It's been ages since I took the time to tune my pianos. Let's just say I got sidetracked by a thing or two. 😃

I pulled my upright out of circulation recently, and this labor day weekend, I was finally able to retune it from top to bottom. And now it is sweeeet. 🎶

The unisons are absolutely beautiful. All I do is put on noise cancellation headphones and let my eyes do the tuning using pianoscope's freeze frame feature. I blithely follow this process, but at the end it's just an absolute joy to experience the beautiful crispness of each note.

Over a year back, when I first started working on this instrument, I was using equal temperament with great success. Then I experimented with Bill Bremmer's Equal Beating Victorian temperament, Coleman 11, and later Koval Victorian temperament.

I always knew I was going to come back to EBVT III. There's just something very pleasing about the resulting resonance with this temperament, and musically, it feels very different from my grand, which is parked in equal temperament.

With EBVT III, I love nothing better than to play notes in various scales with the pedal down... experiencing the luscious resonance and rich musical character is a pure joy.

I'd like to think piano tuning is getting easier for me, but sometimes, I make the same dumb mistakes, which can be truly aggravating.

I dropped my mutes into the piano action once or twice... again. This time I had the wire handles on, so I could fish them out with chopsticks, but I should have tied string to the loops as well.

Then I had the terrible accident of whacking the side of my piano with an impact hammer. I usually put a piece of cloth on the side when I reach the right side, so I'm quite mad at myself for making that mistake again.

Here's the set up:

Now visualize this CyberHammer, forged by Thor Nate himself, swinging all the way to the right and whacking the side of the piano. 😫

Live and relearn. 😮‍💨

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Beach L168, Wish, baCh, WOW Petrof, Fake Steinway, VS
TIME

    After reading this I want to try different temperaments too!

    Last time I tuned my Yamaha upright I had only two mutes left and dropped one inside the piano. I thought, where are the other mutes? I looked inside the Thürmer and I found all of them. I didn't even remember I have so many mutes. 😆

      navindra do you think you'll record it? Would you try that tuning on your grand? I'd be super interested to hear a comparison of different tunings on the same piano played by the same pianist!

          Josephine That's hilarious! And actually makes me feel a little bit better about my own mute situation. 😆

          twocats Maybe! I've never recorded my upright before, but if I ever do get down to recording The Entertainer from Alfred's, I might just do it on the upright. It would be a new challenge for me, for sure.

          I'm definitely nervous about publicly sharing an alternate tuning done by myself, but I have blind tested it on a professional tuner who thought it was quite good without knowing what it was. 🙂

          My grand... I think I found its voice already. It sounds amazing to me on ET, so I'm not too tempted to rock that boat. It might just be a good idea to let this one settle in where it's happy.

          When I first began to tune, I didn't have a whole lot of confidence in my abilities. So I let a professional tune the grand for a planned recording... and I quickly regretted it. I restored my own tuning ASAP and put my recording with my tuning out there. I made some mistakes which I tried to address in a later recording/tuning.

          I had originally planned to trade in the upright, but dealers were not interested, sight unseen. So now, I get to make the most of that with these musical experiments.

          It's the piano everyone loves, while I get to baby the grand. 😃

          --
          Beach L168, Wish, baCh, WOW Petrof, Fake Steinway, VS
          TIME

                navindra will The Entertainer show off the alternate tuning well? I think maybe one of those pretty pieces you recorded for your grand would highlight the differences better 🙂

                    twocats That's true!

                    Currently, my goal when recording is to strive for something I feel is musically or artistically interesting or I have some particular idea I want to showcase. So I've experimented with different tunings in recordings before for such artistic reasons.

                    I'd have to mull it over and plan it all very carefully. It would be particularly tough to do this side-by-side on acoustic pianos... and then would it be musically interesting?

                    I did experiment with a side-by-side once, but this was with a piece which was full of repetition and that was one way I thought of to bring some variation to it using tech in real-time.

                    To get back to the topic, I do have a draft of a tuning how-to and if I ever make sufficient progress on that, I might supplement it with videos that could compare the different tunings... but that's a very tall order indeed for me! 😃

                    --
                    Beach L168, Wish, baCh, WOW Petrof, Fake Steinway, VS
                    TIME

                        navindra So I've experimented with different tunings in recordings before for such artistic reasons.

                        Your playing and the sound of the piano is remarkably like the actual Sarah McLachlan track!

                        navindra I might supplement it with videos that could compare the different tunings... but that's a very tall order indeed for me!

                        Haha I understand! It's very easy for me to ask 😂

                        My tech is coming in about a month and I'm undecided about whether to try perfect 12ths with as little stretch as possible again (he's convinced the first time was jinxed with home heating issues), or a tuning with mild temperament.

                            Though not perfect, it's nice that a lot of keyboards out there can try alternative tunings pretty easily... and if you don't like 'em, one little click and you're back to ET. I don't know of any keyboards that have that exact alternative tuning but most of them have a dozen or more.

                            Have known a few people who love the EBVT and a few people who really do not. It's something each person has to decide for themselves. Not a fan personally but if it trips your trigger, great! (no sarcasm intended)

                              Bellyman Though not perfect, it's nice that a lot of keyboards out there can try alternative tunings pretty easily... and if you don't like 'em, one little click and you're back to ET.

                              It would be fun to get access to one (without having to invest in a whole digital setup) to experiment!

                                  twocats, about the only thing I can think of there is finding a piano store near you that has some decent digital keyboards that you could spend a few hours playing with. During times that are not very busy, they might not mind you doing that.

                                    twocats I’ve done this with my DP but I don’t think it’s necessarily all that useful. I have a Clavinova. I was at one point working on a Mozart sonata in B flat major, not the world’s most exotic key, and decided to try one of the programmed temperaments that seemed like it might be close-ish to a Mozart tuning temperament (I can’t remember the one I chose specifically, but I did read a little about the different temperament selections, so my decision was not totally random). When I played the Mozart sonata, I got to some chords, and they sounded like nails being dragged across a chalkboard. Not spicy… terrible. My teacher at the time had some knowledge of Yamaha processes, and when I told him about this, he said not to bother with the alternative temperaments, as they were programmed in as something of an afterthought and there wasn’t a lot of thought/care put into the effort.

                                    This is in contrast to a number of YouTube videos I’ve seen, by people who are clearly knowledgeable about historical temperaments, who demonstrate how these historical temperaments really affect the musical experience in a positive way. There’s no nails scraping a chalkboard.

                                    So I gave up on the unequal Clavinova temperaments, but I still find historical temperaments intriguing. That said, when my piano tuner comes, I just let him do his thing, and I’m always happy the results. I’ve never asked him about his preferred temperaments 🙂.

                                      Historical temperaments are definitely not all the same. Some are actually fairly close to ET, some dramatically different and can give some of those fingernails on the chalkboard. If a person is set in a specific key, sometimes one of those tunings can sound pretty good. I am all over the place for keys and do not stick with any key all that long. (It actually is something I find irritating. "Key fatigue" seems to be a thing for some people.) As I type this, I can't think of a single key that I do not spend at least a chorus or B section in on a fairly regular basis. And I don't want that crunchy sound showing up where I don't want it.

                                      There are a certain number of "beats" contained within an octave and you HAVE to put them somewhere. If you take them out of one place to make something "smoother", you HAVE to put them back in somewhere else which will make that "less smooth". There is no free lunch.

                                      That said, if there is some alternative you like, enjoy! The EBVT is said to be fairly mild and not nearly as offensive as some will be in some keys.

                                      FWIW, on some keyboards, the tuning is very customizable, down to the individual note. I've not gone too far down that bunny trail as I'm an ET guy. But hey, to each their own.