The Buzz Is Probably Not Your Piano

One note buzzes and the other 87 behave. That reads like a crack in the soundboardSoundboardThe large spruce panel under the strings (grand) or behind them (upright) that amplifies string vibration — effectively the piano's speaker.The Savvy Take: Hairline soundboard cracks look scary and are usually cosmetic; what matters is whether the ribs are tight and nothing buzzes. Its real enemy is humidity swing — which is why technicians never stop talking about it.View in glossary →, and Fine Tuning documents a customer who got quoted $3,500 for a new one before anybody found the real fault. Mario Igrec opens the buzz chapter of Pianos Inside Out in the cheapest possible place: "Sympathetic vibrations are often produced by objects in the room, not the piano itself." Kendall Ross Bean of Piano Finders gets there too, at the end of a longer list. A picture frame that rattles at 370 Hz rattles when you play F#4 and stays quiet for the restRestA symbol indicating silence for a specified duration.The Savvy Take: Music is painted on a canvas of silence. The rests are as important as the notes. Don’t rush through them! A sudden silence (Grand Pause) is often the loudest moment in the piece.View in glossary → of the keyboard.

Work through these in order. They run cheapest first, and the first four take no tools.

Bean and Igrec's two tests

Learn these before the list. Both men build the whole diagnosis on them.

The mute test. Press a finger firmly against one string of that unisonUnisonTwo or more voices or instruments sounding the same pitch (or octaves of the same pitch) simultaneously.The Savvy Take: Playing in unison with both hands is deceptively hard. If your left hand is 1 millisecond slower than your right, it sounds “flammed” and amateur. Practice strictly together to get that laser-focused sound.View in glossary → and play the key, then the next string, then all three at once. If the noise stops when you silence a particular string, that string is driving it. If the noise survives with every string of the note damped, no string is involved and you're looking at the key, the action, the case, or the lid hardware.

The pedalPedalA device on the piano operated by the feet. The right pedal (Damper/Sustain) lifts all dampers, allowing strings to vibrate freely. The left (Una Corda) softens the tone. The middle (Sostenuto) sustains only selected notes.The Savvy Take: Foot technique is as important as finger technique. Don’t just stomp it down. “Flutter pedaling” (rapid, shallow movements) can clear out the mud while keeping the sound warm. Pedal with your ears, not your foot.View in glossary → test. Play the note with the sustain pedalDamper PedalThe right pedal: it lifts all the dampers off the strings, letting played notes ring and every other string vibrate sympathetically. Also called the sustain pedal.The Savvy Take: Pedal with your ears, not your foot. The core technique is syncopated pedaling — the pedal changes just after each new harmony sounds, so the join is seamless but never smeared.View in glossary → held down, then with the pedal up, holding the key and letting it rise very slowly. Bean's version: a buzz that shows up only as the damper settles back onto the string puts you in section 6.

1. The room ($0, and Igrec's suspect list)

Bean's instruction is to have a helper play the note repeatedly, at the volume that produces the noise, while you listen your way around the room. When you've narrowed it down, lay a flatFlatThe symbol (b) indicating that a pitch should be lowered by one semitone.The Savvy Take: Visually, flats look “heavy” (like a sagging belly). Musically, they often sound mellower or darker than sharps. When a piece modulates to the flat side, think of it as a relaxation or a darkening of the mood.View in glossary → palm on each suspect in turnTurnAn ornament consisting of four notes: the note above, the main note, the note below, and the main note again.The Savvy Take: A Turn is like drawing a circle around a note. It decorates the pitch. Don’t rush it so much that it sounds like a glitch; it should be a graceful curl.View in glossary →, the way Coppell Piano Shop damps a soundboard rib. When you touch the offender the buzz stops and comes back the second you let go. Walking the room is the first thing I do on a buzz call, before I open the lid.

Igrec's usual suspects: china closets, chandeliers, picture frames, plates, jewelry boxes, figurines, loose window panes, air-conditioning registers, doorknobs, floor tiles. Bean adds lamp fixtures, light bulb filaments, heater shrouds, metronomesMetronomeA device that sounds a steady beat at an adjustable speed, measured in beats per minute (BPM).The Savvy Take: The metronome is a mirror, not a metronome-teacher. Use it to expose where you rush and drag — try two bars with it, two bars without, and see if you're still together when it comes back in.View in glossary →, clocks, and venetian blinds. A Piano Technicians Guild thread on this exact complaint turned up a customer's hearing aids, a pair of rubber shoe soles rubbing the pedals, and family photos sitting on the lid.

Faster screen: play that same pitchPitchThe perceived highness or lowness of a sound, determined by the frequency of vibration.The Savvy Take: Most people have “Relative Pitch” (recognizing intervals), not “Perfect Pitch.” And that’s fine! Relative pitch is actually more useful for understanding harmony and structure.View in glossary → through a tone generator app, hands off the piano, sustain pedal up so every string stays damped. Anything that rattles is outside the piano.

2. A coin on the soundboard ($0 to find)

On a grand, get underneath and thump the underside of the board with the flat of your fist. Don't reach over the strings to do it, and take your ring off first, because the finished side of a soundboard scratches. On an upright the board is the back of the piano, so thump it from behind. If you hear the buzz with no note played at all, something is lying loose on the board.

Coins, paper clips, hair pins, and guitar picks fall through the openings in the cast-iron plate and settle on the spruce, often sliding under the plate webbing where you'll never see them. The board drives the object and the object chatters. It speaks on one note because it's sitting where the board moves hardest at that frequency. Igrec's first move on a short metallic rattle in a grand is to check for debris on the soundboard hidden under the plate.

If you can reach it with your fingers from underneath, take it out. If it's under the plate, leave it. Your technician sweeps it out with a soundboard steel in about ninety seconds.

3. Loose case hardware ($0 to snug a screw)

Play the note repeatedly and press down hard, one finger at a time, on the lid, the lid prop, the music desk, the fallboard, and the lock plate at the front of the case. Pressure that kills the buzz has found it.

Then change the piano's configuration. Play the note with the lid on full stick, then with the lid closed. Igrec calls hinge screws notorious for being loose and cross-threaded, and the pin can buzz inside a loosened barrel. On Yamaha U1 and U3 uprights, Mark Goodwin Pianos points at the nut and bolt on the middle pedal rod. A buzz that appears in one lid position and disappears in another is loose hardware, and a hand screwdriver is the whole toolkit.

4. Bean's action checklist, with every string damped

Damp every string of the note with your fingers and play the key hard. Noise still there? Nothing string-related is happening. That's a loose flange screw, a rail nut, a backcheck striking something, or a loose lead weight in a damper underlever. The last three are on Bean's buzz checklist by name; the flange screws are in his section on action clicks.

Push the key down very slowly with the strings still muted. A mechanical noise usually reproduces at one specific point in the roughly 10 mm of key dip. Tell your technician where that point is before they open anything.

5. A sizzling bass string ($40 for the part)

BassBassThe lowest part in a musical composition. It provides the harmonic foundation upon which the melody and inner voices are built.The Savvy Take: Amateur pianists listen to the melody; pros listen to the bass. If your bass line is weak or timid, the entire harmonic structure collapses. Play your bass notes with confidence—they are the floor the rest of the music stands on.View in glossary → strings are a steel core wrapped in copper winding. Rust and dirt work between the two over decades, the winding starts vibrating at a different rate than the core, and you get a sizzle. Burd and Sons describes it as the copper winding coming loose from the steel core. The tell: it sizzles at every dynamic level, soft playing included, where hardware buzzes need volume.

The repair is a technician job. It involves slackening the string, lifting the loop off the hitch pin, and twisting the wire in the same direction the copper is wound. Twist the wrong way and Doug L. Bullock of Piano World Enterprises warns you'll get "a dull thud or buzz in the tone." Fine Tuning says one or two strings can often be resolved during a tuning without adding significant cost, and Richard's Piano Service says outright that very minorMinorReferring to a scale or chord containing a minor third. Often associated with sadness, darkness, or tension.The Savvy Take: Minor isn’t just “sad.” It can be angry, mysterious, exotic, or serious. The Natural Minor sounds ancient; the Harmonic Minor sounds exotic/classical; the Melodic Minor sounds jazzy/smooth.View in glossary → repairs get included at no additional charge. If the string has to be replaced, a custom-wound bass string is $40.00 from Howard Piano Industries for the part alone, before labor, with one to two weeks of manufacturing lead time. Installed, budget the $40 part plus an hour or two at Richard's published $75.

6. Dampers, and Igrec's metallic zing (technician only)

This is what the pedal test isolates. Buzz only with the pedal down means the damper felt is still touching the string when it should be clear of it. Buzz only as you let the key up slowly means the felt is the source as it lands. On a grand, sight straight down the damper wire for that note and check whether a neighboring string is leaning against it. Hardened damper felt with string oxidation baked into it makes a metallic zing that Igrec says is worst during soft legatoLegatoItalian for “tied.” A directive to play without breaks between notes, smoothly connecting them.The Savvy Take: Legato is an illusion on the piano because the sound decays instantly. To fake it, overlap the sound slightly—hold the first note until the split second the second note speaks. It’s a physical transfer of weight, not just hitting keys.View in glossary → playing. Spoon adjustment on an upright means pulling the action out of the piano. Don't.

7. The capo bar, agraffes, and the bridge

Play the note as softly as you can, then as hard as you can. Clean when quiet and sizzling when you dig in points at the front termination. Igrec puts metallic noise that gets worse the louder you play at the agraffes and the V bar. Decades of vibration cut a groove into the brass or iron, the string loses its one clean line of contact, and it chatters.

The rear termination is the bridgeBridgeA transitional passage connecting two sections of a composition, or the contrasting B section in a standard AABA song form.The Savvy Take: In pop and jazz, the Bridge is the energy booster. It usually lifts the harmony to a new place (often the IV chord). Don’t let the energy drop here; it should build tension that makes the return to the final verse (A section) feel satisfying.View in glossary →, and it's the last thing to suspect. Stuart Davidson, RPT: "A loose pin can cause a buzz and/or a false beatBeatThe basic temporal unit of a composition. The regular pulse that organizes the rhythm.The Savvy Take: There is a difference between “keeping time” and “feeling the beat.” A metronome keeps time; a musician feels the pulse. Your job is to internalize that pulse so strongly that you can push against it (rubato) without losing it.View in glossary → that cannot be tuned out." The false beat is your corroborating evidence, a wobble your tuner can't remove no matter how the unison is set. Ask whether that note has always been difficult. If your piano has never quite held a clean unison, that's separate.

Same for a soundboard crack. Get under the piano with a light while someone plays the note and press a finger hard against the rib where the crack crosses it. Coppell Piano Shop's test: if the buzz stops or even diminishes, you've found it. A crack you can see but can't make buzz with finger pressure is not your problem. Larry Fine's position in The Piano Book is that a soundboard gets judged by how the piano sounds.

What NOT To Do (The Danger Zone)

No WD-40. Not ever. David Boyce, a piano tuner in Gourock, Scotland, documents on his own site that WD-40 seeps down the length of the tuning pins and slackens them in their holes until the piano won't hold a tuning at all. Wim Blees, on a PTG Pianotech thread about a WD-40'd Baldwin M: "There is no cure or solvent for WD40." A technician can try cyanoacrylate on the pins, and plenty of contaminated pianos end up restrung on a new wrest plank. That thread records ruined bushings and softened wood, and David Nereson, RPT, records a pinblock finished off the same way: pins slipped, the piano went untunable, new block and restringing.

No steel wool or wire brushes on the strings. Steel wool leaves particles on the soundboard that rust later, and microscopic hairs on the strings that buzz for years.

Don't crank every screw down with a power driver. Action and case screws are hand tight only. Overtightening crushes the wood or strips the hole, and stripped holes get plugged and redrilled. Leave the plate perimeter bolts to your technician.

Don't fish for that coin with a coat hanger. You'll drive it deeper into a recess under the bridge shelf and scratch the finished soundboard on the way.

Don't accept a soundboard replacement quote for one buzzing note. That $3,500 customer of Fine Tuning's had a bass string. Make anyone proposing four-figure belly work put a finger on the rib and show you the buzz stopping.

What the call costs: $85 to $240

If you've worked the list and it's inside the piano, book the visit and stop worrying about it. Richard's Piano Service lists a Basic Service Call at $85.00 when no tuning is performed, and $75/hr for repair and regulationRegulationThe adjustment of the piano action's mechanical settings — key dip, let-off, drop, spring tension and more — so every key responds evenly.The Savvy Take: Tuning is for pitch; regulation is for touch. If some keys feel deeper, heavier, or slower to repeat than others, ask your technician about regulation — it's the difference between fighting the instrument and forgetting it's there.View in glossary → labor. Willey Piano Tuning in Renton, Washington lists a $125 evaluation without tuning, and bundles up to a half hour of repairs into its $240 tuning visit. Most of what's on this list gets absorbed into a regular tuning, which is one more argument for staying on schedule. Prices checked August 2026.

While you're waiting, get the humidity under control at the Piano Technicians Guild's 42% and 68°F. Rib separations open up in dry spells, and winter is when they announce themselves.

Before any of that, go put a flat palm on the picture frame behind you while somebody holds the note down. Bean and Igrec would both check it first.