[pianotech] Stretch in tuning

[David Andersen]

Exactly, Ron. Pianos aren't tunable in any absolute sense; tuning is a custom, 
artisanal, MUSICAL, inexact art and craft. Neck down. NOT neck up.
The body, having paid attention---hopefully---knows how to tune.
Simple. Anything but easy, given the self-scripted, endlessly repeating self- critique, but eminently doable and repeatable. Surrender to the sound and your body---no matter what the tool is.
DA

Sent from my iPhone

On May 26, 2012, at 5:38 AM, Ron Nossaman <rnossaman at cox.net> wrote:

> On 5/25/2012 7:01 PM, David Lawson wrote:
>> This is a subject that has haunted me for ever. We all know that piano
>> tuning is subjected to all sorts of rights and wrongs, as there are so
>> many opinions out there. The stretching of octaves is,(as you say),
>> during get togethers, mentioned in passing, and then dropped.
> 
> This confused me for some time. Didn't the inharmonicity of piano strings guarantee a pure sounding octave was stretched? One out of state expert who came in to replace a set of hammers on one of the university's Steinways (gotta have a Steinway expert, you know) even carefully explained to me how he "started stretching" octaves at the beginning of the capo section, and went up to about eight beats per second in the octave at c-7/8! I heard that tuning, and wasn't awfully convinced, nor was I awfully convinced by the tunings I followed that were flat through octave 5-6, and were nearly a semitone sharp at c-8. I never had anything resembling decent tuning instruction, so it took me some time to piece a sensible picture together from what I heard from others, read, and found in others' tunings. Learning something about more meaningful interval tests (piecemeal) from better educated aural tuners finally cleared up a lot of misinformation and the process became a lot more sensible to me. The closer I get to understanding how all this works, however, the more I realize that pianos aren't entirely tunabe.
> Ron N