I've been chewing on a few ideas about tuning the high treble tuning lately. I'm not going to post all of them at once, suspecting how the discussion is likely to splinter into other tangents. So I want to introduce one idea at a time for the list's feedback. First idea -- seems like when I NAIL a unison in the high treble the note can become lower in volume and sustain and less interesting in content. I was in a class given by Don Manino once ("The Sound of Your Tuning") where he suggested and demonstrated SLIGHTLY detuning one of the strings of the unison up there to attempt to increase the sustain. There were two same-model pianos in the room and he did a direct A-B comparison. I was sold. Sustain was noticeably increased with the detuned unison. And it had a little "shimmer" to it - not really an objectionable beat, just a "shimmer", maybe a slow vibrato or slow-rolling beat, though the length of the sustain wasn't long enough to make the slow-rolling "shimmer"/vibrato/beat at all unmusical. Perfect unisons of course assume strings that are not self-beating. As we know, some pianos are not able to acheive that in some or many high treble strings, and thus create their own imperfections, often ANNOYING imperfections. In these cases, the PURE unisons also make their impure neighbors stand out in comparison, so DEtuning the pure ones may make for a little more consistency in the piano's sound. Another little interesting phrase that was related to me second-hand was from an older, presumably very experienced tech who was fond of saying, "Don't tune the life out of the unison!" I would assume the phenomena I've described above would be what he's referring to here, too. Your thoughts? BTW, I don't remember really whether Don recommended detuning the one string to the flat or to the sharp side. I SEEM to remember flat, but I'm unsure.
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