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Recently the humidity in my piano room is 50 - 60% and temperature 20 degrees Celsius.

There is a damp chaser inside.

Was it much different before?

No, the nuisance sounds the same.

Sorry, I misunderstood the question.

The temperature was similar before, but I didn't notice the humidity.

Well, at least you experienced some temporary joy in thinking you found and fixed the problem.

I've experienced that same "ah oh, time to try something else" many times.

On my grand piano with the fall-board lock buzz, I could play the offending note, take my other hand and put pressure on the the top of the fall-board lock and the noise would change/go away completely. The cotton trick worked for me, permanently (or at least until I sold the piano:-).

My advice? If at first you don't succeed, try, try again...

Good luck!

Rick

Hi Rickster,

Wow you can read my mind !

Yes, when the buzzes came back I said to myself, "At least I temporarily enjoyed a whole week and I think it's not incurable."

Had a word with the third tuner over the phone. He said he would come and check it again, free of charge. Next time I must watch carefully and see if I can fix it all by myself later.

Yes, and ASK QUESTIONS!

Pwg

Mine has developed a couple of buzzes too here and there when playing certain individual notes or even chords in certain keys. One source is my son's Cajon in the same room. Eb5 makes the strings inside the Cajon vibrate. I'm also wondering if something on my piano lamp is vibrating sympathetically. I could also tell that at least 1 is coming from the piano itself. I suspects maybe a loose hinge or screw, especially with the colder, dry weather we're having here causing the wood to shrink. So I got out a straight-head and Philips-head screwdriver and spent some time going thru all the hinges, etc., on the piano. I found several screws that were just a little loose. This seems to have improved. I've got 1 screw that feels striped out, so I think I'm going to have to put a little wood glue or filler in the hole to tighten that up.

Fillers are for appearance only, don't trust them to hold a screw. Yellow woodworking glue and some real wood is the way to go. Fill the hole and let it dry. Then cut the wood off flush with a chisel or sharp knife. Drill your pilot hole and put the screw back in.

The third tuner told me it was sympathetic vibration. I don't know what it is.

Just now I discovered something. I played across the whole keyboard, stepped on the right pedal every time when I played another note. So I stepped on the pedal 88 times. It turned out that there was no buzz at all.

Then I returned to Chopin Nocturne Op. 55 No. 1 from Bar 57 onward. I just played the left-hand part, stepped on the right pedal once every four notes. The buzzes immediately appeared again.

I can't understand why.

Here is my suggestion which some may consider "overkill" and possibly costly but just might identify your problem

Obtain a digital recorder, e.g. like my Zoom H4n and connect a shotgun microphone and enable the unit to output sound through headphones whilst the recording is active or on standby. Shotgun microphones are designed to greatly reduce the volume of received sound from its sides. Thus the microphone becomes extremely directional.

By using the setup you could point the microphone both around the piano and around the room to determine the direction at which the buzz is loudest. Even better if you have access to an analog audio mixer is to set the equalisation to reject frequencies widely different to the buzz frequency (some more advanced mixers have variable band-pass filters that you could set to enhance just the buzz frequency and reject most piano string noise)

Your comment about the buzz reappearing every four notes is hard to appreciate! Do you mean that literally? What happens after only three notes?

ian

sympathic vibration means something is loose and picks up the sound from your piano. For instance if you lift the damper of the e4 string and play an e5 staccato, the e4 will symphatically vibrate and keep vibrating even after you stopped playing the e5 (because it's not damped).

It may be that you press the pedal differently when playing the piece. Eg pressing a bit sideways, pushing harder or softer, etc.

I had buzzes in my pedal too. It disappeared if I rotated the push rod. But of course the rod rotated slowly by itself and once it found its old position back buzzes returned. Just to illustrate how hard finding the problem can be.

That sounds like the problem is in the pedal linkage. Try half pedaling, or quarter pedaling, or just putting a slight pressure on the pedal. If any of those stop the buzz, it's the linkage.

Ok. Without comparative measurements, it'd be difficult to know if those things contribute to the problem or not.

If it is a sympathetic vibration, he/she should have been able to isolate it for you do that you can stop it without calling back.

Pwg