Re (2): [Bell Historians] Re: Bell Notes

[s.ivin at n...]

DJB:

> What would be interesting to know is what the policy of the foundries is on
> tuning - do either or the English foundries aim to provide new rings with
> keynotes which are spot on the international standard? And of course even
> where this is used there is the matter of temperament - if an unequal
> temperament is used is the tenor, whatever key it's in, taken as C and the
> other note frequencies calculated accordingly, or are the frequencies
> calculated according to the actual note of the tenor?

In the many cases I have observed, with the so-called just scale the
frequencies are invariably calculated with reference to the tenor, so you
could say that regardless of actual pitch the C scale is used. Grimthorpe
gives such an explanation, and A A Hughes said the same in an article he
wrote for the RW during the (second) war. More recently we have had Nigel
Taylor's 'take' on the subject, with his choice of the Kirnberger III
temperament, but he rather illogically clearly uses only the C scale e.g.
the new 8 at Milton, actually in B, use the C scale. In fact I think the
KIII G scale gives a rather better sound, if one wants to use one scale
for all keynotes. Perhaps Nigel would explain.

An interesting point is that while those Taylor rings which have target
frequencies given by the 'just' calculation, in practice those bells which
if tuned exactly thus would be flat on the Equal scale seem to have been
left sharp to that target, and thus much closer to the Equal scale than if
the target had been achieved. I'm inclined to guess that these divergencies
were well-known and that (maybe) the 'just' figures were used as an approximation,
in view of the laborious nature of calculating the Equal pitches for an
arbitrary keynote, before the availability of pocket calculators.

Steve