[BC] Making Beautiful Music

[RichardBJohnson at comcast.net]

The early Hammond Organs had spinning tone-wheels which,
were quite good at maintaining perfect pitch because all of the
octaves could be harmonically related. However, the piano does
not maintain harmonic relationships --on purpose. The low
notes are stretched slightly flat and the high notes slightly
sharp. This is to get rid of the dissonance that results from
the frequency modulation of high notes as the low strings,
while vibrating, change the length of the sound-board. The
result is a "well tempered" keyboard. An electronic keyboard
does not have such tempering and is therefore called
"evenly tempered." If you attempt to play a well tempered
piano and an organ together, you need to stay in the
middle registers or else you get dissonance.

Normally, bands want to tune to G, just above middle
'C.' It will be in perfect pitch if the piano tuner was
any good. I've heard pianos which were tuned by
hacks who thought their ear was better than a tuning-
fork. The result being that a song sounded fine on
that piano, but you needed to play solo. Any attempt
to play with another instrument or to accompany a
singer was doomed.

Because of the way the scale is created (12ths),
you can start with any tone and pretend it was
'A' (440 Hz). It works until you need to play with
somebody else. With fretted instruments, the
notes will end up between the frets, with horns
the notes end up being unreachable as well
--except for a trombone!

--
Cheers,
Richard B. Johnson
Read about my book
http://www.LymanSchool.org