Hamburg Steinway "D" bass (wound string) Buzz

[Alan Forsyth]

Ron Nossaman "suggested";

"Grab everything - everything in the vicinity of where the sound seems to be
coming from, and see if it stops. If it stops, you have your hand on the
culprit. "

This is what I came across the other day while tuning a Yamaha A1. All was
going fine until I came upon the first wound string. There was this lousy
buzz. I instinctively put my finger on the string at the agraffe, I suppose
because this was where my ears told me where the noise was coming from. The
buzz vanished. My finger was touching the plain length of wire, about 1/4",
between the agraffe and the start of the winding. It occurred to me that
this short bit of string had it's own speaking length determined by the
agraffe and the winding and as such was creating it's own sound, an
extremely high frequency. How one is supposed to cure such a problem I do
not know. The customer didn't mention it and I didn't tell her about it
either.

Methinks I now know why Broadwood used to have the bass windings running
through the bridge pins.

As for other sources of buzzing, it's amazing how many ball point pens find
their ways into pianos especially in university practice rooms.

AF