List, This question was posed to me privately but I feel that it is of general interest so I am answering it publicly, leaving the identity of the writer out. I hope that person doesn't mind. << Bill, one question. My complaint about Kimballs is that there are many false beats everywhere in the piano. I recently had a callback on a kimball..three months after the tuning. After the last tuner finish his job, the piano sounded bad within a week! So I did better. My theory is that pianos with lots of false beats don't need to go out of tune very much before they sound bad. I have some pianos that sound great after a year, but they are Yahamha, Steinways, some with damp chasers. Why do you think there are so many false beats in the Kimballs? Perhaps poorly made bridges? Mechanically, they're ok, but I'm rarely sastified with the tuning and pray that I don't get a callback. -- >> There are many reasons that a piano might go out of tune quickly. Although it has not been my usual experience, I have had very good success with certain Kimballs staying remarkably well in tune and frustrating disappointment with certain Steinways, Yamahas and other fine, expensive pianos. There is, in fact a Steinway L that I have serviced for 20 years that used to go wildly out of tune very quickly. It is in a French-Speaking residence house on the university campus. I go there every week for dinner so I see the piano and hear it often. Some years ago I installed a complete Dampp-Chaser system with multiple dehumidifiers and a string cover. That did help considerably but even though the piano gets tuned at least 4 times per year and sometimes more for some special occasions, I still find it sometimes very disappointingly out of tune. It also has a number of false beats but everybody loves it and so do I. My family had a Kimball studio when I was growing up and my sister has it now. I tune it every three years, whether it needs it or not and never have to change the pitch. It used to have a few false beats but I fixed them with a string seating tool called the "False Beat Eliminator". I would not characterize Kimball pianos in general as "having false beats everywhere". The one you are having a problem with may well have more than its share but not all of them do. Even the finest pianos can develop them. I'm not sure what all of the reasons for false beats are but it is usually associated with the termination point on the bridge. If the string has ridden up on the bridge pin, for example, the pin can act as a kind of "flagpole" and cause the pitch to waver up and down. In this case, a string seating tool such as the "False Beat Eliminator" or any other technique for seating strings can be effective. There could be another problem with the bridge that won't respond to this kind of technique and pounding too hard on a string to try to seat it could only damage the piano further. A wound string in particular may have a falseness to it that is in its winding that cannot be remedied except through replacement. Some plain wire can also have a flalse sound. This can be remedied by string replacement. On a fine piano, it is sometimes possible to "eliminate" a false beat when tuning a unison. If the pitch of one string goes up and down, you might actually be able to cancel out the beat by very careful unison tuning. This requires some advanced experience and skill but I do know of some very fine tuning technicians who can do it effectively. In the instance of a very common piano such as a Kimball console, however, don't beat yourself up or your brains out over false beats. Try some string seating techniques, if you like, but beyond that, just accept the situation. The likelihood is that your customer cannot hear that which frustrates you anyway. You do need to produce a stable tuning where the unisons stay where you put them and don't fail just by playing the piano. I accomplish this by using muting strips and a "rough" tuning followed by a fine tuning and good, firm test blows. If your unisons fail, it is that which probably makes the piano sound "bad", as you say, not the false beats. I'll give you a case in point about a Kimball console with false beats that worried and frustrated me until I realized that the customer couldn't even hear what I could. A friend of mine in Madison moved back to his childhood home in a farmhouse about an hour and a half away to care for his elderly and ailing mother. He was happy to be back with the piano he loved since he only had an electronic keyboard in his apartment in town. He is a very fine vocalist with a sweet, lyric tenor voice and loves to play Bach and religious music. He understands about HT's and calls them "musical tunings". He wanted me to tune his piano because he wanted what he considered to be truly musical harmony, not the kind of false, arbitrary chord voicings that he considers ET to have. He was also very sensitive to the piano's pitch, which had sunken to about 20 cents flat. To him, that was disastrous. He is one of those who uses the term, "perfect pitch". He very much required Standard Pitch *and* a Well-Tempered Tuning to suit his needs and taste. This is an example of how Standard pitch or so-called "perfect pitch" and ET are seperate issues, one having no bearing upon the other. I drove out on a Saturday and cleaned the piano out, tightened the action, spot leveled the keys, took up lost motion and adjusted let-off, raised the pitch and fine tuned. When I was finished, I was disappointed with a few notes in the treble which I told him I could not tune very well. When he listened to them, he said, "What's wrong with that? That's in tune." I responded that if this were a concert tuning, it wouldn't be acceptable at all. He only sensed the general pitch of the falsely beating unisons and found them to be no problem at all. He invited me to dinner and afterwards, he played and we both sang some classical music together and separately. There was no question in either of our minds that the Kimball piano served well as a true, musical instrument, not "marketing garbage" as someone just recently remarked, in poor taste, on this List. Once in the context of music, I was not bothered either by the false beats that I could hear in the context of tuning. I hope this has given the writer of the question and others on the List a different perspective than that which has usually been offered about Kimball pianos and the inherent flaw known as a "false beat" that virtually any piano can have. Sincerely, Bill Bremmer RPT Madison, Wisconsin
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