Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Do you consider or check false beats when you buy piano?

Hi Lady Bird,

I too have had a few pianos over the years with some rust on the strings. The rust was not extreme or heavy, but rust nonetheless. I would take some 0000 steel wool and try to clean some of the rust off the strings. In some cases, if the rust was not too bad, the steel wool would remove the rust on the surface of the strings and leave it with a newish looking sheen.

I do not recall the rusty strings having false beats and the pianos tuned up find. I do think heavy rust would cause the string to be more prone to breakage from tuning (or just playing) than non-rusty strings, as you have stated.

If you are asking if the rust alone can cause false beats, I suppose it could. However, I have a couple of older upright pianos now that are over 100 years old with the original strings, and although the wound bass strings are a little dull, the plain steel wire strings still sound as good as my newer pianos, for the most part.

A brand new piano can have false beats on some strings/notes. I think it just comes with the territory...

However, I am not an authority on the subject. Just sharing my own personal experience.

Rick

"False" beats are a very complex subject. All pianos have some. "Good" pianos allow them to be "smoothed" over when tuning unisons so they are not noticeable, even by tuners ears.

I too have noticed that large grands can have more problematic false beats than smaller pianos. But this is not always true.

Not all false beats are caused by loose bridge pins or twisted wire, or poor string spacing. I have discovered that some are caused by longitudinal modes interacting with the transverse modes. Then the false beats become inherent to the construction/design of the piano.

And yes, I do take a mute and listen to the single strings for falseness when evaluating a piano.

I was always under the impression that false beats were principally the result of imperfections in the piano wire itself, such that portions of a single string would beat against other portions of the same string.

Larry.

I think the point is that pretty much every sound a piano makes is a combination of many factors adding together and it is essentially impossible for a normal pianist to identify what is responsible for the sounds. All we can realistically do is judge the tone of a piano as a whole and not worry about how it achieves what it achieves - it is the end result that counts.

Now it is probably possible to identify what you think is a false beat when tuning or when isolating strings deliberately but its highly unlikely that there is just one possible cause of those false beats. If you want to identify the actual cause of a false beat and fix it you are probably moving beyond the scope of an average competent technician to that of piano or wire designer (or those here with a special interest :-) Or so it seems to me at any rate. Personally I either like the tone of a piano or not - and if I don't I'm not that interested if the problem is a false beat or something else, choosing a different piano seems a better solution.

The strings on my Kawai 500 (1966) started snapping around 2016 only .We lived in a city with perhaps higher humidty than Miami .The piano was moved to Canada in 2001.
Around 2015 two treble strings snapped totally on thier own .
I would simply have them replaced .More snapped 2016 and 2017.I consulted an excellent technicians. There is no doubt the strings had corroded to the point where where the piano needed to be restrung.This WAS the CONCLUSIONof TWO professional technicians.

I do not understand Rick how you can say that was not the cause of the strings breaking .The technicians could ONLY
remove some of the rust .If anything is under pressure developes and developes such a degree of rust , of course it will break !
Apart from that the two technicians I consulted said quite plainly the piano needed to be restrung. They even gave us quotes ., You did not even see the piano and are saying rust was not the cause of the strings snapping. They would snap in the night , at lessons, when no one was around .Only once did it happen when the technician was tuning the piano. I mean I was there , of course it was rust !



As for new pianos NO I have looked at many new pianos , tried
them and could never hear false beats ., not ever !!!
There was a Hailun grand which I heard someone play in the store with had a strident tone. The salespeople said that piano
had a duplex scale.
At fist I thought that was false beats ?

Rick I may have misinterpreted what you said .If so I am sorry .
Letting go that Kawai grand ( which was so part of my life was quite a big thing for me )

No problem, Lady Bird. We are, and will remain friends, even if there is a misunderstanding.



Perhaps here is the misunderstanding, if there was one... I never said that rust was not the cause of the strings breaking on your Kawai 500. I said that none of the strings broke due to rust on my old upright pianos.

I always take your word at face value, Lady Bird, 100%!

Rick

Same here Rick , I know you know a great deal about pianos and tuning , rechnical work on a piano. As you know I tend to get things a bit skewed at times here.
I agree about the false beats perhaps the suggestion by the technician about rust causing false beats was not true or
perhaps it was ? Either I heard it , or perhaps I thought I heard it because he suggested it.
The main problem was that the piano needed to be restrung.

This string has a very noticeable and annoying false beat, because of a loose bridge pin.

When the bridge pin is stabilized by pressing a screwdriver gently against it, the false beats decrease noticeably.

https://youtu.be/zGmuZ772e6Y