Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

This sounds like a total contradiction. So, I’m going to show you something really fascinating today! You will hear an example of the famous Mozart Sonata in C major K545. Most of you probably know this sonata. I’m going to be demonstrating with the beautiful and lyrical slow movement. I’m going to first play it in a way that is pretty slow. But it won’t sound slow and I’ll explain why in just a minute.

This movement is in ¾ time and I’m playing every single sixteenth note in the left hand as its own beat. So you’re hearing a lot of motion in the music. Now I could play it at the same tempo or even slightly faster, but hearing the eighth notes as the beat. It will start to sound a little bit slower even at the same tempo or faster.

Finally, we’re going to go one step further and make the quarter note the beat. I will play a little bit faster. Yet, it will sound slower than anything you’ve heard so far. It will have a more relaxed quality. It was Rachmaninoff who said,

“The bigger the phrase, the bigger the musician.”

So in your music, try to think the long notes as the pulse of your music; particularly in slow movements. It will have the benefit of creating a relaxed quality. You will also be able to take faster tempos yet make it sound slower which can really help with slow movements that have repeats because they can get ponderously long if you take them too slowly. You can create a relaxed quality in your music at a faster tempo by hearing the longer notes as the beat.

Some people look at fingerprints on a piano with a high gloss finish and think they will never be able to keep it clean. Interestingly, in many ways a high gloss finish is easier to care for than a satin finish. How can this be? The difference is simple. A high gloss finish on pianos is generally a polyester finish. It is a totally sealed finish. You can actually clean it with Windex without damaging it believe it or not! Be sure to use a soft cotton cloth. You never want to use anything that has any fibers in it because as robust as high gloss finishes are, certain things can mess them up very quickly.

For example, if you take a music book and toss it on the piano making it spin, you’ll notice little tiny hairline scratches on the finish just from tossing the book on the piano. Polyester finishes were first introduced in this country from Asian Manufacturers at the NAMM music trade show. To demonstrate how robust they are, they set a piano on fire! The downside of high gloss finishes is that if they’re damaged, very few people know how to repair them. However, they are generally very strong finishes unless a metal object hits them. Hairline scratches can be buffed out by a professional furniture person if they’re not too deep.

Satin Finishes

Satin finishes are somewhat porous finishes which are hand-rubbed. They have multi-layers of lacquer, yet they’re still open finishes. You’ll see fingerprints in the finish and may wonder how to polish them out. You do not want to use cleaning products like pledge because they leave a wax residue which can build up over time and must be professionally removed. There are some piano polishes which are specifically designed for satin or high gloss piano finishes which won’t damage the piano. General furniture polishes are not advisable on pianos.

How do you clean a satin finish? It’s really simple: you take a soft cotton cloth and rub it in the direction of the grain of the finish. If there are persistent blemishes from dirty hands or even just the natural oils in your skin, take a slightly damp cloth and rub it in the direction of the grain of the finish. You should be able to get rid of all the fingerprints so long as there is nothing embedded in there or if it got dented by a sharp object.

I wear shoes that are comfortable and don’t squeak. It’s always important to test your shoes to make sure you don’t get pedal squeak. It can sometimes happen depending upon the sole of the shoes. I’ve worn so many different types of shoes – even sneakers and all sorts of other footwear. I’ve even played barefoot! It’s possible to play the piano with all sorts of different types of shoes. Sometimes I see women wearing high heels and I wonder how they can negotiate the pedal!

A great deal of it comes down to what you are used to. Of course, if you’re going to be playing a concert, you want to test the shoes you’re going to be wearing and be comfortable with them. Just imagine if you practice all the time in sandals. Then you go out in a public performance wearing dress shoes and feel a dramatic difference in the feel of the pedal. This could be a real challenge! So, you have to get used to the shoes you’re going to wear in performance.

The other thing to consider is that pedals, as I’ve talked about before, are different on all pianos. So, some pedals travel a very short distance and other pedals travel quite far. Also, where they engage is different. Even the height of pedals can be different. Have you ever had the experience of going to a piano that’s on one of those spider dollies or an upright on a dolly in a school? The whole piano can be up high and you’re trying to reach the pedals at a drastic angle. This can be tough to deal with!

I’ve actually had the circumstance of playing in concerts where the piano was on one of those dollies, so the piano was higher from the floor than usual and it was uncomfortable. I was also sitting too low even with the bench in the highest position. We found a piece of ¾ inch plywood to put the bench on extending all the way underneath the pedals as well, and that solved the problem perfectly!

There are a lot of solutions to the myriad situations you find with pianos, but one thing to note is the importance of getting used to wearing a variety of shoes. It’s one less variable to worry about. Test the shoes you are planning to wear for a performance, ideally on the piano you are going to be playing on and you should be in good shape.

You may have heard the term “Asian Production Pianos.” What does that mean? Here is some historical context. The piano industry started in Europe centuries ago offering hand-built pianos from many manufacturers. Eventually manufacturing migrated to the United States which had well over 1,000 companies making pianos a century ago. The Japanese followed with the giants, Yamaha and Kawai. This is when the scale of production increased to a point where technologies were employed to produce massive numbers of pianos which would be classified as “Asian Production Pianos”. Later the Koreans produced pianos including Samick and Young Chang. Today, hundreds of companies in China are manufacturing pianos. The vast majority of these pianos are production pianos meaning that they produce vast numbers of instruments.

Just because pianos are made in Asia does not necessarily mean that they are Asian production pianos. Here is an example: Yamaha is a very large piano manufacturer and they make many pianos and many of them would be classified as Asian production pianos. Even their CX series would be in my opinion classified as an Asian production piano. This simply means that they make a lot of them! When you take a company like Mason Hamlin which only make around 100 to 150 pianos a year and European companies like Sauter which make a only a few hundred pianos a year, these are hand-crafted pianos. Steinway is the most notable example of hand-built pianos of the highest order.

When it comes to production pianos, Pearl River would be a classic example. Last year they made around 130,000 pianos! Obviously, there have to be technologies employed to this massive scale of production from seasoning woods to crafting actions with thousands of parts. Just one of their factories is over 1 million square feet ! So, that is a great example of an Asian production piano. However, Pearl River does have other name brands they sell in more limited quantities with more hand work.

When it comes to Yamaha, just because it’s a Yamaha doesn’t mean that it’s an Asian production piano. They have their CF and SX series which are hand built pianos. I would not classify these as Asian production pianos even though they are produced by Yamaha. They are handmade in limited production in separate factories from where they make their other pianos such as the CX series.

We get this question all the time. So many times people call up and have old pianos they think are valuable. The first question isn’t: What’s the brand or what’s the size? It comes down to one thing: condition. Condition is everything with pianos. You’d think that a piano that dates back a hundred years or more would have some antique value. You hear about people who find treasures on Antiques Roadshow and they find out things they own are worth a lot of money. Not so much with pianos.

Now there are some exceptions. First, if for example you had one of the very first Steinway pianos ever made or maybe even another manufacturer, one that’s truly historical in its significance. For example, if Chickering only made half a dozen of a certain model and you had one of the last one’s made in the 1860s, there could be some antique value. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I would say maybe one out of 10,000 pianos might fit into that criteria. It’s a rare thing to have true antique value. Another example might be a piano that was owned by a famous person. That’s a whole other area, and as a matter of fact, for appraisals you have to find the right appraiser who can take that into account because it is really hard to assess value based upon a piano’s lineage.

Other than that, what other things are there to look for? There are certain brands that have more stature than others. Naturally, Steinway is the most well known brand of any piano. So, older Steinways can retain value even when they need rebuilding. There’s a market for them because used Steinways can command much more money than other pianos because everybody knows the name. Still, the condition is so important because the cost of rebuilding a piano can be very expensive. It can cost $20,000 – $30,000 to rebuild a piano that has been neglected or has seen much use over the years. You have to ask yourself what the piano would be worth after restoration. If the answer is less than the cost of the work that you’re going to put into it, you’ve got a negative net worth which is obviously no value.

This is a really good question. There is a simple answer and I’m going to tell you right up front. Last year there were around 30,000 pianos sold in this country. That might sound like a lot or maybe not particularly. If you consider that over one hundred years ago, when there were less than 100 million people in this country, ten times more people bought pianos. In fact, at the peak, there were some 146,000 pianos with a population less than a third of what it is today!

The piano was as ubiquitous as television is today. Every home had to have them. They were the original home entertainment technology and it was a de facto standard. Player pianos were incredibly popular and you could sing along with them as well as play along with them. Everybody had to have pianos. Not so much today, as I mentioned earlier, only a little over 30,000 pianos were sold in the United States last year.

China has more companies producing pianos than there are piano stores in the United States! The largest piano manufacturer in China is Pearl River. They have several factories and they just put a new factory online over a year ago that has 1.2 million square feet. Can you believe that? They produce hundreds of thousands of pianos (around 130,000 pianos last year). In contrast, last year, there were only about 1,200 pianos built in North America.

Think about this: China buys 15 times as many pianos as Americans do. Well, this isn’t too surprising when you consider that China buys more General Motors cars than Americans do also. But there is more to is. With pianos, their culture values pianos more than contemporary American culture does.

This is reflected not only by the number of pianos produced and sold there but in the enormity of the piano teaching business as well. In the U.S. there are around 6 million piano students. China has over 40 million piano students! You have to go back a hundred years in the United States for any kind of parallel. Back then, there were many hundreds of American companies producing pianos. The population was only around a hundred million compared to the 325 million people living here now. Yet, 10 times as many people bought pianos than they do today.

It seems like an obvious thing. If your piano sounds bad, get it tuned by all means. You might not know how bad or how to know what to even listen for. Maybe you’re new at piano, and you’re afraid maybe you’re going too long, or perhaps you’re throwing away hundreds of dollars unnecessarily. So I’m going to give you some pointers today.

Perhaps you’ve probably heard the term “A440”. A440 is the reference that orchestras tune to often and pianos are tuned to. It’s the A above middle C on the piano, and when you hear A, you’re actually hearing 440 vibration cycles per second. That’s right; your mind is a calculator of frequencies when you recognize pitches! If your piano goes low or possibly even high from the weather, you might not know it since it could be in tune with itself. In this instance, you want to utilize some kind of reference pitch. The easiest thing in this day and age is to find an app you can put right on your phone to check your tuning periodically to make sure “A” is at 440. If it’s at A441 or something like that you’re okay. But if you see it slipping down several points, you want to get your piano tuned because otherwise, the tuning won’t hold very long if you let it get too far gone.

What about if the piano is basically on pitch? You’ve tried different notes that are all about center, some are a little high, and some are a little low. You wonder what are you listening for when notes are out of tune. When you play notes that are in tune on a piano, there’s a purity to the sound. I’m going to let you hear as I detune one of the strings on a G on a piano just a slight amount on the accompanying video. You’re going to hear waves. Why do you hear waves? Well, pitches are simply waves going through the air. “A” is 440 cycles per second and if you have three strings and one of them is going at a slightly slower frequency than the other ones, you get the interference wave of where they start over again. Like if two people are clapping at different speeds, eventually they match up again. It’s the same thing with this, so I’m going to detune this one string very slightly so you can hear the detuned chorus effect which makes the tone thicker like two pianos playing the same note slightly out of tune with one another.

When you go through your piano, and you hear any notes that aren’t pure, those are the notes that are out of tune. So you might go through your piano, and some of the notes will be pure and others might have waves. You want the notes to sound pure, and you don’t want to hear the strings distinct from one another. You want to hear just that one pure pitch. So in a nutshell, you want to make sure your piano’s basic pitch is up to pitch either with a tuning fork or better yet, get an app on your phone. I recommend “PanoTuner”.