Bass string revival

[Joel Jones]

Conrad, Mike, and Wim,
Good to know you think the pounding and tension lowering will give the
strings a few more years.  I had originally planned to clean the strings,
but with the startling success I won't follow up.  Leave success alone.
    Should have mentioned that this is a 30 year old 45" that is played
hard, but not 24/7.  With this type of playing I'm hoping this will keep the
strings moving and shake out a few more sugar crumbs.
    I normally do the overhand knot and put on a turn as Mike mentioned, but
this being a low budget repair I went for the quick fix.  I was shocked at
the results.  
    If anyone has this situation I would recommend trying one or two
strings.  Like Conrad said you can feather the sound by working on fewer
strings to blend the string output.
    Thanks for your responses.
Joel

-- 
Joel A. Jones  RPT
Assistant Director - TEAM 2 00 3
July 2 - 6 Dallas, TX
http://www.ptg.org/conv.htm
jajones2@facstaff.wisc.edu

  On 5/10/03 4:39 AM, "Conrad Hoffsommer" <hoffsoco@martin.luther.edu>
wrote:

> Hi, Joel!
> 
> At 21:30 05/09/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>>    I began by pounding the key and lowering each string about 1/2 turn
>> until it was slack.  Continuing to test blow the key a dozen times while
>> slack and continuing pounding I then pulled the string up to pitch.
>> 
>>     Presto the string had a live, full sound.   However, I'm wondering:
>> 
>>  1.  What happened to the string to cause it to revive???
> 
> You scared the **** out of the strings. They thought they were going to be
> "eliminated"...  More exactly, you literally beat the **** out of
> them.   I've done this to many upright and grand strings whose only
> deadening agent was decades of dust.
> 
>> 2.   Will this be a short term fix and the strings become dead again???
> 
> They'll deaden again when they load up again with detritis.
> 
>> Anybody experienced this bass string revival?
> 
> Years ago, [at least ten] I did some "voicing" on a Welte grand with a very
> dead bunch of wound strings.  The bass bridge was also shot, so full tone
> restoration was not possible.  This piano has a number of trichord wound
> unisons, so what I did was to thump on all three for the top few, then two
> for the next and only one for several unisons.  This way I "feathered" the
> tone from live plain to dead bridge wound.  Voila!  No abrupt change.
> 
> The only caveat I would add is that many of these dead string pianos also
> have pinblocks which are about to give up the ghost and you may wind up
> with a live string which won't stay in tune - ;-{
> YMMV
> 
> 
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