[CAUT] False Beats and George Winston

[Keith Roberts]

There is also the possibility that it is the wire itself. My mentor was
complaining about false beats in the treble in the newly strung pianos so
his wife who does the stringing switched to Mapes international gold without
telling him. He subsequently remarked how the false beats had dissappeared.
Too late to change wire now so that doesn't help George.

Wire is made in a factory. Some equipment get old and worn out. They have
bad days. The stock metal supplied can have variations. A lot gets by
quality control. String problems will have variety depending on where the
bad spots in the spool end up.

Keith Roberts


On 3/15/07, maxpiano <maxpiano at sc.rr.com> wrote:
>
> In a performance/theater venue, I service a Yamaha CFIII that has some
> fast
> false beat issues on 2-3 keys in the top octave and very few false beats
> in
> the rest of the piano.  I am told this was the piano Andre Watt used
> during
> his (brief?) departure from the Steinway Artist fold some 15 years ago.
> Nothing I have tried so far on D#7 and F7 has worked, such as tapping the
> bridge pins.  The beats do not respond to pushing against the bridge pins
> with a screwdriver, so I am assuming it is not an issue of loose bridge
> pins.
>
> George Winston is to be there a week from tomorrow.  This will be about
> the
> fourth time I have tuned this piano for his concerts.  He complains about
> unisons in the treble, and doesn't seem to know how to sort out the
> difference between bad unisons and false beats.  I get the impression he
> is
> not open to the suggestion that false beats are par for the course up
> there,
> and he wants all the focus he can get at the top.  He has the habit of
> carrying a bunch of rubber mutes with him and laying them next to the
> tuning
> pins wherever he detects a bad unison, both before the concert after he
> has
> practiced, and during the show for touch-up at intermission.  Interesting,
> at intermission there may be some hairy unisons in the tenor/low treble
> with
> no mutes laid down, but a proliferation of them by the top octave!
>
> I am wondering if it would help, when I go to prepare the piano a week
> from
> today, a day ahead of the concert (I'll be touching it up the afternoon of
> the concert) if I would go prepared with emery cloth strips to shoeshine
> the
> capo bar on the affected notes.  I trust I could get the strings settled
> down again after the loosening.  I have also thought of Roger Jolly's
> suggestion of taking the rear end of a coil lifter tool (the 3 notches for
> aligning strings), setting it onto the 3 strings of a unison and driving
> it
> sideways and back, but I don't want to risk breaking strings.
>
> Any advice or other suggestions for quieting the false beats in the top
> octave?
>
> Bill Maxim, RPT
> Columbia, SC
>
>
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