"Tuned" Pitch Drop

[Farrell]

I got a call from a piano teacher - a regular customer - yesterday with a 70 or 80 year old Baldwin L. The last several tunings I have been warning her that numerous tuning pins appear to barely be holding and sometime soon we will likely have to do something about that. Last tuning I actually had to tap in a few pins to get them to hold (maybe three months ago).

She calls yesterday and says that several bass strings are way flat and she just can't play the piano like that. We go over options to repair loose pins. She's not ready to restring (piano needs it), so we decide to go with CA glue on pins. So I check out piano. Indeed, nine bass notes ranged from 25 to 60 cents flat (every other note on piano was within a cent or two of target - a few bass notes were a tad sharp - likely in response to the few notes going flat). 

BUT - five of these notes were wound bicords. AND BOTH STRINGS ON ALL FIVE NOTES WERE EQUALLY FLAT! I'm saying that the notes that were 25 to 60 cents flat had perfectly tuned unisons. Obviously, one would think that pins letting loose would be an arbitrary occurrence - one here, one there. It's almost like someone that knew how to tune a unison but not an octave tried to "fix" the tuning. I asked her, and she said no one has gone near the piano with a tuning wrench (maybe I should have asked about vice grips!) since I was last there.

Anyway, anyone have a reasonable explanation how this could happen? Boy, I don't know what the odds are against a random occurrence like this, but I'm sure they are not quite as good as winning the lottery.

Terry Farrell