Ghost In The Machine?

[Ron Nossaman]

>His S&S 'D' was doing something I had never heard before - up around G#6, I
>started hearing 2 ghost tones(A#5 and D6) as I would play - never heard
>anything like it before in my life - I know of F2 producing an A4
>overtone(not present on this D), but I have never heard these ghosts
>before 

>By the way, I heard these ghosts at the 1PM tuning - at the 5PM tuning, the
>ghosts were gone....maybe they went to the beach??
>
>Rook

Hi Phil,
I've got a D in a church that does something like this to me once in a
while - but not always. It's in the same general area of the scale, and
happens when I'm pulling my strip mute and tuning unisons. I tend to hit
the string repeatedly, not awfully hard, and pretty rapidly while I'm
pulling a string in to the unison in this area. Once in a while, while the
string's moving and I'm mentally focusing on the clarity of the result, the
whole thing will be drowned out by a swelling, horribly discordant mess of
a noise and I have to stop. Testing the note in normal play seconds
afterwards, it's clean (or not, depending on the time of year and RH%).
Testing the same note by rapid striking doesn't do anything weird either.
This just happens when a string is moving. Often, but not always, as I go
on to finish the same unison, the noise will happen again. This leads me to
believe it's not something like the coil settling, but is rather happening
as a sympathetic in the open string segments. 

Now before I get the inevitable lectures on hammer technique, let me point
out that I have a reasonably practical idea (or 25) of how to work a tuning
hammer,  can both feel and hear the string move, and don't have any chronic
stability problems with my tunings. This noise doesn't happen on initial
string movement anyway, but after I've got it close to the rest of the
unison and am settling it in. 

I haven't been able to find the source of this noise because I can't always
reproduce it, and it happens and disappears so quickly that there's no time
to explore it. Where this is finally going is -Yours could conceivably be a
damper leaking somewhere lower if the ghost has significant sustain. Do you
strip mute the tenor, and did you check for the ghost after all the mutes
were out? I think my noise is probably a duplex noise, and if yours isn't
leaking dampers, it could be too. The effect is too touchy and transient to
be much of anything else, seems to me.

If anyone has anything different that's plausible, I'd sure like to hear it.

Ron N