Paul, I've spent many years in bands and realized that the basically principles of guitar strings making waves are basically the same as pianos but the results are different. I may be going out on a limb here but the guitar is using much smaller gauge wire to produce the same pitches as a piano. I don't believe the overtones are as much a factor. I've experimented with guitars and have noticed that beats produced by stretched fourths and fifths on guitars are far less noticable even when beating rapidly. These beat rates could not be tolerated on a piano. In the guitars case I don't think the whammy bar really returns the strings exactly to their original position but our ears can tolerate the difference in pitch left behind after the bar is returned, especially in a group situation. I think you would find that any experimental device like this on a piano would quickly render our fine tuning jobs very painful to listen to. I'd like to hear from the list about any experiments in the history of the industry attempting to make pianos more stable tuning wise. Bob Sadowski RPT Erie,PA.
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