weirdly out of tune Kawai

[Ron Nossaman]

> One more nugget of info I have been tuning for a Kawai dealer for over 
> 20 years, about a 15 or so years ago Kawai began getting complaints 
> about string tarnishing, they'd turn black or dark rather quickly. Then 
> it stopped but I noticed a change in the way they tuned. If a pitch 
> raise of anything approaching 25 cents was necessary I noticed the 
> phenomonen of the strings slipping around the hitchpin! 

I don't think so. Rendering through the bridge, yes. Yamahas 
do this too. One good whack after it's pulled up will do it, 
and the string will drop a couple of beats. It's not happening 
at the hitch, because you can quietly pull up both sides of a 
shared hitch, and when you whack it, both sides drop in pitch. 
I think it's the bridge. It happens in the capo sections, 
where speaking lengths are getting short.

I've run into this often enough following "soft" tuners who 
swear you can tune quietly with good stability with the right 
hammer technique. I've followed them as little as a week after 
their tuning, because it needed it.

Ron N