My wife has a pretty largish concert coming up on the fortepiano... and she has to do quite a bit of practicing for it. So, being the nice husband that I am... I offered to do the tuning and upkeep of the tuning in the weeks beforehand, that she wouldn't have to spend additional time each day doing it. It just means that there is one less thing for her to have to worry about, and that means that she will have more time for practicing and preparation.

I had a free day today and so I figured I would spend the morning getting the first tuning of the instrument done in order to let it settle before going off to do some gardening and cooking. I love these days when you hit the ground running and feel like you've got some serious work done in and around the house!

All the more reason to follow through on quitting a few commitments that I find inanely annoying and time-consuming! I think I'm just not a good person when it comes to working outside of a performance or directly teaching! People in work groups are intensely irritating! I recently got emails from a whole bunch of people who don't know how to avoid the "reply all" button... and one of them was supremely pompous and up-himself, I had to restrain myself from doing a "reply-all" piss take!

Sigh... anyway, I can go back to my day of not talking to anyone, and just finding peace in tuning, cooking, and gardening! Plus, probably should do a little bit of practice... have a few concerti to learn, and a stupidly awkward piece to learn.

So, when I tested the pitch, the fortepiano was sitting high at A=435Hz. Normally we try to keep this one at around A=430Hz, so this was about a quarter-tone higher than it should be. Yes yes, we got a little slack keeping up with this one... but I do the harpsichord, and my wife should have been taking care of this one... this is her baby after all!

I also had to end up settling on a temperament of some sort (how you divide up the wolf to complete the circle of fifths). Normally we would go with Valotti, but I wanted to try out the Young temperament as well... plus, it is one that is already on my tuning machine and that would make it a much faster affair... seeing as the fortepiano is double and triple strung, and I would be spending more time dealing with those unison strings rather than wrestling with a temperament by ear at the same time... plus, doing it by ear might not work so well if entire instrument ALSO needed to be pulled down 5Hz!

The fortepiano has this long-handled tuning "fork"... I don't mind it, but I really prefer the T-bar shape of the harpsichord one. After all, you don't really need the amount of leverage that this one gives... and it sort of gets in the way near to the high treble end, when the lever part hits the body of the instrument... so, you have to go left-handed with it.

So yes... after the temperament was settled with single strings (you pick out only a single strings from the double/triple stringing using the dampers pictured above), it was time to go around tune the unisons. For the triple strung notes, you had to damp the third string and do pairs of unisons at a time.

All in all, a bit over an hour long doing this... it is quite restful... and more so when you don't have to worry too much about the temperament because you are using a machine to settle that part of it. However, tuning the octaves and unisons by ear can be quite frustrating at times... small slips can magnify, and if the unisons aren't really tight you lose a lot of the resonance of the instrument!

However, decent enough for the first tuning... I'll try to run around it ever day for the next couple of weeks so that it holds solid. The main problem was the large drop from A=435Hz to A=430Hz.. I suspect that it will sound quite... interesting... tomorrow!

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