All posts by Robert Estrin

A Free Piano?!

A piano for free? It seems like a crazy idea that there could possibly be free pianos, but you would be surprised. In fact there are websites all over the internet with free pianos on them! How can this be? You know that pianos cost thousands of dollars; so why would anybody ever give away a piano? Well if you’ve ever worked in a piano store or know of anyone who has ever worked in a piano store, they will tell you that every single day the phone rings with people offering pianos. While they aren’t all free, many people have reasons to get rid of pianos and many of them get listed on Craigslist and other places. If you type in any major metropolitan area Craigslist search box “Free Piano” you will be amazed.

In fact, there is a whole website devoted to mostly free pianos: PianoAdoption.com. So what’s the deal? Why do you even need piano stores if there are free pianos all over the place? Well, here’s the thing. Pianos are a significant piece of furniture and there are certain styles of furniture that aren’t popular anymore and people don’t want them in their homes. So sometimes you can get a decent piano for free! Many old fashioned American console designs, particularly lighter woods are difficult for people to sell. Think about this: a family has kids and they get a piano. The kids never practice and it just sits there. Kids move out and then they’re downsizing. Then they try to figure out what they will do with the piano. They call all the piano stores and nobody wants it. Then they list the piano online and don’t get anybody interested. So, often times they give it away! If no friends or family want the piano, they list it online for free.

You’ll see them at Goodwill stores and other places as well. Is this a good place to get a piano? Possibly. The thing is, all used pianos offered to us need work. There’s never a piano no matter how recently it has been manufactured that doesn’t require some work. Here’s the challenge: when you go out and play a free piano which might have problems here or there, it’s hard to know if the problems are superficial or fundamental. Maybe some keys don’t work or the pedal squeaks or there are some other issues. If you have a friend who is a piano technician or know of someone who can check out pianos for you, you may be able to find a piano that is worthwhile. However, there are some pianos you are unlikely to find for free, such as high gloss black baby grands in half way decent condition because these instruments are in demand. But if you’re not particularly picky, sometimes big old upright pianos in decent condition can make a serviceable instrument for you. But that’s a big “if” since pianos like that are usually very old. But occasionally they may play well and sound great with minimal work.

So you want to get a piano that has some redeeming qualities. You might encounter a piano piano that has just been neglected. You must have a relationship with a technician to get it serviced for you. Have them look at it before you commit because some problems have no easy fix. You are welcome to contact us for information about free pianos and resources as well as pianos that have already been worked on and play on a high level. I hope this has been interesting for you. It’s pretty amazing that there are so many free pianos out there! Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com.

Why are Piano Strings Different Lengths?

This may seem like an obvious question, but it is a really interesting question in a number of ways that I’ll explain. All vibrating objects produce pitches and those pitches are lower if the object is bigger and they’re higher if the object is smaller. It’s simple physics. With pianos, you notice particularly on concert grand pianos, the very highest treble strings are very short and they get longer and longer throughout the entire scale design until you have the very long bass strings on a nine foot piano. The bass strings are able to produce those low frequencies from their sheer length like the pipes on pipe organs; the large pipes produce low frequencies and the the small pipes produce high frequencies.

It’s the same reason why women and children tend to have higher voices than men because being bigger (including the vocal cords) produces lower pitched voices. Bigger things make lower sounds. Where it gets really interesting is the fact that you can have a baby grand where the strings are pretty much the same length once you get to the middle of the keyboard on down. How do they achieve the low notes out of a smaller piano? They make the strings thicker in the bass to overcome the fact that they’re not getting as long as they need to be.

In fact, even a concert grand piano doesn’t necessarily have the difference in length of strings you would need to double the length of the strings for each octave down on the keyboard. So, you would need strings going twice the length throughout the entire piano for every octave which would produce a longer piano than nine feet depending upon the starting length of the highest treble strings if it were done by the length of the strings alone. It could be difficult to excite the soundboard with such long strings. There are other aspects of piano design and acoustical science that just don’t enable that to happen. It would be an interesting experiment in the virtual world with programs like PianoTeq to create virtual pianos that don’t exist in the real world with incredibly long strings.

I hope this has been enlightening for you. Thanks for joining me, Robert@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729

The Backwards Piano – A Left-Handed Piano?

Has anyone ever made a backwards piano? Shouldn’t left handed people have a go of it with a piano where the high keys are on the bottom and the low keys are on the top? It seems like a crazy idea but indeed, the Dutch team Poletti and Tuinman built such a piano. I think about the fact that we’ve learned how to play piano as it is, what an arduous task it would be to relearn the piano!

Famously, there are some guitar players such as Jimi Hendrix who played guitar flipped over. Some players even reversed the strings – and that’s interesting enough! But here’s an interesting fact: You can actually try out a backwards piano! How can this be? There is music software available which I first utilized back in the 1990s from Mark of the Unicorn called, Performer. It had a function where you could set the MIDI keyboard controller to play the notes in reverse order from top to bottom. I found it so fascinating to hear pieces played upside down! One of the facts of inverting music is that everything major becomes minor and everything minor becomes major. As a result, you get really interesting music. It’s like hearing an entirely fresh piece with a totally different emotional content that can still work heard upside down!

If you ever get a chance to play an upside down keyboard, which is probably going to be through MIDI because it’s hard to find any actual pianos built that way, you’re going to find that you can play pieces you know and have refreshing new compositions you can play instantly almost like whole new pieces!

The bottom line is this, you need some conventions in the world. For example, in your country, you know what side of the street to drive on. Imagine how haphazard it would be otherwise. It’s the same thing with the piano. To relearn everything would be an arduous task. Indeed, with the piano you have to be ambidextrous anyway because both hands have an equal role to play. But it is certainly fascinating playing such a piano.

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com. info@livingpianos.com

Is There Editing in Classical Recordings?

I have vast experience with editing recordings, having owned several recording studios over the years and have been present during my father’s recording sessions from a young age. I have produced countless albums as well as demo recordings. Yes, there is editing in Classical recordings and you might wonder how this works. You play a piece, and miss a note. So, can you put the correct note in there? How does it work? With modern technology you almost can! In previous years, not that long ago in the days of tape, it was possible to razorblade edit and you would not believe what was possible even then!

Here’s the key: To be able to get successful edits in music, you have to have a keen understanding of the work. That’s why the producer of a recording and the engineer have to understand music in a deep way. For example, if you were to try to edit a performance to make a perfect recording by playing until you missed something, then started there and continued on to the next place you missed, then going through the whole piece that way, you might get all the notes, but you probably will not get much of a musical performance. Continuity and cohesiveness has to be achieved in the editing process. So what is generally done is to play complete works several times. You choose the best take as the foundation and replace key sections to achieve accuracy.

You don’t just put in missed notes here and there, but you might take the first exposition of a sonata and maybe a development from a different take then perhaps the recapitulation will come back to the first take. If there’s a particularly thorny section of a piece of music that is really difficult to play accurately, it’s important to remember that you cannot edit in anything that you can’t play. You have to be able to play all the notes at some point! If there’s a particularly difficult section, they might have the performer play that section many times so they know it’s covered. In a worst case scenario, it’s possible to cut in before and after that section. It’s critical to know where you’re going to try to cut in later so that you don’t just try to squeeze something in.

If you have total silence, you can always cut in. A strong, decisive chord that punctuates a new section can mask edits as well. So there’s a great deal of editing in recordings, but not the way you may think. It’s not about replacing missed notes even though with digital technology that may be possible. It’s almost at the point where you can do that, but you’ll never get a fluid performance on a high level of expression and continuity trying to edit that way. You’ve got to be able to play the notes, it’s just a matter of saving time. Think how many performances you would have to do in order to get a perfect performance of a work that takes 20 or 30 minutes. You might miss one little thing here or there which may go unnoticed in a live performance, but in a recording you listen to again and again it becomes an annoyance. So, in a best case scenario, editing enables note perfect recordings in the hands of a producer who has the ability to draw out the best performance of an artist.

Should You Play Music Exactly as Written?

Do Classical performers play exactly what is written? There’s a lot to this question. Of course, naturally, Classical pianists strive for accuracy. But what is accurate? There is a real challenge with composers who lived hundreds of years ago. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to look at some of the great composers’ scores, Beethoven comes to mind, there are scrawls on the page and sections scribbled out. Trying to decipher what they meant is no easy task.

It takes a lot of scholarly work. That’s why the editions you look at is critical and there are urtext editions which strive to present exactly what the composers wrote. How do they know what the composers wrote? Sometimes there are autographed scores and early editions and there are often discrepancies. Decisions have to be made as to what the composers’ intentions really were. Particularly with composers with sloppy calligraphy, it can be a real task! Ultimately, the performer must have conviction about the notes they play regardless of what is supposedly authoritative. If something seems wrong, you shouldn’t play it even if it is supposed to be authoritative. Maybe somewhere somebody got it wrong! You must have conviction as to what you’re playing.

There’s an entire other side to this question that is perhaps even more significant which is this: the musical score only has notes, rhythm, phrasing and expression. There is a whole lot more to the music than that! Consider this analogy of a play or motion picture. The words are all written out, yet the actor or actress must take those written words and create a character out of it. The words themselves really don’t come to life until the performer creates that character.

Exactly the same thing is true with a musical performance. The notes are just the skeleton of the work and it’s your job as a performer to flesh out the living, breathing work of music. In order to do that, many decisions have to be made that are not in the score. You might wonder what else there is besides the notes, rhythm, phrasing and expression. There are the ups and downs of the expression as well as rubato (the slight speeding up and slowing down in Romantic period music) which gives flavor and emotion to the music.

All of these things and more are left up to the performer. So it’s more than just a matter of accuracy, it’s all the things a performer brings to a performance to turn it into a piece of music. There are only basic directions in the score. So that’s the job of the performer. It’s not just about being accurate and if you want to prove that to yourself, listen to a computer playing a score of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin or anyone else. You can program in everything and still it’s no music is it?

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com info@livingpianos.com

How Can You Hear Lower than Human Hearing?

Some pipe organs can produce frequencies lower than the threshold of human hearing which is around 20 cycles per second. The Bösendorfer Imperial which goes all the way down to the C below the standard low A on other pianos produces notes lower than 20 cycles per second. Part of this phenomenon can be explained by the how you can feel rather than hear those extremely low frequencies. Certainly a massive pipe organ in a cathedral can energize an entire room with sonic energy with low, rumbling frequencies. But there is much more to it than that and it has to do with the overtone series.

I have a video about atonality which touches on the overtone series:

DOES ATONALITY GO AGAINST NATURE? THE OVERTONE SERIES – ATONALITY PART 2

The overtone series is a characteristic of all pitched sounds in nature as well as musical instruments. Anything that makes pitched sounds contains color tones above the fundamental tone. It’s a series of tones that goes up by an octave, then a fifth, then two octaves above the fundamental pitch and on and on. All these color tones affect the quality of the tone. That’s why in its simplest form a trumpet sounds distinctly different from a violin playing the same pitch. It has to do with the overtone series and how these overtones interact. So when you’re hearing an extremely low note, you are actually hearing more overtones than fundamental pitch! Your mind constructs the fundamental pitch particularly in descending lines that go lower than your hearing.

As a young child I performed an experiment utilizing my father’s tape recorder and my tape recorder. I recorded the lowest note of the piano at one speed, then played it back 4 times faster which raised the pitch 2 octaves. To my shock, instead of hearing a single note I head a chord! This is because on smaller grand pianos, the fundamental tone is so weak, that the overtones are actually as loud or louder than the fundamental tone! So, this is how you’re able to hear notes that are below 20 cycles per second such as the Bösendorfer Imperial which goes lower than your hearing as do some pipe organs with immense pipes that produce frequencies in the low double digits of frequencies. It’s not only that you feel the room shaking, but you hear the overtones and you surmise the fundamental pitch that you can’t actually hear. So the question is answered for you very simply, you’re not hearing something you can’t hear but your mind makes an image of that low tone in a convincing way.

Again, this is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. info@LivingPianos.com