"Loss of Tone" Complaint

[Ron Nossaman]

> Actually, she told
>me about the loss of tone thing while on the car phone, so I did not want to
>have a long conversation - otherwise I may have pointed out that a little
>dust just ain't gonna kill a piano.

Not necessarily. It might very well depend on the dust. You plucked, but
said it was hard to tell if it is the hammers, or ?. If you used a
fingernail, try a piece of hardwood. A tongue depressor, sharpened hammer
shank, etc, will get you more volume and make it easier to tell what you
have - maybe. A while back, I exchanged some mail with Jim Harvey, who was
speculating on practical (i.e. - profitable) ways to clean strings and
termination points at bridges and capos. He had run into this "tone loss"
and disconnected/cleaned/reconnected a couple of strings to see what would
happen. He said they brightened up considerably, but doing the whole set
this way seemed prohibitive. His call was that it didn't take much crud at
the termination to kill enough upper partials to mute the string. He
suggested cooking grease, or tobacco smoke as the binder, with whatever
other junk settled out of the air contributing to the muffler effect. 

I would doubt that the hammers got softer, unless they steamed the old
tiles off and pressure cooked the interior of the whole house (did the
couch and toilet paper get softer too? <G>). At least I don't recall
experiencing or even hearing of hammers softening without the application
of something to them. 

Question: did she happen to have dusted and cleaned up the case before you
came to tune? Did she use a spray-on dust collector? I wonder what Endust
does to strings.

Step 2 (you already did step 1), I'd pull and clean a string and speaking
length terminations and see what happens. If there's no improvement, you're
back where you started. But if it brings back the sound, here's where it
gets interesting.   


Ron N