standards

[Richard West]

Phil & All,

Phil Bondi wrote:

"In my opinion, the larger and better scaled the piano, the more options you have for stretching and narrowing, depending on taste"

This is an interesting statement and gets at the heart of what I'm trying to explore.  First of all it's my belief that the better the piano, the more clearly the physics of the scaling comes through and hence the more clearly the piano itself dictates what it wants.  "Taste" has very little to do with it, in my opinion.  With the sophisticated aural checks, and ETD's available to professional piano technicians, it seems to me that it should be possible to define a standard for concert grand tuning that minimizes resorting to "taste".

My arguement against using customer or even technicians' "taste" as a criteria is that it's so vague.  I think it opens the door for imprecision.  If I ask whether a person tunes pure 5ths in the center of the piano, that seems to me to be a fairly precise parameter and it has consequences when tuning the upper and lower extremes of the piano.  If I ask whether a person likes the 3rds, 10ths, and 17ths to increase in speed by an amount equal to the difference between similar temperament thirds, then that seems like a precise way of describing how the 3rd, 10th and 17th compare.  Unfortunately most technicians say they have to get faster, and leave it at that, end of description.  

Using just those basic tools above, takes the tuning to the last octave and 1/2.  If I ask whether a person tunes the last octave and 1/2 using pure 4:1 double octaves, that again is fairly precise, especially if one uses an ETD set to match the double octave below.  Tuning the double octave with a treble stretch as descrbed above, seems to me to be the widest stretch that a piano can accomodate and be consistently tuned. There simply are no good checks for the last 1/2 octave 7 other that 17ths and double octaves.  Checks that rely on triple octaves and arpeggios don't seem to me to be as accurate and therefore make the top octaves inconsistent.  In addition tuning octave 7 as pure double octaves to the notes below octave 7, enhances the singing area of the piano because  the notes in octaves 4 & 5 are supported by sympathetic strings in octave 7. 

In terms of satisfying customers' "taste" what is that?  If a person doesn't tune professionally, what real criteria are there for "taste?" Without an accurate description of a set of tuning criteria, what is taste but guesswork.  Using "taste" as a criterion opens pandoras box to untrained ears who, like untrained artists, can say, "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like."  Or there will be technicians who develop their own "standard" in the vacuum of no standard.

What a person does with smaller grands, spinets and consoles is one thing (we all know there are often big compromises that have to be made), but concert grands announce how they want to be tuned.  At least that's my thesis here and I'm trying to find out if I'm a lone wolf on this, or whether we can really determine a more clearly defined concert grand tuning that doesn't rely on "taste."


Richard West