All posts by Robert Estrin

How are Piano Plates Made? Piano Parts

The cast-iron plate of a piano is one of the most impressive structures of the instrument. It’s a large and complex part of the piano which weighs more than the rest of the piano – and you might wonder how they are made. There are actually two methods of making piano plates and we are going to talk about both of them and whether one technique is better than the other.

The traditional method of making piano plates is something that goes back to the 19th century. This is called a “wet sand cast plate”. In this method the plate takes a long time for the metal to cure; it can take months. This might not be the most time-effective strategy but this is still how most handmade pianos – such as Steinway and Mason & Hamlin plates are made today.

The Asian manufacturers found a much quicker way to produce plates for pianos – and comprises the vast majority of plates manufactured in Asia. By producing a plate with a vacuum mold process, it can be completed in just a few minutes. It’s a lot like how plastics are made – by filling a mold and letting it set.

Vacuum mold plates are structurally sound yet some people discern a different sound from wet sand cast plates. What is the truth? Wet sand cast plates have a higher density of metal and therefore don’t impart a metallic “ring” that you may hear from vacuum mold type plates.

So which one is better?

It’s more of a personal choice than anything else. Some people prefer the sound brighter sound of Asian pianos and some prefer the sound of American or European pianos. It doesn’t mean that one method is necessarily better than the other, but there are some sonic differences between the two.

I would love to hear your opinions about this topic. Have you played pianos with both types of plates? What are your impressions?

Thanks again for joining us here at Living Pianos. If you have any questions or comments about this subject or any subject at all please contact us directly: Info@LivingPianos.com (949) 244-3729.

What Makes Great Music “Great”?

This is a very complex and deep subject and discussing this in the limited amount of time we have for this video won’t do this topic justice. However, there are some universal truths I would like to share with you. Music speaks to all of us in different ways and sometimes you may encounter a particular piece that you find to be stunning and unforgettable. What is it about certain artists that separate them from their contemporaries? Why is Mozart so much more highly regarded than his contemporaries?

Whether it’s listening to music, reading a novel, looking at a painting or watching a film, any piece of art sets up expectations. If you are reading a book or watching a motion picture and every time you think you know what’s going to happen next in the story it unfolds exactly as you predicted, you’ll find yourself disengaged and bored. The same thing is true for other pieces of art. A piece of music that is extremely predictable is not likely to hold your attention either.

The flipside to this is creating a work that is completely random and unpredictable. There are schools of music dedicated to this type of work such as expressionism and serialized music which aims to randomize elements. There is nothing inherently wrong with this type of approach – just as there is nothing wrong with making something predictable. But you might find that your audience becomes disengaged. It’s just like a movie with random images and no discernible plot – or a painting with a series of nonsensical images, complete randomness is impossible to comprehend and it can lose most of its audience just as quickly as something that is predictable yet for opposite reasons!

So how do you avoid these pitfalls? How can you create something that straddles the line between predictability and randomness?

The best pieces of art will tend to set up expectations and then surprise its audience in either big or subtle ways. The films which everyone tends to remember often have some of the most surprising elements in them. Just when the audience thinks things are going in one direction they are immediately thrown into another. If it’s done convincingly it can become something that people will remember. The same principle applies to music, setting up your audience and then surprising them in creative and significant ways will make your piece engaging and memorable.

Mozart was a master of Classical structure which seems deceptively simple. Yet, just when you are lulled into a sense of complacency, a turn of phrase will pleasantly surprise you with its subtle genius. It’s not shocking, but it’s a way to subvert expectations and create something captivating. Beethoven offers a different form of the same principal. His pieces are known to radically surprise listeners and keep them engaged by going down a certain path only to shock you with something completely different from what you expect. It’s can be intense in some moments and it’s never dull.

The balance between randomness and order is the ultimate foundation of art. You don’t want to bore your audience as much as you don’t want to confuse them. You want them to be surprised, engaged and remember your work. It’s what makes great art “great”. This holds true for musical performances as well.

Thanks again for joining me. I would love to hear your opinions on this subject as well. If you have any questions or comments about this subject or any subject at all please contact us directly: Info@LivingPianos.com (949) 244-3729.

Advanced Memorization Techniques for Piano

I have a video I made quite a while ago about How to Memorize Music which describes a technique I learned from my father Morton Estrin. www.MortonEstrin.com One of the first things I ever learned as a child sitting down at the piano was how to memorize.

My original technique includes a very simple process of taking one hand at a time with very small phrases. You practice each hand until memorized and then combine the two hands until it’s smooth and memorized. Once you have completed that, you move on to the next phrase connecting phrases as you learn them until you complete the piece. This is a system that has worked phenomenally not just for me, my father, and my sister, but all of our piano students and their students over many years!

This technique holds up for nearly any style or type of music but in some cases the music can become so complex that it can become incredibly difficult to memorize. The system may be inadequate when you have music that presents a middle voice that is distributed between the two hands such as in a Bach Fugue or a Scriabin Etude. It becomes very difficult to learn only one hand at a time in this situation. Luckily, there are some techniques you can use to work through these challenges.

In the case of the middle voice, try practicing only the middle voice (using both hands). The important thing is to get through each individual phrase and do your best to combine them. It may be incredibly difficult to combine the phrases and you might find yourself struggling to do this. The best thing is to keep working: learn a phrase, learn the next phrase, and then try your best to power through them. Even if you can’t combine them in a fluid way, don’t stop; just keep advancing through the phrases of music. This might sound counterintuitive to the process I described earlier, but if you wait until the phrases are smoothly connected, you limit how much you can learn in one sitting. Then when you practice the next day you can combine phrases to get a more fluid connection. You still may not be able to connect all the phrases, but you can break it down in the following manner (or something similar depending upon the context):

Day one: Learn 2 measure phrases and connect each 2 measure phrase to the adjacent phrase.

Day two: Learn 4 measure phrases.

Day three: Connect all the phrases!

You can continue working in this manner in each successive section of the piece.

Thanks again for joining me Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com (949) 244-3729

Do You Hit the Fallboard on Your Piano?

Do pianists hit the fallboard when they play the piano? Whenever I bring this up, almost anyone I know who plays the piano says they don’t hit the fallboard when playing. Yet, if you go to a music conservatory or look at a serious pianist’s piano, the fallboard will be compromised and have scratch marks. My father’s pianos were both gouged out to the wood across almost the entire fallboard! You might wonder how this happens.

My father had large hands. So, it’s somewhat expected that his hands would hit the fallboard from time to time. I have rather small hands. Yet, every piano I practice on shows signs of wear on the fallboard and we have to constantly refresh the finish on our fallboards to remove scratch marks.

What happens when you’re playing is that although you are not thinking about hitting the fallboard, it’s right there and even though you may not realize it, you’re actually hitting it all the time! If you were to put a slow-motion camera right by the fallboard, you would indeed see that you are hitting the fallboard!

If you have a piano with a satin finish, in particular, take a close look and you’ll see lines where your fingers are indeed coming in contact with the fallboard surface. If you practice a great deal over many years, you eventually will get down to the raw wood which I’ve seen many times from concert pianist’s pianos.

So the answer to this question is a resounding, “Yes”, you do hit the fallboard when you play. Hope you have enjoyed this – Robert@LivingPianos.com.

Do Pianists Need to Sing?

Is it necessary for pianists to sing? This sounds like a crazy question at first, but there is a lot of validity to this. Consider this: piano majors at conservatories and universities around the country, almost all of them sing in the chorus. (Sometimes they play an instrument in the orchestra if they play a second instrument.) In studying music theory, sight-singing is an intrinsic skill for pianists. I’ve had several videos on sight-singing because I consider it to be a beneficial skill for pianists.

Think about this: the piano and singing are about as diametrically opposed instruments that exist in the world. How so? The human voice is the most natural instrument. It’s the only instrument that everyone has and everybody has tried out. It was the first instrument, and for millenia was the only musical instrument. Eventually, people started banging on things and blowing through things. Even then, most music is evocative of the human voice.

What’s so unique about the human voice more than any other instrument is that you absolutely have to hear the notes you’re singing in order to produce the pitches. With the piano, you may have no idea of what a note is going to sound like. Yet, the pitch comes out anyway! However, it’s really important to hear what you’re playing. How do you quantify what you’re hearing? After all, a teacher can make corrections and you can do all the right fingering. You might play a note perfect performance but not really hear what you’re doing. Many pianists rely upon tactile memory.

This is not only dangerous but it is also not very gratifying. You must hear what you’re playing. This is really important in performance when inevitably you get off-track. It will happen. It doesn’t matter who you are and how experienced you are. At some point you will get off track and find your fingers over the wrong keys. You must make it sound right in order to get back on track. If you can’t hear it you’re pretty much done for if you’re doing it only by feel. That’s where singing comes in because if you can sing your music, you can play by ear until you get back on on track.

If you never sing, how do you know that you’re actually hearing what you’re playing? Singing is a tremendous tool. Likewise, singers need to study the piano. It’s a really important to play an instrument that can play more than one note at a time. An organ or guitar can also aid in this. Something where you can hear the underlying harmonic structure because after all, you can’t sing more than one note at a time! So singers must study the piano and pianists must sing. Does this mean you have to be a professional singer? Of course not. If you’ve heard me sing on some of my videos, you can attest to that! The fact of the matter is, I sing constantly as a way of hearing music. For me I love sight-singing with syllables because I can figure out the notes I’m hearing. It quantifies pitches.

I strongly recommend singing your music. One technique if you have music that has counterpoint where you have interweaving lines is to try singing one of the lines while you’re playing. Then try singing a different line. You will learn immeasurable amounts about your music. By singing, you’ll understand in a way you never will from only playing your music on the piano. So the answer to this question is a resounding “Yes”, singing is necessary to develop as a pianist.

Hope this helps! Again, this is Robert@LivingPianos.com.

Why is Bach’s Italian Concerto Called a Concerto?

Why is Bach’s Italian Concerto referred to as a concerto? This is a really good question. A concerto is generally a solo instrument or small group of soloists along with a larger ensemble and almost every concerto you encounter meets this definition. Yet, Bach’s Italian Concerto is a solo keyboard work! So, how can this possibly be considered a concerto? The reason for this is that it is written with the Italian style of a concerto grosso and the way Bach achieves this is by doing something he rarely did in any of his keyboard music which is, he wrote in dynamics in the entire three movements every single note; in the right hand and the left hand. Either they’re both forte or they’re both piano or one or the other is forte. This is what achieves the feeling of a concerto of the larger group and the smaller group.

The entire concerto was built upon the juxtaposition of the sound of a solo group against the entire group and it gives the feeling of an Italian concerto. It’s so fascinating to realize two things about Bach. One is that there is a tremendous amount of music that we’ll never know because he was undiscovered until years after his death. There’s an old wives tale that many of his scores ended up being used to wrap fish. I don’t know if this is true, but we do know that he wrote a lot of music that we have never gotten to hear and probably never will. The other thing about Bach is that he lived in Leipzig, Germany and did very little travelling, yet he wrote a magnificent Italian concerto, a set of beautiful English suites as well as French suites. How is it possible that he wrote all this music? After all, there was no recording back then. Being in a major city, any time any artists from other places would come to visit, he made a point of listening to many different styles of music. Being the genius that he was, he could assimilate those styles and could write some of the greatest Italian, French and English music as well as his native German music,

So that’s a bit of a lesson on Bach’s Italian Concerto for you. I hope this has been helpful! Again, this is Robert@LivingPianos.com