All posts by Robert Estrin

What are Asian Production Pianos?

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.

They also have pianos they make on the other end of the spectrum that they build in factories in Indonesia which are certainly Asian production pianos. These are price point pianos which service the entry level market for baby grand and upright pianos. They may not be heirloom pianos, but they serve a very important function in the market. I hope this has been helpful for you! This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com – your online piano store. 949-244-3729 info@LivingPianos.com

Need for Speed: Piano Finger Exercises to Increase Speed

I came across this video recently from Ryan at TakeLessons.com. In this video, Ryan demonstrates some very useful piano finger exercises for building not only speed, but agility as well. It is important to be aware of your thumbs when playing the piano and what they are doing. This is a very important factor in building your speed. There are many effective ways of increasing your speed and if you’re playing a scale that is more than five notes, you are going to have to utilize your thumbs by crossing over at some point. You need to be aware of what your thumb is doing after you play a note that aligns to it. The secret to a fast easy scale is all in the crossover technique that is implemented by the thumb.

He also talks about how to make the scale sound clean and smooth by means of crossing the thumbs under at the appropriate time so that there aren’t any rests. There are exercises that you can use to prepare your thumbs for the next note so that you can swiftly cross under without it being noticeable. He talks about not only practicing the scales legato but also staccato as it allows for proper position of the hands. This makes executing scales with ease so much more efficient. You want your hands to be more rounded when doing this. When practicing scales staccato, you want to just use your fingertips rather than the weight of your whole finger or hand. Doing this will let you prepare your thumbs early so you can gain muscle memory when it comes to playing fast.

Another technique that is covered is blocking scales, chords and passages. Rather than playing scales as individual notes, instead play them as chords! You can play them at a faster speed once you get the hang of it. It may seem like an unusual approach, but it is effective in regards to building up speed. You may find it to be an easier approach as your fingers will already know where they’re going. This is something you can do in scales as well as passages. These are just some of the ways you can bring your piano playing to an even higher level. This video can be very useful for demonstrating these exciting ideas in piano technique and improving your speed.

I hope to see another video from Ryan about 3rd and 4th finger crossings since when going in the opposite direction, these fingers come into play. Meanwhile, try out these techniques for yourself and see how they improve your speed at the piano.

Here are some additional lessons on how to play faster on the piano.

Are Antique Pianos Worth Anything?

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.

So that’s the long and short of it. There really isn’t antique value in pianos generally with the exceptions I articulated at the beginning of something truly rare, something where only a handful were ever made from a respected manufacture. Otherwise, sadly, there are a lot of old pianos out there that go begging and we do our best here at Living Pianos to provide a new life for some of the magnificent instruments of years past. Robert Estrin info@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729

How Many Pianos are Sold in the USA?

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.

Contrast that with China which sold around 140,000 pianos in the last year! That’s really where people are clamoring for pianos in the world and of course my mission in life is to spread the joy of piano and encourage people because I can’t even imagine growing up without a piano. I believe everyone should have the opportunity to experience a piano. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video! This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, hour online piano store. info@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729

What’s the Biggest Piano Maker in the World?

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.

So that’s the long and short of it, the largest piano company in the world is the Chinese company Pearl River. This is Robert@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729.

How to Know When to Tune Your Piano

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”.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/free-chromatic-tuner-pano-tuner/id449780743?mt=8

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.soundlim.panotuner&hl=en_US

It’s a very easy app to use, and it’s available for iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets. I use it quite often to check pitches on pianos around the store. Usually, I can tell when they’re low because of an interesting fact. If your piano drops in pitch a bit and it’s in tune with itself, you might think it’s okay until you get it tuned. Pianos are made to sound their best at A440, and when they drop in pitch, you get a dull, lifeless sound. So, tuning your piano will enhance the sound. Also, changes of weather effect tuning. So, put it on your calendar for when you go through changes of seasons. When you go from air conditioning to heat and back again later in the season, your piano could shift, and that’s a good time to get out the app and check things out. Listen carefully note to note and listen to see if any of them have beats or waves that I demonstrated to you. I hope this is helpful for you! Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com – your online piano store! 949-244-3729 info@LivingPianos.com