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Hi, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com. Living Pianos is now located in the Waterloo Arts District. This is a unique neighborhood in Cleveland Ohio. About one-hundred years ago, Cleveland was the epicenter of culture and wealth in the United States. The Rockefellers and the Carnegies were here. There was Millionaire’s Row on Euclid Avenue. It was a vibrant place. It’s left a legacy of culture and diversity. There’s the Cleveland Orchestra, one of the world’s finest orchestras, about 15 minutes away from here at Severance Hall, which has spectacular acoustics. The Cleveland Museum of Art is one of the great museums in the country. We also have the Cleveland Cultural Gardens that stretch from the lake all the way inland to University Circle, celebrating the diversity of cultures here in this city.

The Waterloo Arts District is about 10 minutes east of downtown a mile from Euclid Beach on Lake Erie. There are a lot of galleries, restaurants, coffee houses, venues, recording studios, you name it, it’s here. My wife and I really love the fact that we’re with like-minded people who appreciate art, music, and culture. It’s really quite an experience living here! Yet the pace is not as intense as Southern California where we lived for so long. You get on the freeway here and it actually moves! You don’t have to worry about rush hour. When we lived in Orange County, we used to love to go to Laguna Beach. The only problem was we couldn’t come home without hitting major traffic.

Take a tour of Living Pianos and the Waterloo Arts District Here

Check out the accompanying video to see the neighborhood and the spectacular new Living Pianos showroom! This area offers so much. One of the region’s noted music venues where national touring acts perform, Beachland Ballroom is right down the street. So there is a nice mix of musicians who come through. There are several vintage record stores, cool bars and restaurants, art galleries, and spectacular murals. It’s a unique part of the city! Last night was Art Walk, which happens the first Friday of every month and it was packed. There are three outdoor stages where bands play. It’s really a vibrant place to be, particularly on the first Friday of the month. There are all kinds of festivals. Next Saturday they’re blocking off the entire street and there will be artists, crafts, music and food. There’s so much to celebrate!

We bought a beautiful building here in the Waterloo Arts District.

There’s room for everything here in our new space. It’s four stories! On the top two floors we have a beautiful place to live. In our music room, we have a vintage, Chickering baby grand that blends right in with the vintage woodwork. My wife has her music studio on the third floor. Downstairs are our pianos in a beautiful showroom with great acoustics! The front part of the building is a Civil War era structure originally built in 1862. Of course we have done some work. Fortunately, the person who owned the building before us was a contractor. Thank goodness, because a lot of the restoration was already done including the plumbing, electrical, and all the important structural work. We just finally got air conditioning in the whole building. It was no easy task. It’s hard to find people to do that kind of work these days. On the lowest level we have our ping pong room. In the back we have a large warehouse that houses our piano shop. We are in the process of remodeling part of it to allow for even more showroom space. I also have a studio on the main level where I shoot a lot of my videos. I do a lot of my teaching there as well. I have students from all around the world!

It’s a new world we live in. It’s so easy to connect with people! That’s why I wanted to connect with you to let you know what’s going on here. If you’re ever in the area, you’re welcome to arrange a visit. We’d love to have you! In the meantime, you can watch videos which we continue producing.

We are celebrating Living Piano’s 15th year and hit 20 million views on YouTube with 95,000 subscribers!

Thanks so much for all your support, we couldn’t do it without you. It’s all for you! So thanks again to everyone. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Living Pianos Tour: Now in Waterloo Arts District

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com. Living Pianos is now located in the Waterloo Arts District. This is a unique neighborhood in Cleveland Ohio. About one-hundred years ago, Cleveland was the epicenter of culture and wealth in the U

In 2005, there were 1,200 Piano Stores in the United States

Now, there are less than 150 Piano Stores in the U.S.

The only way the piano will stay relevant in people’s lives is if they can experience it online, like everything else

The piano business is one of the only industries still operating with a 20th century model of independent, mom and pop stores selling pianos in protected territories. You need a critical mass of piano stores so people are even exposed to the instrument. Online is the only way to go.

Imagine being able to summon a grand piano to your living room from your phone, then having interactive musical experience for your family anytime that’s convenient for you.

Living Pianos makes getting a piano as simple as calling up something on Netflix! When people join the Living Pianos community, they get to share their music and musical experiences with tens of thousands of other Living Pianos subscribers.

Living Pianos Virtual Showroom allows visitors to experience rare Steinway, Bosendorfer, Seiler, Baldwin and other top-tier American and European pianos with rich media. You not only get the aid of thousands of articles and videos searchable by keywords, but also a personal team of pianists, technicians and teachers providing the ultimate musical experience without leaving your home!

Logistics are the biggest challenge facing companies trying to sell pianos nationally. But having started as an online piano company in 2006, Living Pianos has sold pianos to places as diverse as the Royal Theater in London to Shenzhen, China.

Operating a successful online piano store involves handling everything, from providing professional guidance in selecting the right instruments, to coordinating deliveries and servicing instruments around the country. Only the most cutting edge companies offer interactive musical training with rich media content. Living Pianos has thousands of videos and articles and hosts live, interactive events.

What better way is there to share time at home than with music!

When you join the Living Pianoscommunity, you get to share your music and your musical experiences with tens of thousands of other Living Pianos subscribers. Feel stuck at home? This could be the perfect opportunity to enrich your family with music with the turnkey system offered by the world’s first online piano store, Living Pianos.

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store. Thanks for joining me.

info@LivingPianos.com

Could Lockdown Have a Musical Solution?

In 2005, there were 1,200 Piano Stores in the United States Now, there are less than 150 Piano Stores in the U.S. The only way the piano will stay relevant in people’s lives is if they can experience it online, like everything else The piano busine

This is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com. Today’s subject is augmented reality in concert halls. It sounds futuristic and a little bit scary! What are we talking about here?

Designing a concert hall is very difficult.

If you build a concert hall that has beautiful acoustics for an orchestra, will it have the right acoustics for solo piano? If you bring in a jazz ensemble, will it have the right acoustics for that? What about rock bands with amplifiers and digital reverb? It is impossible to have one concert hall that will serve all of those purposes. With depleting budgets for classical music, having a hall dedicated to just classical music is rare. But the fact is, the acoustics in a hall designed for an orchestra might not be right for other performances.

There are new technologies that can customize acoustics in concert halls.

For example, the symphony hall in Indianapolis, Hilbert Circle Theater, has technology where the hall itself is acoustically somewhat dead. But they have built into the hall a microphone and speaker system that creates the ambiance artificially. You might think this sounds like a terrible idea until you actually hear it. They do an absolutely splendid job of creating beautiful acoustics electronically!

You can have a hall where the ideal acoustics can be dialed in for whatever ensemble is performing there.

For example, if you have a group that is playing amplified music, there is nothing worse than having a hall with rich reverberation that creates a wash of sound, making everything muddy. Worse yet, if there is a speaking engagement in the acoustically live hall, it can be impossible to understand speech. Just imagine being able to dial in the reverb at your will. For example, you could have a dry sound for speaking, and a reverberant hall for classical music ensembles.

There are new types of reverbs that use impulses of samples from actual halls.

These convolution reverbs allow you to take the acoustics of Carnegie Hall, for example, and create that space acoustically on recordings or possibly even live. You can make a small hall sound like a medium or large hall. You can dial in whatever hall you want! This isn’t the future, it is happening right now.

Many halls now utilize digital technologies in order to create ideal sound in spaces with acoustic compromises.

Even with the best intentions and all of the best scientific data available, some concert halls are built, but once completed, it becomes apparent that they didn’t get the acoustics quite right. To remedy this they would have to rip everything out and put in new panels with different reflecting patterns and baffles to get the hall’s acoustics dialed in. Some halls actually have mechanical panels that can be moved to alter the acoustics of the hall. Segerstrom Hall in Orange County has this sort of technology. That’s a great situation! It is also very expensive. Once a hall has digital acoustics installed, it is just the beginning. You can experiment with an unlimited number of acoustic possibilities all at the push of a button!

Augmented reality in concert halls, what a fascinating subject! I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Once again, this is Robert Estrin of LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store

info@LivingPianos.com

949-244-3729

Augmented Reality in Concert Halls

This is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com. Today’s subject is augmented reality in concert halls. It sounds futuristic and a little bit scary! What are we talking about here? Designing a concert hall is very difficult. If you build a concert hall

Today you are going to get a glimpse in the accompanying video into our studio where we record our videos! Starting out in the control room, you will hear a brief snippet of a recording project for a film score we recorded this weekend. It is a documentary which features ragtime music. Through some creative equalization and other techniques, we reproduced the sound of a piano going through a 1930’s radio! The piano was recorded on my new prototype which provides a virtual concert grand experience which I will demonstrate briefly for you. As you can hear, it sounds like a first class concert grand! It’s funny that we downgraded the audio experience to 1930’s technology for the film!

Moving into the performance room, you see grand pianos, microphones, lights and the equipment we use to record videos. The acoustics are dialed in with bass traps in the corners to avoid a muddy sound, while keeping reflections for natural reverberation.

Recording has been a passion of mine since childhood. My father had professional recording equipment in his teaching studio growing up. I would get his hand-me-down equipment which I played with as a young child. Eventually, I got into recording music both in the studio and on location for fun and later professionally.

I also had the good fortune of attending my father’s recording sessions from a young age. The Connoisseur Society Recordings from then were state-of-the-art and hold up well on CD today. In fact there was an artistry to these recordings that is quite rare as you can hear on some of these links on YouTube:

Rachmaninoff Complete Preludes Opus 32 – Morton Estrin, pianist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn1qveK6z4U&list=PLb9dheYKfknRW-F4QTI_v-GcsogwMkiJr

Brahms Rhapsody in G minor Opus 79, No. 2 – Morton Estrin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob-jgLGQuCk

My passion for piano goes hand-in-hand with my love for technology such as recording as well as my piano prototype I showed you earlier which you will be hearing more about. Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store info@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729

A New Kind of Piano

This might sound like a crazy question, however, this might be possible!

Player pianos have come a long way since the days of paper rolls and pedal-based systems:

Eventually player systems progressed to floppy disks, to CDs and eventually to what we have today, which are player systems that are barely even visible on the pianos:

Today’s systems are controlled wirelessly through remotes, smart phones, and tablets that actually work off your home’s wi-fi network. Because these systems are based on a wi-fi connection, they could theoretically be hacked!

You’d need to have someone who is pretty adept at breaking into home networks and a strange reason to hack your piano but anything is possible right?

The only scenario I could see this being even a remote possibility is if you’re a famous musician who stores your piano recordings on your piano’s player system – such as Disklavier or other recording device. Maybe someone would want to steal your music or destroy your work for malicious purposes. This is a far-fetched scenario, but it could potentially happen!

Expert hackers will always find a way around encryptions but keeping strangers out of your wireless network or piano is dependant on you to come up with a strong passwords and not share them publicly.

While I don’t think people will be hacking into your piano anytime soon, if you have a wireless player system on your piano and hear your piano playing in the middle of the night for no reason – this could be why!

I hope this is helpful and if you have any questions about this topic or any other, please email me Robert@LivingPianos.com for more information.

Can Someone Hack Into Your Piano?

This might sound like a crazy question, however, this might be possible! Player pianos have come a long way since the days of paper rolls and pedal-based systems: Eventually player systems progressed to floppy disks, to CDs and eventually to what we

Grand pianos are generally better than upright pianos. However, there are 2 reasons to consider an upright piano:

– Limited space

– Limited budget

Although an upright piano may be considered because of space restrictions, because of its design, a baby grand may be easier to place. The back of an upright piano is ugly. This is why it is almost always placed on a wall. So you need about 5-feet of wall space to accommodate an upright piano (even a short one).

However, a baby grand piano looks good however you place it. The flexibility allows for placement in a corner or even the middle of a room. So in some instances where space is at a premium, a baby grand may be easier to place than an upright piano.

It is true that you will have to invest more money to get a baby grand piano compared to an upright. However, there are several distinct advantages in regards to sound and touch:

– The sound of an upright comes out the back. As a result, the sound goes into the wall. A baby grand or grand piano opens up into the room projecting the sound where you want it.

– The keys of an upright are shorter than a baby grand (and much shorter than a grand piano). Not the part you see, but behind the fallboard. As a result, it is harder to press black keys and between black keys on an upright than on a baby grand. Just like being near the center of a see-saw, it is difficult to get leverage on an upright piano because the shorter keys don’t allow for the leverage you get on a grand piano.

– The hammers travel sideways on an upright action instead of up and down as in a grand action. So even the best uprights have sluggish actions because they don’t have the benefit of gravity helping the repetition of the hammers.

– Last, the pedals on an upright don’t do what they are supposed to do (except the sustain pedal on the right). The soft pedal (une corde) on a grand piano shifts the action so that the hammers hit only 2 strings instead of 3. This gives a change of tonal color which is one of the most magnificent expressive devices of a piano. In an upright, the soft pedal changes the touch by making the hammers closer to the strings which makes it harder to play loud but doesn’t change the tone at all. Also, the middle pedal (sustento) rarely provides the proper function on an upright.

So if you can afford it, get a grand piano or a baby grand. You will appreciate the difference.