tuning <> TUNING

[Isaac OLEG SIMANOT]

Ed , I answered you privately too, because these things are may be not so
interesting for others.

I fairly understand that some tuners have to rediscover that tempering a
tuning with the aid of a one partial only match lend to bland sound and
frustration.

Having more life in the fifths is of course good for the music, but from my
humble opinion it is absolutely not necessary to push that point so far, the
piano have its own flaws that can be used to support its own tonal
preferences.

The demonstration with the CD did not convince me, may be because the tuning
standard used was not what I consider a good sounding tuning, (nor the way
the music is played, but it is another question).

You where probably with a piano in bad shape, I think there is more than
enough hard work to do to obtain top level sounding pianos with regulation,
standard tuning, standard voicing, and this ability is not enough present in
the musical word at this moment, so it is of course very interesting for
historical purpose and for tuning old sounding pianos or instruments, but it
seems to me that the modern piano need very much more work before these
refinements are to be used.

As the use of HT is not a help in hearing what the instrument is needing in
term of voicing and tone building, and they give a false impression to
unentrained ears that the instrument is sounding more lively that it is
really, I just want to warn younger tuners that this is not the universal
solution.

It is very hard and a long way to learn to have a very stable a nice sound
on good pianos, we want to have a precise equilibrium in tension between
speaking lengths and other parts of the strings, that is IMO what gives the
better sound and the longer stability in unisons, and having to move the
notes back and forth is simply looking for trouble.

I heard that in the CD, it is exploration work I understand, but on a
recording you can't move things that far - simply no time for that.

The octaves drift, the unisons move, and I said too the piano was in need of
voicing before the takes (ground tone not opening).

That is the way I hear it, and it is frustrating to me.

What I will understand is that pre 19oo pianos will likely be better used
for that purpose.

Regards, hoping I don't break too much netiquette with my posts.

Isaac OLEG

FRANCE