Bluethner Well Tempered

I almost never use equal temperament with Pianoteq (nor on my upright--it's tuned to "equal beating Victorian temperament"). I usually use Werkmeister III or "well temperament."

Temperament strongly influences resonant behaviour of the strings. Try this:
1) in Pianoteq, depress the Harmonic pedal

2) choose equal temperament
3) play a staccato low C and listen

4) choose another temperament
5) play a staccato low C and listen

6) repeat with different notes, different temperaments

You will hear many things.

Among others :

IN WERKMEISTER, THE WHOLE PIANO IS TUNED AROUND C MAJOR AND ITS MODES.
IN EQUAL, THE WHOLE PIANO IS TUNED AROUND 12 TONES AND A440.

To my mind, this is absolutely huge. It means that different keys and modes have quite different characters in any unequal temperament which can deeply influence the affect of a composition. It means that keys relate to each other in ways that don't exist in equal temperament.

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Once you've found a temperament (and diapason) that suits you, spend some time on Unison Width and Octave Stretching. They will both benefit from adjusting.

No. I have a very cooperative piano tuner. I asked him to tune my piano to a well temperament and he did his research, downloaded this temperament into his strobe thingy, actually practised on a piano at the show room he tunes for, and has been tuning my piano to EBVT for the past six years or so. I'm very pleased with the result and I think we agree that it suits my 1912 piano very well. Mine is the only piano he doesn't tune to equal temperament--no-one else has ever asked him for anything different.

You're probably aware Scala's scales.zip contains 4 Bremmer variants (Shining Brow - named 'bremmer'; EBVT I, II, III - 'bremmer1, 2, 3'). I wasn't, but stimmed-up by this discussion went to his site, listened, and as he says, it sounds *very* well with very varied material.

So I was glad of the Scalas, applied III to Mozart K533 (F major) in Ran Jia's concert from the 2004 Minnesota Competition. This performance won an unscheduled Mozart Prize, and indeed it seems to be an extraterrestrial playing, but with Modartt's Well Temperament applied the slow movement ran into the sours when Mozart does modulation, badly. Not so EBVT III.

So I tried Prokofiev Sonata 2 (notionally D minor), which sets out to give any piano indigestion, and has the tables turned on it by III, gaining an altogether unintended mellowness plus occasional grandeur.

Continuing with Chopin Ballade 1 (G minor, and ET forgot to practise it), 3 Debussy preludes (unassignable) and Mephisto Waltz 1 (E major), all which had ET going full steam and all which Well Temperament soured badly with, this tuning simply did favors to - that's a total range of seven different scales of various descriptions, handled flawlessly.

Thanks a lot for the directions!

I'm not holding out a lot of hope. The problem with using Scala files, of course, is that they simply duplicate the pitch offsets across the keyboard, without regard to inharmonicity, and thus to the kind of interval tuning that  is needed in both the bearing octave and the other octaves. I've tried going through the tuning steps in the PDF on Bremmer's site at http://www.billbremmer.com/ebvt/ myself, but I don't hear the beats as precisely as is needed, and always give up. 

There's another temperament that I wish I could duplicate. Have you heard the sound that David Penninger  is getting from his well temperament? He has a site with many videos of lovely playing on older pianos he's tuned to this temperament.

http://www.youtube.com/user/latribe/fea...9vbJxPhN3Y

(He is with the Hammerwood performance center in the UK, a place that includes a Broadwood museum.)

I started a thread on the PW site after running across these videos by accident. I contacted David and he joined the forum and still posts there from time to time. Some of the links in this thread are now dead or lead to the wrong videos, so if the sound is appealing, it' s best to just search his site. The thread is at http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthre...814/1.html . One video stands out, for me. I may have posted this on this forum before, Sorry, if so, but it may bear another listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2IXOfn...ature=plcp

The recording quality is less than ideal and the piano is old, but the effect of the temperament makes me listen to this often.

Sorry to drag us off topic. I thought that, since you liked the EBVT, you might like this too. (But David won't reveal the exact tuning for the temperament, which is his own.)

Well, I'm not sure that he's just using the Lehman temperament. I see that, in his post on your first link, he mentions an interest in tuning to the scribble without turning it upside down. 

In response to my question about the temperament in the videos, David said that "It's a well temperament slightly less strong than Kirnberger III and near to Werkmeister." I'm not sure if that description fits the Lehman temperament or a right-side up version of the scribble. Anyone?

(And yes, it's "David Pinnegar." I misspelled his name in my previous post.)

I do like those other piano videos, too. Thanks for the reminder that there are many more, with better sound, on his site.