honky tonk tuning

[Stéphane Collin]

Hello Carl.

No dumb questions.  Only dumb answers.

The question you raise makes me think about this : the process of a 
piano going out of tune is an even one, all over the scale, especially 
when it goes about crowned soundboard shrinking and releasing tension of 
the strings.  But this gives a quite even out-of-tune result, I guess 
not similar to the rag-time out of tuneness.  Pin tightness failures 
seem more prominent candidates to cause the effect you are talking 
about.  Then, only a statistical distribution of this condition over the 
compass of the piano could explain the evenness you are talking about.
I really don't believe that anybody ever consciously designed a special 
tuning for rag-time recordings.  But I understand clearly that an in 
tune piano would be here out of aesthetic.

This was my dumb attempt to answer a clever question.

Stéphane Collin.



Carl Teplitski a écrit :

>For some time now, I've been thinking of sending this post
>to the list , to see if there was a definitive answer . I've
>procrastinated,
>because I thought it might be a dumb question.  What I would like to
>know,
>is this. Is the tuning we hear on Rag- Time recordings, a special
>tuning, or
>just a piano which happens to be badly out of tune. I know of course
>that
>many pianos badly out of tune, sound like this, but on these recordings,
>they
>seem to be quite consistent across the keyboard, which leads me to
>believe that
>this piano was tuned exactly for this particular recording.  What I'm
>trying to say is
>that the piano sounds like the out of tuneness seems to be very even
>thru - out.
>If in fact my suspicions are correct, I would be interested in knowing
>what the
>tuning looked like on paper, ( like E.T. , or some of the other tunings
>).
>For instance, how the beats were arrived at.
>
>Carl / Winnipeg.
>
>
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