Technical Library TEMPERAMENTS VII: Werkmeister III Entire Contents Copyright ©2012 CBH

When you feel you’ve mastered Kirnberger III, it’s an easy matter to change it into something else, so now it’s time for Werkmeister III. He proposed his third temperament in 1691 (Those Darwinists reading this will, I trust, forgive me working backwards in history for ease of tuning—in musical terms, what came later was not always better!), and this is how you can accomplish it on your instrument:

1. From your nicely tuned Kirnberger, sharpen that e' that your violinist friend so much despised, so that instead of the beautiful perfect third with middle c', it makes a perfect fifth with a.

2. Tune down the octave to e, and raise the b so it is a perfect fifth with the e.

Congratulations—You’re done! You’ve tucked that last narrowed fifth a little bit further around the circle, effectively improving the sharp keys. And you will be forever loved by your string-playing colleagues because they needn’t detune the top string on their fiddles.

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