muting strings

John M. Formsma jformsma@dixie-net.com
Wed, 18 Sep 2002 05:51:26 -0500


David A. wrote,
> I mute with felt strips sometimes (when I'm not tuning "old School," with
> just one rubber mute).
> There's usually a bleed-through problem in the middle of the piano, ... I
just put up with having to fiddle with the strips in the tenor. <snip>

> With rubber mutes, where you place them on the string seems to be
> important: at some points they seem to excite a node or something, and
> create a "ghost" note that can interfere with good listening.
> Close to the agraffe seems best, and again, it only seems relevant in the
> middle of the piano.

I guess I've learned how to filter most of that noise out, but it is there.

Took a muting class from Dan Levitan several years ago. He recommended strip
muting as close to the agraffe as possible to minimize this problem.

His very cool middle section muting strip is described below.

Get a 1" strip of white medium action cloth. Stretch it out and lay it flat.
Draw a line from the corner of both ends (on the top side) to a point on the
middle of the strip 1/4" from the top side. Draw a similar line from the
corners of the bottom side to a point in the middle 1/4" from the bottom
side. Cut along the lines, which makes it tapered--wider from the ends
decreasing to 1/2" at the middle.

To mute, use the middle point of the strip (the 1/2" wide part). Beginning
at the highest note in the middle section, place the strip in between every
other string group, going down as far as you can. Then, with the rest of the
strip, return to the top and fill in the gaps down. All outside strings will
now be muted. Tune the middle strings, and remove one half of the strip.
Now, you can tune those unisons. Then, remove the other half and tune those
unisons. Fast and easy.

John Formsma
402 W. Main St.
Blue Mountain, MS 38610

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