Re: Weird phenomenon: strings going sharp when detuning?
Amen to John H's post. It doesn't take much of a change in temperature/humidity to raise (or lower) string pitches noticeably. Indoors to outdoors is one obvious example. I keep my instruments when I'm not taking them out for gigs, in a basement room with noticeably lower temperature and higher humidity than the first floor. Even the small differences you find within a house, will alter string pitch within a short time after moving the instrument from one room to the other.
The "tight nut slots" sharping problem only occurs when the string has been tuned up to get to pitch; if the nut slot's too tight and grabs the string, there will be a portion of the string between the tuning peg and the nut, that will be under more tension than the portion between the nut and the bridge -- the part that sounds when played. As the instrument's played, and the strings flex a bit in the nut slots, that "extra" string tension between nut and tuning peg gets transferred incrementally to the "sounding" portion of the string, raising its tension and therefore pitch.
If the player tunes down to get to the correct pitch, the opposite effect occurs: there's less string tension between the peg and nut, than in the rest of the string, and that lower tension will be transferred to the entire length of the string during playing, making the instrument go flat.
Many of us rush to blame our tuning pegs for our tuning problems; I'd hazard a guess that tuning problems caused by the pegs, are a minor fraction of the problems we experience.
Allen Hopkins
Gibsn: '54 F5 3pt F2 A-N Custm K1 m'cello
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Eastmn: 615'dola 805 m'cello
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