Are Loose Bridge Pins a Big Deal?

[Ron Nossaman]

>Are loose bridge pins and false beats a concern of piano owners? Do they
>care? I certainly realize that most piano owners do not hear them. But if
>someone is buying a new or used piano and you have been retained to inspect
>the prospective purchase, are false beats something to identify as a defect?

I'll tell customers the treble is noisy, and that it's not unusual in a
piano this age (or that it is), and tell them that if it doesn't bother
them, it's not something that absolutely must be fixed or it'll ruin the
piano. If it's not a problem for them, it's not for me either. Those that
can hear unisons out of tune will be bothered by it, and we can discuss
options on a price-to-improvement scale from there. It's fairly rare at
best for me to find a really clean piano out there in the world, so I don't
tend to get too upset over a little extraneous noise from a loose bridge
pin - especially since the tuned duplex noises are so effectively
disguising it as "power". I rarely seat a string and then only when the
beat seems to be coming from other than the loose bridge pin. Even at that,
it's usually just a quick push down on the string with a thumb nail. No
sweat, but no fix (or "fix") either.

It's rare that anyone wants me to actually fix false beaters as a field
repair, even when they can hear them in unisons. For the money, they don't
seem to mind the beaters all that much.


>I generally think so. If the piano is new, in my opinion there should be no
>false beats (I realize most pianos will have a few imperfections in string
>clarity, and I suppose at some point a new piano owner may choose to simply
>accept some minor defects such as this - or should he/she?).  

In principal, yes. They also shouldn't have flat soundboards and tuning
pins either too loose to hold, jumpy, or too tight to tune accurately. They
shouldn't have dead trebles, killer killer octaves, or hammers that are
hard enough to scratch rocks. They shouldn't have duplexes that are so
noisy you can't tell which background shriek to tune to which, or low
tenors that gronk like an old bullfrog and can't be tuned at all, much less
stay in tune for ten minutes. They shouldn't have action geometry and
regulation so far outside the realm of reason as to not be reasonably
playable by average mortals. They shouldn't... add anything else you can
think of that is altogether too common in new pianos and realistically more
dire than an F# - 6, left string wa-wa or sixteen, and it sort of boils
down to where your priorities are. What's your disaster triage checklist
sequence, and how near the top of the list is false beating strings?

Then it's pretty much the customer's call as to what does or doesn't get
done, regardless of that us technoids think.


> I wonder sometimes if I am being too nit-picky. Thanks.

I don't think so. Seems to me you are dealing with it in a survivable manner.


> Does this mean I am developing a national reputation? Is
>this a good thing?

It depends. How do you feel about Liberian hit squads? <G>


Ron N