Weird detuning

[Jim Coleman, Sr.]

Hi Mark:

You have not lost your sanity.

There is no way that an individual string could go 50 cents sharp by 
itself. Therefore, it had to have been changed by someone.  My 
suspicion is that the son who looked on with interest may have 
decided that he would give it a try. The other suspicion is that he 
may have had a motive in making either you or the piano look bad. 
Perhaps he wants a new piano?

Humidity change could not have been the culprit because it would affect
many other strings also.

Jim Coleman, Sr.

On Mon, 22 Dec 1997, Mark Graham wrote:

> I tuned a Mason & Hamlin A grand last Thursday for a longtime customer who
> is an excellent pianist. There was a call on the answering machine Friday
> that something was wrong with the tuning. I went this morning (Monday) and
> found he wasn't kidding. Four notes in the middle were painfully out. On
> two of them, one string was fine, one string was grossly flat, and one
> string was grossly sharp. One other had the center string grossly flat and
> the other two OK. The fourth had one severely sharp string, two others
> flat.
> 
> The piano is less than 20 years old and well-maintained. The house is
> humidified now and air-conditioned in the summer. The plate, bridges,
> soundboard, and pinblock all seem fine. I did not test the pins with a
> torque wrench, but they felt good and normally tight. The piano tuned up
> well. As with most M&H's this section of the piano has one string of each
> unison strung singly with a loop around the hitch pin, but I could find
> no correlation between that and the way the strings detuned, meaning, I
> don't think things slipped around the hitch pins.
> 
> The detuning was so bad it could not have been mere carelessness on my
> part. The man played it the day I tuned it and it was fine. His
> grandchildren and his son were there at different times Thursday and
> Friday. His son (grown) is also a good pianist, and told his father it was
> out of tune, and lo and behold. The grandkids played it, but didn't abuse
> it, and I don't see how this could have happened even if kids did bang on
> it.
> 
> Frankly, if evidence supported it, I would say someone deliberately
> detuned four notes. After all, some strings were severely sharp, more than
> 50 cents. But there is no tuning lever in the house, nor does the son have
> one. The customer said he assumed I had put new strings on and had not
> told him. But he said he ruled that out, because I hadn't charged him for
> the work, and (gentle dig at me) he knew that was out of the question.
> 
> What on earth is going on? I will, of course, monitor the piano, and if it
> happens again I know the man will contact me right away. But all I can
> come up with is
> 
> A) a very strange burglar
> B) magnetic anomalies in the earth's crust or core
> C) alien intervention
> or D) supernatural interference in my life, either simply to annoy me,
> or to make me realize that I really have no control over the universe.
> 
> I find none of these satisfying, and some of them irritating. The customer
> seems quite sane and normal, but I've watched enough Hitchcock movies to
> know that you can never REALLY TELL.
> 
> Help me. My own sanity is at stake here.
> Mark Graham
> Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory of Music
> 
>