learning temperaments (ws EBVT-)

[A440A@AOL.COM]

John writes:
<<I must

devote the necessary time to learning various temperaments. I have

Jorgensen's book, so it is doable whenever I can find the time. I have only

a SAT II, so any HTs will be done aurally, which is fine by me anyway.>>

Greetings, 
   This brings up a worthwhile point. Time vs. Money, or, "How am I supposed 
to learn all these different temperaments?"  You don't HAVE to devote a lot 
of time to hear the various temperaments.  
   Jorgensen's 'Tuning" coupled with the progammable tuning machine has 
dramatically lowered the cost of temperament exploration.  A working tech can 
now easily produce the tunings found in the piano's historical record without 
the huge investment of time previously required.   
     Whereas Barbour's work is all that is really needed to tune in the 
applicable styles, the time required to master a working repertoire of 
temperaments has, for over 50 years, been too high for the vast majority of 
techs to justify.  Especially for what has been an extremely limited market.  
(We do tune for money,no?) 
     The ability to create well temperaments electronically has, in the last 
5 years, resulted in a huge increase in the number of tuners tuning non-ET in 
various venues.  There are techs that are tuning these aurally, but from 
informal surveys of my classes, they appear to represent about 20 % of the 
techs involved.  
      I tried the aural instructions from "Tuning" before finding out what 
those numbers at the back of the chapters meant.  Once I used the correction 
figures Owen gives, I found that I was producing tunings that sounded just 
like my aural efforts, the differences being so slight that they required 
careful measurement to actually find.  From a musical standpoint, the 
differences were moot.  
         So,  how to use a SATII?  Simply use an existing tuning for a given 
piano and use the pitch change calculator for the note's alteration.  If the 
C's need to be sharpened from ET by 6 cents, just put that +6 in (via the 
calculator) and tune all the C's, zero that offset, and put in the next 
offset and tune all of those notes.  It is a little less laborious than 
tuning chromatically and changing up or down for each note, though that is 
another approach.  
    Using a machine on a smaller piano requires the same compensation that an 
ET would, so I would suggest using a custom program instead of the FAC as a 
base for the offsets to work with.   
       It is also worth noting that tuning aurally tunes the tuner as well as 
the piano, so I would encourage anybody that is interested in non-ET tunings 
to work through a few of them aurally first, it does educate and sensitize 
the ear of the tuner. ( I don't suppose that is so different than our 
widely-ascribed-to belief that even an ET tuner should be able to tune by ear 
before wielding the machine). 
Regards, 
Ed Foote RPT.