Alternative methods involve looking at several important elements of scaling, tension, inharmonicity, breaking% and loudness factors and knowing what you are looking at when you see them. Knowing how changing one factor influences another factor. Making changes in the treble wires is not real important but making changes in the bass strings could have a profound effect on the tone of a piano. It is not difficult, after all, I do it all the time, but I have also been at it for more than 30 years. Tremain Parsons program PScale works well for me. I do scaling for the trade because I have the time to enter the numbers and play with the numbers until I get something that looks like a piano. Old pianos, and many new pianos, have egregious error in scaling, sometimes they can be changed to make a piano appear 12 inches longer than it is. Get the program, play with it, have a couple of sets made and see how you like the sound. Some pianos are near impossible to improve easily, others just almost rescale themselves. Newton
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