List, Conrad wanted to see hard evidence of what I was talking about: that most, yes I mean *most* aural tuners actually tune a backwards version of a Well-Tempered Tuning instead of ET but fail to recognize that fact. I have, on a few occasions, documented this phenomenon and once I wrote a post about it. Generally, I am not inclined to go around documenting every shortcoming down that I encounter, I just make a mental note of it. I hesitate to write this down and publish it because I am doing the very same thing I have criticized Conrad for doing: writing a full report on how bad somebody else's work is. But *Enquiring* minds want to know, so here it is. Between my 4th and 5th pianos of the day, I read Conrad's, shall we say, *provacative* post. The first 4 pianos were regular customers, so there was nothing interesting to report. The 5th, however, was an older Kawai Grand, a 6 foot (approx.) with "#650" on the plate. I am not the usual tuner. It had last been done in early September but now was being tuned for a Choir rehearsal and performance Wednesday night. I asked the stage manager a couple of questions and found out who the last tuner was. It is a well-known RPT from my Chapter who has often served as a Delegate to Council, Chapter President and VP and has been in the business many years (15 or so, I think.) I used the Exam program to do this analysis. I first read the tuning as it was, and no surprise to me, it was Reverse Well, as I expected, although it was not one of the more extreme examples of it. I then aurally "straightened it out" into ET, although I NEVER tune ET *except* for Exam or research purposes. I used my own aural ET as a reference tuning. It does not look entirely numerically regular but I have seen "Master Tunings" for Exams that didn't either. I am sure that it would "pass" the Exam at either 100 or with possible 1 error at 97.5. Having said that, I used my own aural ET as a reference and scored the Reverse Well (RW) temperament and my own EBVT against it. Here are the results: (Please note that per the Exam program, all values are read on octave 5 which differs from the FAC program). Note: F3 F#3 G3 G#3 A3 A#3 B3 C4 C#4 D4 D#4 E4 F4 Aural ET: -0.6 -0.6 -1.4 -0.6 0.0 0.4 0.6 -0.6 -1.0 -1.4 -1.5 -0.8 0.6 Reverse Well: -1.0 0.2 -1.3 -0.4 0.0 0.4 1.0 -2.1 -1.6 -0.7 -2.9 -0.1 -2.9 EBVT: 2.5 -2.0 4.0 2.0 0.0 4.5 0.5 4.0 -1.0 0.5 1.5 -2.0 3.5 The Reverse Well scored 82.5. It "passed" the Exam! The "unethical" EBVT scored a lousy 42.5. Pretty bad, eh? I also noticed that the 6th and 7th octaves were very flat, so flat that I had to do 3 passes to get the high treble to hold accurately. Knowing that the tuner who tuned it uses a fork, I guess this confirms the statement made recently by David who claims that if you use a fork, the treble will be flat. I wonder what Conrad did not want hard data to support *that* statement? Of course, this is only one "anecdotal" experience but if you really want me to Conrad, I'll document every time I tune a piano that someone else has tuned before me for a while. If it doesn't turn out to be RW, fine, if it is a good ET, fine, if it turns out to be ET with only a few random errors that do not exhibit a RW pattern, I'll document that too. I'm willing to say this here and now. At least 90% of what I would document will be RW. The piano I tuned for the Temperament Festival in Providence was and I called Jim Coleman over to witness it but he didn't seem to understand exactly what RW was. Likewise, when I went to Chicago to meet again with Virgil Smith, there it was, as sure as the sun rises and sets, the piano is in RW and the treble is so flat that it had to be tuned 3 times to make it hold well enough for a demonstration. As the old skit on Johnny Carson used to say, "Believe it, or STUFF it!" Bill Bremmer RPT Madison, Wisconsin
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC