Bass string revival

[Conrad Hoffsommer]

Hi, Joel!

At 21:30 05/09/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>    I began by pounding the key and lowering each string about 1/2 turn
>until it was slack.  Continuing to test blow the key a dozen times while
>slack and continuing pounding I then pulled the string up to pitch.
>
>     Presto the string had a live, full sound.   However, I'm wondering:
>
>  1.  What happened to the string to cause it to revive???

You scared the **** out of the strings. They thought they were going to be 
"eliminated"...  More exactly, you literally beat the **** out of 
them.   I've done this to many upright and grand strings whose only 
deadening agent was decades of dust.

>2.   Will this be a short term fix and the strings become dead again???

They'll deaden again when they load up again with detritis.

>Anybody experienced this bass string revival?

Years ago, [at least ten] I did some "voicing" on a Welte grand with a very 
dead bunch of wound strings.  The bass bridge was also shot, so full tone 
restoration was not possible.  This piano has a number of trichord wound 
unisons, so what I did was to thump on all three for the top few, then two 
for the next and only one for several unisons.  This way I "feathered" the 
tone from live plain to dead bridge wound.  Voila!  No abrupt change.

The only caveat I would add is that many of these dead string pianos also 
have pinblocks which are about to give up the ghost and you may wind up 
with a live string which won't stay in tune - ;-{
YMMV