<HTML>List I'm sure you've experienced replacing a string on a piano that has dead, tub= by bass strings, ending up with a piano that has one bright, loud, sustainin= g key in the bass, next to the dull thuds on either side.  Perhaps the= re are other solutions to this problem (other than replacing the whole set),= but I stumbled across something today that I thought I'd share.  (Pur= ists read no further lest you be tarnished by the following.) I was called in to tune the piano at a restaurant, and replace a bass string= which had broken.  The piano was a Story & Clark (Samick) and is = full of false beats in the treble and dead, tubby bass strings.  When = I mic-ed the broken string, I found that I did not have one that size. = It was larger than a #1 Schaff universal replacement.  My original p= lan was to replace the string with a universal and order a duplicate of the = original to replace the universal.  But not having a universal the cor= rect size, I thought I would just leave it as is, and return ASAP with the d= upe. But then I noticed the damper felt was becoming deformed from the hammer rep= eatedly striking it.  Without a string there, the damper would eventua= lly become unusable and need to be replaced, because obviously the piano pla= yer could not stop himself from playing that low G, even if there was no sou= nd.  So I decided to replace it with the largest string I had and hope that it di= dn't sound too awful. Well, when I tuned up the new string I was surprised to find that it matched= its tubby neighbors perfectly.  Because the string was too small, the= tension had to be lower to obtain the correct pitch.  Because of the = lower tension, it sounded just as tubby as the rest of the section. So, I'm considering leaving the universal in there, and not replacing it wit= h a correctly sized string.  After all, a perfect duplicate of the ori= ginal will stick out like a sore thumb. Expecting flames from this one, I'd never do it on a Steinway, honest, Tom Sivak</HTML>