I’m Robert Estrin, and today we have an intriguing question: Why can’t you buy a piano online? You might think it’s odd coming from me, given that Living Pianos was the world’s first online piano store, started in 2006. However, for the most part, you really can’t buy a piano online. Let me explain.
Practical Challenges
First, there are practical challenges. How do you ship a piano if you buy one online? If you live in Florida and buy a piano from California, how do you get it there? Who will tune it? These practicalities are significant, but there’s more to it.
Protected Territories in the Piano Industry
The piano industry still operates on an old business model of protected territories. This means you can’t shop for pianos the same way you shop for other items online. For most products, you can easily compare prices and buy from the cheapest source. But with pianos, the agreement between manufacturers, distributors, and dealers limits sales to specific geographical areas.
Unique Aspects of Pianos
Every piano is unique, which adds another layer of complexity. The agreements between manufacturers and dealers mean that dealers can only sell within their designated areas. If you visit a store, they can sell to you, but they can’t quote prices over the phone for out-of-area customers.
Exceptions and Loopholes
There are exceptions. Some large dealers skirt the rules and sell out of their designated areas. If caught, they may have to pay a commission to the local dealer. However, as long as the dealer is significant enough, manufacturers often look the other way.
The Living Pianos Model
Living Pianos has based its business model on selling used pianos. Nobody can restrict the sale of used pianos across the country. High-end brands like Steinway, Mason & Hamlin, and Bechstein are often worth the cost of shipping, making this model feasible. We provide high-quality videos and photos so you know what you’re getting. Experienced pianists are always welcome to visit and try the pianos.
Digital Pianos
Digital pianos are another exception. They can be shipped easily, but some digital pianos fall under the same protected territories as acoustic pianos. There are two categories: MI (Musical Instruments) sold in places like Guitar Center and Sweetwater, and home units with protected territories.
Your Thoughts?
What do you think about protected territories in the piano industry? Is it good to protect dealers who invest in inventory, or should you be able to shop anywhere for the best price? Let’s get a discussion going at LivingPianos.com. We primarily sell used pianos and abide by all rules for new pianos, ensuring the survival of the piano business.
I am Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. Thanks for joining me! 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.
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I have a really interesting story for you about how a Pinto blew up my teaching. This is not only an interesting story, but for any of you people out there who have ever thought about having a career or even a side hustle teaching the piano, there will be useful information for you. I’m going to give you a lot of pointers because I have a background in teaching going back literally generations.
My father, Morton Estrin, was a great concert pianist and teacher.
He taught my sister and me until we both went off to conservatory after high school. And in fact, both of us got our teaching career started by learning how to teach the piano from our father and assisting him in his teaching when we were still in high school. All throughout my college years in conservatory, my side hustle was teaching the piano as well as accompanying. So I was no stranger to teaching.
Have Pinto, will travel!
When I graduated from the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana, I very quickly amassed many students. I did this by offering to travel to people’s homes for lessons and advertising wherever I could to get students. Back then, it was classified ads because it was before the internet offered that possibility. No matter where people were located, I would go there .I would figure out how much more I’d have to charge for the amount of time it would take me to drive there.
I went all over the county.
No place was off-limits. I would just charge accordingly. My schedule back then was crazy because I would figure out the exact amount of time it would take to go from one student to the next. So one student might have a lesson starting at 3:15, and the next one might start at 3:55. It was all these odd times. Now, if a student was not able to make the lesson, it would be a disaster because I’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere! Sometimes it was really cold, and that car didn’t have the best heat. The other thing was that back then there were no smartphones with GPS. In some areas, there were no street signs! When it was dark, it was almost impossible to figure out where you were going. Worse yet, if for some reason I had to call a student, I’d have to find a payphone!
My mission was to figure out how to get students to come to me.
I figured the best way to do that was to have a really good piano to entice them. It also added a lot of validity when people walked into my studio and saw a beautiful, brand new Baldwin baby grand piano. We also always looked for houses with a separate entrance to a room so that students didn’t have to march through the whole house and there’d be some privacy. My wife Florence is also a musician, a flutist, so we always looked for houses with two rooms with separate entrances to each one. This was always a huge challenge! But you would be surprised at how many places we found that had two separate entrances that didn’t go through the whole house where she could do her teaching and I could do my teaching without disturbing each other.
If you want to get into teaching, you might consider driving to people’s homes.
Why is this so advantageous? Can’t you just teach at a music store or studio? The problem with that is that many studios now, at least in Southern California, get 50% or more of the money in studio fees! So you go to teach lessons, and the people who own the business that you’re teaching at are making more than you are for the actual teaching! You can make far more money if you’re willing to travel. Plus, people really appreciate the convenience of having you come to their homes. Once you develop enough students and have a following, seek out a place where you can make your own teaching studio. If you have a good instrument, and perhaps recording capabilities, it could be a viable place for people to come to for the benefits they get from studying with you.
I hope this is helpful for any of you who are interested in teaching!
By the way, I teach piano pedagogy. I have a deep background in teaching teachers. I was so lucky to have been taught how to teach by my father from the time I was in high school, and I’m happy to help any of you out there who would like to teach piano. Thanks again 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
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you the secret of extreme slow practice. This is an incredibly valuable technique. I’m going to demonstrate how this works and how it can be unbelievably valuable for your practice. I’m going to play part of the Bach French Suite in G major. The second movement, the Courante, goes really fast. I’m going to play it, and then I’m going to solidify it using extreme slow practice right in front of you. I’ll explain how valuable this is for you for a number of reasons. But first, let’s have some music!
Watch the video to see the demonstration.
Let’s say you have a piece you can play O.K, but maybe it’s getting rusty. What can you do to re-solidify it? Or you have a piece that you’ve gotten to a certain level and you just can’t quite get it really secure. Take a piece like this that’s fast, and you find an extremely slow tempo. You play looking at the score, using the metronome, and using no pedal. Exaggerate all the markings in the score including phrasing and dynamics so they become ingrained in your playing.
What’s so interesting about this technique is that when you play fast, some things may be a little blurry, and you may barely notice it. But at this extremely slow speed, any little imperfections are blown up.
It’s like putting your playing under a microscope!
And as a result, you can really solidify your playing. Now, here’s the amazing thing about this technique. Obviously, if you get it solid, and work with the metronome speeding up a notch at a time, that would be ideal. But if all you do is play it slowly like this, you will gain so much just from that! Not that progressively faster metronome speeds aren’t of value. Obviously that’s a great technique. But just going through things slowly and deliberately, even a piece you can play reasonably well, you will always learn new things about your score.
When you play things that slowly, you’re going to see things, hear things, and you’re going to feel things and understand things in a new way. Have you ever taken a word and say it over, over, over, over, and the word doesn’t even sound like a word anymore? And then eventually you really understand that word on a new level. Well, that’s what happens when you play very slowly like this, a piece that your fingers can play on auto-pilot.
You must be deliberate at these slow speeds, and you end up learning your music so much more securely. So try this with pieces that you want to get on a higher level, or pieces you’ve had on a high level, and you want to reinforce them. There’s no better way, by the way, before a performance, when you already have a piece in shape and you’re playing it over and over again, and then some days it’s better than others, and you wonder, what can you do.
Extreme slow practice to the rescue!
It will solidify your playing like you can’t believe. Try it for yourself. Let us know how it works here on LivingPianos.comYour Online Piano Store! Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin
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
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about the power of the perfect authentic cadence. Have you ever heard of this before? Well, I’m going to show you way more than that today! And what you’re going to learn here today is going to help you with your sight-reading, memorization of music, and improvisation. It’s that basic and important. It’s unbelievable. I’m surprised I have not done this video before because it’s so important.
What is a perfect authentic cadence?
In its simplest form, authentic cadence is basically just a five to one with some passing tones.
But what I want to show you today is even more valuable. It’s essentially how to establish a key with primary chords. What are your primary chords? Primary chords are your major chords. If you go up your scale and play chords on all 7 of the scale degrees, you have major chords on one, four, and five. The other chords are secondary chords. Your two chord, three chord, and six chord are minor chords. And your seventh chord is the one diminished chord, the outlier. So you have the one, four, five which are primary chords
Seventh chords are as follows. I7 and IV7 are major seventh chords. II7, III7 and VI7 are minor seventh chords. The VII7 is a half-diminished seventh chord. Why half-diminished? Because it is a diminished triad with a minor seventh.
And the V7 is the strongest chord of all – a major triad with a minor 7th which creates the dominant 7th chord. This chord is so powerful because it can establish the key with just this one chord. So here’s a great voicing for your basic four-part perfect voicing, resolutions, note leadings, and distance between all the notes. It follows all the classic rules of harmony.
Why do we have these rules?
We have these rules because they sound good! That’s why Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, and all the great composers wrote utilizing this basic structure in their music. Musicians analyzed all their great music and realized the truths behind it—the gems of truth that date back to Bach chorales. This basic chord progression is I, IV, I6/4, V7 I. You have nice voice leading and good spacing between the bass and the tenor, because it sounds better that way. Notice with the V7, it has the root, the seventh, and the third, but there’s no fifth. (It’s missing D.) Why would that be? It achieves better resolution. Doubling the root and leaving out the fifth can help to avoid the four going up to five because it resolves better going down to three (F resolving downward to E).
Why is this chord progression so basic and intrinsic to music?
Knowing all your primary chords and how to establish a key is enlightening in your music because it intrinsically makes you understand the harmonic underpinnings of all the music you play, read, or improvise. You can do this same chord progression in all major and minor keys. Once you get comfortable with all your keys, you can start expanding your repertoire of chords. A substitution for a four chord is a two chord in the first inversion, a II6.
Or you can spice it up even further with what’s called a Neapolitan sixth. What’s that? A Neapolitan sixth is like the II6, except it’s a major triad built on the flatted second degree of the scale. It’s almost like your II6 chord, but with two flatted notes. So you get a different flavor.
You can get to the point where you can modulate using a V7 of another key.
For example, if you used a D7, D is the five seven of G.
And instantly, you can modulate to G major! Start in C major, go to the D7, the dominant seventh, (the major triad with a minor seventh), and there you are in G major! And if you want to go to F major, the C7 (dominant 7th chord) brings you to F major.
The dominant seventh, the V7, is the secret to modulation.
Any time the key changes, the dominant seventh chord is pivotal. The V7 chord is almost always responsible for changing keys in music. Sometimes a diminished seventh can accomplish it too, but there’s nothing stronger than a dominant seventh chord for bringing you to a new key in music.
What is a dominant seventh chord?
A dominant seventh chord is a seventh chord built on the fifth scale degree. Build a chord on the fifth scale degree, (which in C major would be G B D F) and you get a major triad and a minor seventh. It’s the only place that exists in a scale. You can build seventh chords starting on any other note of the scale, and only the V7 has this arrangement.
I7 is major, II7 is minor, II7 is minor, IV7 is major, and V7 is the major triad with a minor seventh, it is the powerful dominant seventh chord. VI7 is minor, and VII7 is half diminished. Why half? Because it has a diminished triad and a minor seventh.
So the power of the dominant seventh can’t be stressed enough. For example, when you’re playing a sonata movement, they almost always modulate to the dominant (the key five scale degrees above the key of the piece). How does it modulate to the dominant in the exposition? Typically, it uses a dominant seventh chord! There’s modulation in so much of your music and the pivotal chord that gets you there is the V7, the dominant seventh chord, a major triad with a minor seventh
What is modulation?
Modulation is changing keys. For example if you start with a piece that has no sharps or flats in the key signature, then suddenly you have F sharps all over the place; you’re probably in G major! That’s an example of modulation. What gets you there? The D dominant seventh chord, which is the dominant of G (the fifth note of the G major scale).
So try to play this chord progression in all keys! I promise that you’ll have tremendous benefits in your playing. You’ll understand your music on a deeper level. You’ll be able to learn music more quickly, read music more effectively, and improvise music with more fluidity. Try it out for yourself! Let me know how it works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today, I’m going to show you how to start anywhere in your music. To have effective practice, you must be able to start anywhere. Let’s say you’re playing a piece of music. You mess up somewhere, and you keep starting at the beginning. Maybe the next time you get it, but you haven’t really solved the underlying weakness that caused that problem in the first place.
Being able to start where the correction is made is vital.
You want to be able to start where the correction is made, but sometimes it’s really hard to even find that place. I want to demonstrate this with a piece that’s difficult to start in the middle because it’s counterpoint. I’m going to use Bach’s Invention No. 1 in C major. Watch the video to see the demonstration! This piece does divide itself into some macro-sections that I can articulate for you. Suppose you have an issue in the middle of a section. So you decide to just start the whole section again. Whether you get it again or not, it doesn’t really matter because you still have the same odds moving forward of getting it or not getting it. Just finding the exact place is a big challenge! You must read your score and identify where it is. Now you know where to start, but you can’t start there. It seems totally foreign.
The reason it’s hard to start in the middle of a section is that you don’t know what fingering to use.
When you’re starting in the middle, it’s hard to figure out what fingering to use. So here’s the tip. Go back to a place you can start from. When you get to where the issue is, stop and pay close attention to what fingers are on what notes in each hand. Then you lock it in, and you can start from there. Now you can make the correction and get it solidified by playing through the passage a number of times. Then you go back to the beginning of that macro section and connect it several times until it is smooth.
To recap: Step one is: Find where the correction is. Step two: Go back to a place you can start from before that place. Step three: Lock in what fingers you use to start in that measure or phrase so you can effectively start there. Without this method, you get there, and it’s almost like you’re reading the music for the first time! It seems totally unfamiliar. Have you ever had that experience where you almost feel like you don’t even know the piece when you try to start in the middle? Your fingers know where to go, but you can’t solve the underlying weakness because you can’t start right at that particular spot. Well, now I’m giving you the tools to start from anywhere in any piece!
This is the way to have effective, productive practice!
Zero in on the places that need work and start from there. Solve those issues first, then correct them with the whole macro section. Try this in your practice! I guarantee that you will have a boost in productivity like you’ve never seen before! Let us know how it works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again 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
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to show you how to make your melody float on water. What am I talking about? You want to be able to have your melody soar above a bed of rippling currents. The accompaniment in the left hand is like the rippling waves, with the melody in the right hand floating above. I’m going to tell you how to achieve this!
You must find really great fingering for the left hand in order to achieve a delicate legato.
The way to discover good fingering is by practicing without the pedal. Support the melody in the right hand with a lot of arm weight, so the melody can be above the accompaniment, and then play with a very fluid legato in the left hand. By playing without the pedal, you can hear what’s involved in this process. You’ll hear the fluidity of the left hand. You have to find fingering that enables that kind of legato.
The other side of this is that you must have a buoyant melody that rises above the accompaniment.
Why is this so difficult? For two reasons. First of all, high notes don’t last very long on the piano compared to low notes. And on top of that, you have more notes in the left hand. The left hand is faster than the right hand, so it’s a double whammy. So you must create an angularity in your balance where the melody is much louder than the accompaniment. But how can you achieve it without making it sound harsh?
The secret is to transfer the weight of the arm smoothly from note to note.
Instead of articulating each separate note, use the weight of the arm to smoothly transfer from key to key achieving a fluid line, like the breath of a singer or the bow of a string player, so each note floats to the next. You can never achieve a smooth line by calculating from note to note. It will end up sounding calculated! When you transfer the weight of the arm smoothly from key to key, you get a fluid line. By doing this, you can play with tremendous energy without getting a harsh sound. Remember, the piano is a percussion instrument. When you’re playing a beautiful melody, how can you make it sound smooth? Use the weight of the arm in the right hand and a smooth left hand that’s very beautiful, but underplayed. Find a fingering where you can play that extreme legato.
Practice incessantly without the pedal so you can find the fingering that enables this.
That is the secret! Find great fingering in the left hand, practice without the pedal, and use the weight of the arm in order to get a smooth line. Try it in your playing! Let us know how it works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again 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
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
