Universal Bass String Deadness

[Susan Kline]

At 06:16 PM 12/23/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>Now why in the world would a 6 - 8 month-old bass string in a box be 
>useless, and a 20 year old bass string on a piano be expected to sound 
>reasonably good?

I also think that there's more to this issue than the time elapsed. 
Perhaps, as Wim suggests, they were allowed to collect grime or moisture. A 
little rust on the core wire would really mess up the tone. Or perhaps the 
light windings don't grip the large core all that well, regardless of time 
elapsed.

I just put a large universal string on a church spinet to replace the 
broken highest single. It sounded fine, and the strings have sat in my car 
for at least 10 years. I keep them in an old attache case, in manila 
folders, sorted by size. I suppose one could say that my business has 
evolved. I used to use a lot of universals for spinets and consoles which 
get heavy use, so that the owners (usually churches) didn't have to wait 
for replacement strings. The universal bass strings sound good enough for 
pianos like this, IMHO. It wasn't until I went to ravel the end and 
realized that my reading glasses were no longer strong enough to see the 
work that I thought about how long it has been since I've used a universal 
string.

Back when I was studying tuning at George Brown College, I put a set of Ted 
Sambell's bass strings onto his 5 foot Pleyel. He had been meaning to 
rebuild that piano for years and years, and he said that he had wound the 
bass strings ten (or was it 20?) years before they were finally used. He 
wondered if they might have gone dead, but they sounded fantastic.

Susan Kline