"Loss of Tone" Complaint

[Kevin E. Ramsey]

    Boy, I'm vocal tonight, ain't I?

    I suspect that any tone improvement by removing the strings to clean
under them would be from lowering and bringing the strings back up to pitch.
    I'll keep this one under my hat, though. Might come in handy when I'm at
my wits end (again).


----- Original Message -----
From: "Ron Nossaman" <RNossaman@KSCABLE.com>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2001 7:09 AM
Subject: Re: "Loss of Tone" Complaint


> > Actually, she told
> >me about the loss of tone thing while on the car phone, so I did not want
to
> >have a long conversation - otherwise I may have pointed out that a little
> >dust just ain't gonna kill a piano.
>
> Not necessarily. It might very well depend on the dust. You plucked, but
> said it was hard to tell if it is the hammers, or ?. If you used a
> fingernail, try a piece of hardwood. A tongue depressor, sharpened hammer
> shank, etc, will get you more volume and make it easier to tell what you
> have - maybe. A while back, I exchanged some mail with Jim Harvey, who was
> speculating on practical (i.e. - profitable) ways to clean strings and
> termination points at bridges and capos. He had run into this "tone loss"
> and disconnected/cleaned/reconnected a couple of strings to see what would
> happen. He said they brightened up considerably, but doing the whole set
> this way seemed prohibitive. His call was that it didn't take much crud at
> the termination to kill enough upper partials to mute the string. He
> suggested cooking grease, or tobacco smoke as the binder, with whatever
> other junk settled out of the air contributing to the muffler effect.
>
> I would doubt that the hammers got softer, unless they steamed the old
> tiles off and pressure cooked the interior of the whole house (did the
> couch and toilet paper get softer too? <G>). At least I don't recall
> experiencing or even hearing of hammers softening without the application
> of something to them.
>
> Question: did she happen to have dusted and cleaned up the case before you
> came to tune? Did she use a spray-on dust collector? I wonder what Endust
> does to strings.
>
> Step 2 (you already did step 1), I'd pull and clean a string and speaking
> length terminations and see what happens. If there's no improvement,
you're
> back where you started. But if it brings back the sound, here's where it
> gets interesting.
>
>
> Ron N