Friends, In all my piano technician days (I'm fulltime only eleven years), I have mostly ignored doing anything about false beats because I wasn't sure what to do with them. I tried seating the strings which, as Dave says here, usually helped little or none. I've also heard explanations why the cause could be poor notching. In a couple instances I experimented with muting two strings of a treble unison and putting a little sideways pressure on the bridge pin of the remaining string. Play the note and, more often than not, the beat was gone. Release the pressure, and it's back. I think it was guru Ron Nossaman who wrote once that 90% of the false beats are loose bridge pins. My meager experiments cause me to tend to agree. But I hesitate to epoxy the bridge pin on a grand, fearing that the epoxy might affect the termination point of the vibrating section and make more problems than are solved. And of course for verticals I reckon the piano should be horizontalized. One of these days I may just work up the courage to give it a shot and see what happens. Regards, Clyde Hollinger, RPT Dave Nereson wrote: I tuned a 6-foot Steinert grand today that had a few strings with beats in them, that is, beats in just one string of some of the unisons. Seating strings didn't help. Not sure what caused them, but I just got them to sound as good as they could.
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