breaky Yamaha strings

[Bdshull@AOL.COM]

Ben:

Welcome to the world of performance piano.  A 10 year old S400 which is 
played on regularly by a budding concert pianist is sure to break plenty of 
strings.  ANY performance piano with this type of use over several years is 
going to.  C&A departments find that this can start to happen at the 5 year 
point.   

Sometimes a partial treble restringing, with no tuning pin replacement, is 
the right decision - from the first hitch pins above the bass crossover, for 
convenience.  Usually 99% of the breakage is from C5 and up, and if the piano 
is going to be continually used partial restringing will give it the most 
useful life.

Bill Shull, RPT

In a message dated 5/17/01 7:08:34 AM Pacific Daylight Time, blt@igc.org 
writes:

<< What¹s with Yamaha strings?  This week I replaced four adjacent #14 wires 
on
 a 10-year-old Yamaha 6' grand (Model S400E #4881266). 
      The customer (a young concert pianist with long, thin, unmuscular arms)
 has had dozens of broken strings.
      I called Yamaha in Los Angeles to ask if this problem is familiar to
 them.  The technician there claimed that 1) the problem is common in all
 makes, not just Yamaha; 2) such problems occur only in Gospel churches; 3)
 if a concert pianist is breaking strings she has bad training;  4) it must
 be a case of hard hammers. 
      In 30 years of tuning I've never experienced this kind of trouble with
 string breakage other than in Yamaha grands.   One customer, admittedly a
 strong young pianist, broke almost all his high tenor and treble strings and
 was going to throw the piano away (sell it wholesale to a dealer).  He is
 Christopher Basso, the recent winner of the Van Cliburn Amateur Competition.
  He worked at Starbucks for a living, and didnít have a way to pay for new
 strings.   We worked out a way to string now and pay later, and he kept the
 instrument and won the competition, but Jesus!
      The S400E has the following stringing scale in the breaky sections,
 about the same as on a Steinway:
 #13  6
 #13.5  4
 #14 4
 #14.5 5
 #15 6
 #15.5 6
 #16 5
      Could there be something else about the scale that raises the tension
 (maybe those strings are longer than on other grands)?   My only other
 guesses would be 1) since all the broken strings were in the Capo D'Astro
 section, the pressure bar somehow cuts the strings; or 2) there's something
 breaky about Yamaha wire.  
      Whatever the explanation, I wish Yamaha would come out and admit that
 there's something about those otherwise excellent instruments that breaks
 strings in the treble.   Yamaha artists are often the struggling variety,
 and Yamaha Corporation should find a solution and fix the instruments free
 of charge.   >>