the perspective of people who own piano stores.

The concept of piano "temperament" is completely alien to me, but it's ironic that on a thread with that word in the title, some people seemed to have got a little bit temperamental in their response. I don't contact the moderators or flag posts when I see posts which I disagree with - I either ignore them or respond by putting my view across in a (hopefully) measured way. I may disagree strongly with someone's words, but free speech is important and I will defend anyone's right to say what they think, even if their words offend me. I don't have an inalienable right to never be offended, but I do have a choice how to respond to words that peeve me.