Scenario One – Your child has been complaining about a rattling or buzzing noise when she plays certain keys on the piano. You asked your technician about it when he was out for his regular visit, but he couldn’t find any noise in the piano and your child was not there to remind you which notes triggered the noise. Scenario Two – Your child is preparing for a recital and is disturbed by noises that occur whenever she plays certain notes, notes that come up frequently in her recital piece. You have your technician scheduled, but the earliest he can get there is a week after the recital. What to do?
There is good news. The noise, while triggered by the piano, is not always IN the piano. The problem is often something called “sympathetic vibration”. Think about the stereotype where the opera soprano sings one note long and strong enough that the wine glass she is holding starts vibrating and breaks. Same concept, just less dramatic and less messy. The vibrations from the piano strings will be of the correct frequency (pitch) and volume to start another object vibrating. The best news – with patience and a little help from your child (who should be glad to be rid of the affliction!) you can usually locate the problem in an hour or less and correct it shortly after that, depending on what the exact problem turns out to be. Here is the process:
(1)Talking to your piano student, try to determine when the problem started. Once the two of you pin down the date as exactly as possible, look around the room and try to remember any changes in the room since that time. It could be something small like a statuette that your child received from her teacher for perfect attendance or an antique candy dish that you just inherited from your grandmother to something as large as the new big-screen TV your spouse acquired. (Note: It is usually best if the main TV and the piano are in different rooms. See Piano Bears author Cynthia VanLandingham’s post here for more details.) Make a list of all of these changes, no matter how insignificant, as they are all suspects.
(2) Using the list from (1) start through each suspect one at a time, smallest item first. Stand by the item while your child plays the piece known to trigger the noise. If the item makes noise, try picking it up or padding it so that it cannot vibrate. If the noise ceases then that was the only source and you are done. If not, continue through the list. If the culprit is, as is so often the case, a piece of glassware or ceramic on a glass shelf, placing a doily or something similar between the item and the shelf will normally stop the vibrations. If it is a wall clock or other wall decoration, sometimes you can buffer the vibrations with a piece of felt or other thick cloth. Other times it will be necessary to move the item. (If the buffer doesn’t work, you might want to take down the item until after the recital to give yourself time to think about where to relocate it.) Continue through the list, one suspect at a time, until the noises stop.
(3) So what if you ask your child about when the problem started and the answer is the all too common, “I don’t know”? In that case you will just have to move through the room as she plays the piece over and over, listening carefully. I would suggest in this case that you start by removing everything from the top of the piano then stand next to any shelves that contain decorations. Each time you find a problem, solve it then re-check. Keep going until all noises are resolved.
Now for the bad news. Sometimes the noise IS in the piano. If you go through the steps I have described here, resolve each sympathetic vibration that you find by padding or moving, and you still have some noise that is either next to or in the piano, the probability is that it is in the piano and there is nothing you can safely do to resolve it. The piano has hundreds of moving parts, any one of which could be the problem. If it’s inside the piano, leave it to the pros.
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