Tag Archives: piano technique

How to Choose a Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today, we’re going to discuss how to choose a piano. Different people are going to have markedly different criteria for choosing a piano. For example, if you’re an accomplished, seasoned concert pianist, you have very specific ideas of what you’re looking for, and you’ll want to try countless pianos to find exactly the touch and the tone that you’re after. But if you’re like most people, you haven’t had the opportunity to play a plethora of concert-level instruments, you might want to have a trusted person who knows a lot about pianos to help guide the process. I’m going to try to give you some pointers as to what to look for when you are after a piano.

Are you looking for an acoustic piano or a digital piano?

There are many reasons to choose one or the other. If you’re living in a place where sound is an issue, a digital piano might be necessary. There are also silent pianos that you can play with headphones digitally, but they can also be played acoustically. That’s one alternative for you. But you might want to just have a digital piano. Maybe you have a very limited budget, and an acoustic piano is just not in the cards for you. Maybe you’re living in a studio apartment, and you need to put the piano in the closet during the day. Maybe you do music composition and you want something that has a MIDI or USB interface so you can plug it into your computer. There are definitely good reasons to get a digital piano. But if you want the ultimate playing experience, an acoustic piano really offers that.

There are two main types of acoustic pianos: grands and uprights.

The benefits of grands are many because, while a tall upright can rival the sound of a mid-size grand, the action is inferior on even the finest upright pianos. To get a Steinway or a hand-built German piano, an upright costs tens of thousands of dollars. But the hammers on an upright are striking sideways. So there’s a limit to the speed of repetition compared to a grand piano where the hammers have the benefit of gravity since they go up and down. So if you’re an advanced player, and you’re playing things with rapid repetition or trills on upright pianos, those sorts of things can be very difficult. Even the finest uprights don’t match what a fine grand piano action is capable of. Grand pianos also project sound into the room instead of into the wall, so you get a glorious sound! And they’re beautiful pieces of furniture as well. But there are good reasons to get an upright. Maybe you have space or budgetary limitations that make a grand unattainable. A good upright can have a nice sound. And if you’re not playing something with rapid repetition—a lot of trills and other ornaments that require really fast repetition—a good upright could be a great choice for you.

The size of the piano is another important criterion.
The Bigger the Better?
All things being equal, bigger is better on pianos. What do I mean by that? Well, if you ever look inside a concert grand piano, the strings in the treble are very short, and they get longer and longer throughout the entire range of the piano. On a nine-foot piano, those bass strings are really long, so you get an even sound from the top to the bottom. Every other piano is a compromise. If you look at a baby grand piano, by the time you get to the middle register, the strings are all about the same length to the lowest notes of the bass. They just get thicker, and they don’t have the same true sound you’ll get out of a larger piano. Plus, the soundboard area is larger on bigger pianos, so you get a richer sound.

Another thing to consider is the acoustics of the room.

You don’t want to overwhelm a room with a piano that has too much volume because it will affect the way the piano sounds and the way you play it. It can actually damage your hearing. I have a good friend who has a beautiful Steinway model C, a phenomenal scale design at over seven feet. It’s blowing him out of the room! So he has to practice with earplugs. What a shame to have this glorious piano and not be able to fully enjoy it because he’s got to stuff his ears in order to play it without causing ear damage. So make sure you choose the right size piano for your space. And it’s not just the size of the room you need to consider. If you have an open floor plan, it doesn’t matter if the room is small, so long as the air volume is large. If your room has a wood floor and if there is no soft furniture, drapes, carpet, or rugs, even a larger room can be pretty resonant. A room that has carpeting, drapes, and soft furniture will absorb a lot of sound. Also, odd shapes along the wall, such as bookshelves, will diffuse the sound so it bounces around, giving it a more pleasing tone. There’s nothing worse than what are called standing waves. Have you ever been talking in a hallway and it sounds robotic? It’s like two mirrors facing each other, creating an infinite reflection. That’s exactly what happens with sound waves in a small space with parallel walls. The frequency of the waveform will amplify itself, and you’ll get resonant frequencies that are really nasty. You can mitigate that by utilizing absorbent material in strategic places.

Of course, you have to think about your budget.

You don’t have an infinite amount of money to spend. There are basically two types of pianos: hand-built pianos and Asian production pianos. What’s the difference? Well, a piano factory like Pearl River makes over a hundred thousand pianos a year. That’s an astounding number of pianos! It’s more than triple the number of new acoustic pianos that are sold in the United States each year. They can’t make pianos the same way Steinway does. Steinway only makes about 2400 pianos a year. Fazioli only makes 140 pianos a year! Obviously, they can do things differently from a company like Pearl River, Yamaha, or Kawai that mass-produces pianos. There’s a different methodology in the way the plates are made, the woods that are used, and a plethora of other things that can enhance the way a piano sounds and plays.

The problem with hand-built pianos is cost.

A Rolls-Royce costs much more than a Toyota because it’s hand-built from beginning to end. The same is true of pianos. With a company like Steinway, each piano is hand-made instead of having pretty much an assembly line of parts that are mass-produced. You can get a wide range of Asian production pianos, and some of them are very good instruments. Nobody is going to scoff at a CX-series Yamaha. They’re really well-made pianos. But Yamaha has two levels of pianos above the popular C series, and those are indeed hand-built pianos that cost as much or more than Steinway! So you have to figure out your budget.
PIANO FACTORY

Should you get a new piano or a used piano?

Here again, there are many different things to consider. If you’re buying an inexpensive Asian production piano, realize that there’s a limited lifespan. This is because you’re not going to rebuild a piano that’s not that costly to begin with. If you buy, for example, a $25,000 piano new, that might seem like a lot of money, but it can easily cost that much or more to rebuild a piano. So I hate to say it, but most Asian production pianos aren’t worth restoring because the cost of restoring them exceeds their potential value. So it makes sense to look for used Steinways, Mason & Hamlins, Bechsteins, and other top-tier hand-built pianos. Some of the best value pianos could be brands that are no longer made, like Chickering, Knabe, or Baldwin. These pianos were great in their day. Sadly, these American-produced pianos no longer exist. But you could find a good Baldwin used that maybe isn’t even that old. Maybe the piano is all original and still in good shape. The piano could be worth restoring because Baldwin cost as much as Steinway when they were originally made. And many of them are equal in quality to a new Steinway or Mason & Hamlin, which are the only companies still producing pianos in the United States. Some Mason & Hamlin models are made in China today, so be sure you notice the distinction there.

Every piano is unique.

If you play brand new pianos of the same make and model, each one has a different character of sound and touch. Hand-built pianos like Steinway are notably unique from one to the next, which can be a great thing if you find the one you’re looking for. You really have to try each one to make sure it suits you. Asian production pianos like Yamaha and Kawai are more consistent than other pianos because the manufacturing is very tightly controlled. A lot of robotics are used. But even then, no two trees are alike. So soundboards and bridges are going to have different sonic characteristics. There’s also a lot of handwork. Even on inexpensive Chinese pianos, the bridges are hand-notched. So there’s a lot of handwork, even on Asian production pianos. They’re not just all made in a factory by machines. There are a lot of people working in those factories. So each one is unique. You must try the specific piano because even pianos of the same make and model can vary quite a bit in sound and feel. So you really want to try, or at least listen to, the piano you are buying. We provide first-class recordings with excellent Neumann microphones of our pianos, so you can easily get a comparison from one to the next and hear what you like.

So those are a bunch of things to consider when you’re looking for a piano. If you have any questions about pianos, I’m always available for free advice. Just email me at Robert@LivingPianos.com. I’m always happy to help in any way I can! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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How Much Freedom Is There in Musical Performance?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. How much freedom is there in musical performance? If you listen to the same piece by different performers on the piano or any other instrument, you’ll find dramatically different interpretations. How much do you have to be faithful to the score, and how much can you just take off and do what you want to do? The answer may surprise you!

You want to play faithfully to the score.

If somebody was listening to a piece of music written by a great composer and they were transcribing it note for note, they should end up with the same score that the composer wrote with every last detail. Does that mean that every performance should be the same? No, surprisingly, because you can execute every detail of the score in different ways to indicate what is written, and different people have various ideas about how to achieve that.

I’m going to give you a great example today, which is Debussy.

Debussy was a French impressionist composer from the early 20th century. His music is a wash of colors and sounds. And yet, it’s important to have the clarity of what is intended in the score come out in your performance. But there is more than one way to achieve that. For example, sometimes there are double-stemmed notes, a note with a stem going down and a stem going up. Why are there two stems? Well, that note is part of two different lines of music, like different instruments playing. It may be 16th notes and 8th notes at the same time. One voice is on the top and one voice is on the bottom. Sometimes voices overlap, and they both hit the same note at the same time. The composer wants you to understand that and project it into the performance. It creates different sounds. So in the first movement of Debussy’s Children’s Corner Suite, there are double-stemmed notes. Interestingly, it starts off in the third measure with double-stemmed eighth notes (with staccatos), which intersect with 16th notes on the bottom. What makes it even more interesting is that starting in the fifth measure, you have a similar passage except with double-stemmed quarter notes with 16th notes on the bottom. This is a subtle difference which is the genius of Debussy creating nuances of sound. (You can reference the accompanying video to hear this on the piano with the score provided.)

Ideally, you want to do as much as you possibly can with your fingers and then use the pedal for expression.

That’s just one example where the composer wants to have different lines of music, and it’s up to you as a performer to find a way to execute it to create the effect. On the seventh measure, you have the same pattern twice, but the first time with a crescendo/decrescendo, then it repeats with no dynamic changes. There are all kinds of subtle phrasing, double stemmed-notes, inner lines, expression, and crescendos. What I have found over the years is that if you really learn the precision of where the crescendos start and end, exactly how many notes are slurred, attention to double-stemmed note values, and you delineate all the minutiae of the score, it brings the music to life!

Be sure you’re not working from a heavily edited edition of the score.

You want to follow the markings of the composer, not the editor, because the editor may or may not have great ideas. You should always know what the composer had in mind with an urtext edition, one that is not edited, or one that clearly indicates what’s coming from the editor rather than the composer. That way, you can get in the head of the composer and get an idea of the concept of what they really were after. Those small details all come together to mold a great performance. So you can indeed follow the inclinations of the composer and do so with the conviction of how you believe the music can best be expressed. I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at Living Pianos: Your Online Piano Resource. Join the discussion at LivingPianos.com where you can leave your comments on countless articles with accompanying videos.

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How to Use the Pedal on the Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to use the pedal on the piano. This is such a deep subject. I have other videos on the finer points about pedaling, how it imparts changes in tone, when to use it, when not to use it, and how to use the sustain pedal in conjunction with the soft pedal. But today I will cover the fundamentals. If you’ve ever wondered how the pedal works, you’ve come to the right place!

The interesting thing about the pedal is that it does not go down rhythmically.

If you’ve just started using the pedal the hardest thing about it is that it is not used rhythmically, because you want to tap your foot on the beat. It’s the most natural thing in the world! Yet that doesn’t work on the piano. It doesn’t work because if you push the pedal down when a note plays, you will capture the harmonies of the previous notes that were down. It’s a mess. Why is that? The fact of the matter is, when you push the pedal down, whatever notes are held down are going to continue holding down. When you play a note, you’re still holding down the previous notes to some extent, particularly if something is slurred.

How do you create a slur on the piano?

A slur is a glide between notes. A singer or a French horn player does it very naturally and the notes between the slur are all there. On the piano, you can’t do that. So you tend to overlap notes, and that’s the way you create the illusion of a slur. But what happens when you pedal on the beat is the previously played notes are going to be held. If I play middle C and then a C sharp and I pedal at the same moment as I play the C sharp, you’re going to hear the C and the C sharp together. You will hear dissonance. The pedal must go down right after notes plays.

But here’s some good news for you, the pedal comes up exactly on the beat!

The pedal goes up exactly when you play a note. But the pedal goes down right after the note, arrhythmically. It’s important that you understand that, otherwise, you’re going to hear dissonance. It’s the nature of the pedal.

There’s so much more to the pedal. As a matter of fact, I will put links in the description of some other videos I have on pedaling. Decades ago, I made 50 hour-long presentations live on the internet, for a company in Irvine. My show was called Keyboard Kaleidoscope. One episode is an hour long show on the pedal that I will share with you in the notes below, in the description, and on LivingPianos.com! I hope this is helpful for you. Thanks so much for joining me, 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

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HOW TO USE THE PEDAL ON THE PIANO – KEYBOARD KALEIDOSCOPE – ROBERT ESTRIN

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How to Keep Your Review Pieces on Performance Level

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to keep your review pieces on performance level. I talk to so many people who wonder how they can learn new pieces without forgetting old pieces. People can end up studying the piano for years and still only have one piece they can play, the piece they’re working on that week! So, how do you keep old pieces in shape? How can you possibly have time to learn new pieces when you’re reviewing all your old pieces?

Of course the answer is, you can’t keep every piece you’ve ever played in your hands and in your head all the time. It becomes impossible! Once you amass a repertoire of five or six hours of music, you can’t possibly keep everything in shape. However, it is vitally important that you keep at least the last few pieces you’ve studied in your hands and in your head. Because there’s a pleasure and an ease you gain with music you’ve played for a long time. So, how do you do that without taking up all of your practice time?

The best, easiest, and most fun way of keeping your review pieces in shape is to play them!

Play your pieces all the time! play them every day! Why not? Obviously, if you have pieces like the Hammerklavier Sonata of Beethoven or the Bach Goldberg Variations, they’re going to take a while to play through. So, there are certain limitations depending upon the level you’re on. But certainly you should keep playing the pieces that you’ve studied within the past few weeks.

Let’s say you’re working on a brand new piece, and you have the piece you did at your last lesson. Well, it’s better to have the last few pieces, at least three to five pieces. Otherwise, as I said, you could be playing the piano for years and never have anything really secure. Because there’s nothing like the security of playing a piece that you’ve known for a long time. The ease and security you gain from living with music is tremendous. If you never review those pieces, everything is kind of tentative and you never have that pleasure.

Simply playing through your pieces, is that all you have to do?

Playing through your pieces isn’t all you have to do, but most of the time that’s enough. On a daily basis or at least every other day, play through your review pieces. Play through a bunch of them. It’s fun because they’re pieces you already know. What’s the purpose of all this practicing if you’re not going to have anything you can play? You should enjoy playing the piano, not just practicing. You put in all this tedious work of learning music and working out all the technical details. The reward at the end of the line is being able to play! So of course play them, and play them for people. You’ll get better at performing simply by playing for other people.

Now, if you keep playing your pieces over and over again for weeks on end and that’s all you do, they will deteriorate over time. Because there are slight changes that happen. Which is why you must go back to the score on a periodic basis with your music if it’s something you’ve memorized. Put the score up and play with your foot off the pedal so you can hear the underlying performance without the benefit of the pedal which can obscure things. Sometimes you should use a metronome to make sure you’re playing at a constant tempo. This is a great way to reinforce your playing. Playing with the score slowly to a metronome with no pedal reinforces everything that you’ve learned before. It’s a refresher. I recommend it highly for all of your review pieces. This is particularly helpful with pieces you’ve recently learned that you’re trying to get on that ultimate level. This is a terrific way of doing that. You can actually work at different speeds. Start very slowly with the score, because it’s hard to read something you’ve memorized, particularly if it’s a piece that’s above your reading level. You undoubtedly read through it when you first got it just to see what it was about, and then you got to work and learned it. Going back trying to read it is a tough task, but it’s also vitally important if you want to keep your performance on a high level. Otherwise, it’s like a game of telephone where the message gets so garbled it ends up being a whole new message. If you play your piece over and over enough times and never refer to the score, you can end up with a whole different piece! So, it’s incredibly important to reference the score.

Choose wisely which pieces you keep in your repertoire.

Definitely keep at least the last two or three pieces you’ve learned in your repertoire so you can really solidify them and enjoy the fruits of your labor. You might also select some choice pieces that you’ve learned that you never want to forget. Play them often enough that they don’t get too far gone. If you find that they’ve deteriorated to a great extent, go back to the score. You might have to practice some sections, but don’t let them get so far gone that you have to practically start all over to learn them again. But even if you do, you’ll find if you’ve really learned a piece of music and committed it to memory, relearning it is much faster than initially learning it. So, that’s the good news for any of you out there who haven’t done this. Go ahead and relearn some of those pieces. At first it’ll seem arduous, but then you’ll quickly assimilate the score once again.

There are pieces I’ve learned and relearned multiple times. They become cemented almost as a part of my permanent repertoire. There’s a number of pieces that I just have all the time. Even if I haven’t played them in years, they’re still there. But it takes a long time to get to that point. In the meantime, play through your pieces on a regular basis and have fun with your music! Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Getting into a State of Flow With Your Music

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about getting into a state of flow with your music. You’ve probably heard this term before, and we’ve all experienced it. What does it mean to be in a state of flow? When you’re completely absorbed in something, whether it’s making pottery, a walk in the woods, practicing the piano – it can be almost anything. You stop thinking about what you’re doing, and you just are. It’s all one experience where you don’t have that sense of looking at yourself and telling yourself instructions with words. Instead it just flows naturally.

Getting into a state of flow during a musical performance can be a magnificent experience.

If you’re playing written music from the score, you have to keep a certain amount of your cognition so that you don’t take a wrong turn. You don’t want to get carried away! But you can get to a point with a score, if you are intimately familiar with it, where you are just absorbed in it completely. It comes out of you so naturally that it isn’t even work anymore and time seems to disappear. Have you ever had that experience? If you can get into that state in your practice, you’re really doing well.

Improvising is a fantastic opportunity to get into a state of flow.

With improvisation you don’t have to focus on a score. It’s much easier to get into a state of flow where you’re no longer thinking about what you should do next. It just comes out of you, and you can feel the trajectory. You can feel the flow of the music. You are just part of it. In music and in life, to be in the moment is the ultimate feeling! But it’s one of the most difficult things to do. People use meditation and other things to try to get into that state of flow. But music is a fantastic vehicle for that. So, let yourself go! Sometimes you just have to see where music takes you. You can do that in the privacy of your own home. Eventually, if you have the confidence and the security in your playing, you can do it in performance as well!

I hope this is enjoyable for you. Thanks again for joining me! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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How to Save Vast Amounts of Time Practicing the Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how important it is to double check your work when practicing the piano. If you’ve ever seen any of my videos on how I practice, you know I break things down to the smallest parts. I take small sections and study the notes carefully, just in the right hand. I figure out the rhythm. Then I count to make sure everything is secure and figure out the best fingering. Then I study all the other details, the expression, the slurs, the staccatos. I look back and forth dozens of times until I have it securely memorized. Then I do the same long process just with this tiny phrase on the left-hand part until that is secure, going back and forth, double and triple checking. Finally I play both hands together. That’s the hardest part! Naturally, there’s a lot of back and forth in that process making sure it’s right. Then I go on phrase by phrase until I have the whole piece memorized connecting phrase by phrase as I go. After all of that, I go back and study the score agan! I take my foot off the pedal and play through really slowly to double-check my work. And yet, with all of this, I still discover things I didn’t catch in the score!

I recommend going back and forth a great deal, particularly in the formative phase of learning a piece.

As I’ve said so many times before, unlearning is much harder than learning. So you must constantly reference the score at every stage of your practice. Even when you think you have a piece beautifully memorized on performance level, go back to the music and play excruciatingly slowly. I bet you will find things you didn’t know were there. After all, there are tens of thousands of details in even a short piece of music. When you consider notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing, and expression, it’s mind boggling that we can learn music at all! That’s why I recommend the method that I just described.

Try it for yourself!

So, any of you who have pieces really solid, go through your score as I just mentioned. Go slowly, using no pedal, reading every detail, and see what you discover in the process. I think it will be richly rewarding. Better than that, be sure to double, triple, quadruple check your work as you learn so you don’t have to unlearn things later. It will save you vast amounts of time in the long run.

I hope this is helpful for you! If you enjoy exploring pianos and piano playing, joining my Patreon family www.patreon.com/robertestrin. It will offer you even more videos and the opportunity to be part of the creative process.

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
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