Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to tune your own piano. Can you tune your own piano? That is the real question. I’m going to provide you with the information so you will know if you can tune your piano, and if you want to tune your own piano. But more than that, I’m going to show you an incredibly valuable skill that you can all take to heart: how to touch up the tuning on your piano! That is something I think every pianist should learn how to do. I’ve been doing it for years. You’re going to love it once you learn how to do this!

What tools do you need to tune a piano?

You will need a tuning wrench, sometimes referred to as a tuning hammer. Make sure it has a removable head. You should look for a star head, not a square head. Because with a square head, you only have four positions that you can put the tuning wrench. That is really cumbersome because as you’re going to discover, it’s really hard to move a tuning hammer! So, you want a star head that can be in many different positions. That’s going to be a lifesaver for you! Don’t skimp on your tools either. It’s not that expensive. There are tons of them on Amazon starting at less than $40. Then you just need a couple of wedges so you can mute out some of the strings. As you know, through most of the piano, there are three strings to each note. You need to be able to hear just two of the strings at a time when you’re tuning one string to another. For tuning grand pianos, this is really all you need. To tune a whole piano you can use software for the pitches, but these few tools are all you need to touch up your tuning.

Why is it so important to touch up the tuning of your piano?

It can take hundreds of tunings before you have the skills to get a piano not just to be in tune, but to hold its tuning any length of time at all. Any competent tuner can get a piano in tune. But the first time you play it, notes can go out of tune. It’s really hard to set the strings and pins in such a way that the pitches will hold. Touching up is a totally different ballgame. Let’s say you get your piano tuned. A few days later you’re playing it and notice notes drastically out of tune right in the middle of the piano. It can drive you crazy! You scheduled this tuning, you paid good money for it, and now your piano is just not fun to play at all. What do you do? Hire them back for another tuning a couple weeks later?

If you have the tools and the knowledge – You can touch up the tuning on select notes yourself!

 

Armed with these tools and the knowledge I’m going to show you, you can alleviate the problem of stubborn out of tune notes on your piano. And you can actually extend the tuning of your piano to last much longer just by going through and touching it up on a periodic basis. Let’s get right to work on this. Now, my piano is pretty well in tune. There are some notes in the very high register that are not perfect. But those high notes are really very difficult to tune. The slightest motion of the tuning wrench knocks the pitch way off. To get it just right is very difficult. The lowest notes on the piano are also difficult, for a different reason. Particularly on smaller pianos, there’s so little fundamental pitch it’s hard to tell what pitch you’re even hearing. But If a note in the very high or low register is out of tune, it’s not going to affect you that much. You’re not going to encounter those notes nearly as often as you will with notes in the middle register of the piano. So, that’s what I’m going to focus on here today, because it’s the most value with the least work.

Let’s start with middle C. Does it sound in tune to you? How do you know if a note is in tune or not? Do you look at a tuner to see if it’s in pitch? No, because the important thing is for a piano to be in tune with itself. If your piano is tuned to 442 and then you play A and you want it to be at 440, that A is going to be out of tune with the rest of the piano. When you’re touching up the tuning, it’s usually only one or two strings of a certain note that will be out of tune. A unison goes out to make it sound funny. It’s not the whole note that is going to go out. That rarely happens in any kind of uniform fashion.

You don’t need a chromatic tuner for what I’m showing you. You do need to listen.

When one of the three strings is out of tune on middle C on your piano, instead of the pure sound, you’ll hear waves. If it’s slightly out, the waves will cause a slow undulation. As it gets more out of tune, they become quicker and quicker. So, the first thing you do is find the three strings for middle C. By pushing down the key, you release the damper so that you can pluck them. Then you’re going to follow the string all the way back to find the pin that associates with the right string. When one string is low you can hear that slow wave. Listen for it. If it’s even further out of tune, that wave will get faster.

This is what I’m talking about. You’re playing your piano just after it’s been tuned and a note goes out for no particular reason. It can happen. The weather or just playing hard can knock a string out of tune. If it’s right in the middle of the piano like this, you won’t even want to play your piano. And you don’t want to spend a bunch of money getting the whole piano tuned again. Even just getting your tuner there, they have to charge you for their time, right? So what do you do? Well, the first thing you do is you identify which string is low. You want to listen for it, so listen to the separate strings. Go ahead, pluck them and listen. See if you can notice which one is lower. One thing you want to do is check to make sure the other two strings are in tune with one another. You can do this by muting the string that is low. Now you’re listening to the other two strings. Let’s say those two strings are absolutely in tune with one another. To be able to compare the out of tune string with an in tune string, having just one string sound with the out of tune string is better. So, you want to mute one of the two in tune strings so that you’re left with one string that’s in tune and the one that is low.

Once again, you pluck the strings to be sure you got it right. Push down the key to release the damper so you can pluck them. Now you’re ready to adjust the pitch. When you try this the first time you will develop a deep respect for your piano technician, because it’s really hard to get even one string in tune! Now, you might just luck out and get it right on the first pull. It can happen. But you might go back and forth for five or ten minutes trying to get it locked in. It’s hard to believe how much effect the minuscule motion on your tuning hammer has on the string.

I’ve seen my piano technician, who’s a master concert technician, struggling to get the string locked to the right position. This is because there’s huge amounts of tension on the strings.

Tension builds up at all the points of termination. Right near where the felt is, there’s tremendous tension. As soon as you hit a note hard, that tension is released on the other side where there is termination at the bridge. You can get a note in tune, but with the first loud strike of the note, the string tension equalizes across the points of termination. That’s why it’s so important once you get your piano tuned to give a couple of hard blows to the key so that the first time you play it loud, it doesn’t go out of tune.

Now you want to pull the low string up to pitch very gently. As you do this you will want to check to make sure you didn’t pull it too far. Listen to the strings again. First the string that is in tune, and then the one that was low before to see if it’s still low. If it’s still low you are going to pull a little bit more. When it’s really close it’s tough to hear which one’s higher and which one’s lower. Once again, push the key down and pluck them. Now if it’s extremely close, you can listen to the difference between the slow undulation of the out of tune string played with the in tune string, compared to the purity of the two strings that are in tune with one another. Once you’ve gotten the two strings sounding in tune, listen to all three strings. Now that note sounds good!

What you’ve just done is tune one string on a piano that has somewhere between 220 to 240 strings!

It gets more complicated if your piano is really out of tune. The pitch of the whole piano could be slightly low. As you start tuning one section of the piano, the pressure that is exerted on the bridge in one area pushes the soundboard down affecting the previously tuned area of your piano. So, you have to go through the tuning at least a couple of times to get anything to hold. Tuning a whole piano is very complicated. You also have the factor that smaller pianos don’t have such pure sounds. They have a lot of what are called overtones, which are color tones that are higher notes contained within the lower notes. Sometimes those can conflict with the fundamental pitch of other notes. So, skilled tuners know how to finesse the tuning to get a sweet sound out of all different pianos.

There is good news for you if you want to learn how to tune a piano like a pro!

 

There are software programs that can take the tunings from great tuners and take into account the size of the piano and the pitch you’re starting with. By sampling all the A’s on the piano, for example, it knows how much stretch you need. It’s still an arduous task to tune a whole piano. So, I recommend all of you get your feet wet by touching up your piano. This is something that will really prolong the tuning of your piano and save you when you have one or two notes that are out of tune driving you nuts! Touch up tuning is a great skill to develop! I hope this is enjoyable for you! If you’re interested in learning more about piano tuning I’m happy to share with you a bit more about it. Today I’ve given you a valuable skill that any of you should be able to take to heart and make your piano sound better, longer, by touching up the tuning. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about creepy music. Let’s think about film for a minute. When I think of some of the greatest suspense and creepiness in film, I think of Alfred Hitchcock. Movies like Psycho or The Birds. In these films, it’s not what you’re seeing. It’s not thrusting upon you all this crazy stuff on the screen. Instead, it’s just in your head. You’re wondering what’s going to happen next because of the overtones and undertones. Just like in music, if you throw a bunch of stuff at someone, it might be a little bit jarring. It could even be scary! But slow and simple sounds with dissonance might just make you wonder, “What’s happening next?” Music with too much dissonance gets ugly, and there’s a place for that. Obviously we’ve all seen films that are jarring, but what we’re talking about today is something a little bit different. What I have for you is some original music that explores what this little bit of dissonance can do in music to keep you on the edge of your seat wondering what’s happening next. It’s what you don’t hear! So, I hope you enjoy this and see what you think about this. See Video for Performance

So, that’s an example of music that utilizes dissonance to create a mood.

Not a jarring or scary mood, but creepy and suspenseful. This transcends so many things. If you’re in a conversation with someone, for example, and they stop talking and they’re just looking at you, it’s very creepy after a while. It leaves you wondering, “What the heck are they thinking?” It’s much creepier than anything they could be saying. So, it’s that reserve that builds tension. In cooking it’s the same thing. You could throw a bunch of spice in something, and it could be borderline inedible. But just that little bit of spice can make a dish pop. It’s the same thing with your music. And it’s not just for this particular mood of creepy music. It’s how you parse your words in conversation, and how you delineate music without showing it all, to keep people guessing. What’s beyond? What’s coming next? And that’s one of the secrets of creating moods in music! I hope this is helpful for you! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The topic today is about the magic of the five finger position on the piano. This is particularly important for beginning students. First I’m going to explain what I mean. Put your five fingers over five keys, for example right now I’m over C, D, E, F, G in both hands. Interestingly, when young students are playing, you’ll notice that they will constantly be looking down, even if they are in a five finger position. But the keys aren’t going to go anywhere! If you just leave your hands in this position you should be able to have your eyes closed and play whatever key you want. This is a great way to develop reading skills, because you know which fingers go down in each hand in order to play those five notes.

Of course, it can be shifted to other keys.

You might rest your fingers over G, A, B, C, D. Whatever the position, once you are comfortable in that position you should be able to play without looking down at your hands at all. This is invaluable, because as music gets more complex you can do things like reach one note beyond. It’s not a far reach to be able to play one key beyond in one hand or the other. Getting that sense of the keyboard, of where the notes are and where your hands are on them without having to look down is so important. And if you don’t do it in the five finger position when you first start, you’ll likely never do it. So it’s really important to get comfortable playing in that position without having to look down at your hands, to develop your connection between your fingers and the keyboard, irrespective of looking at them.

That is the secret of the five finger position!

There’s amazing things you can do just with five keys on the piano! So test yourself. Close your eyes and play, and see if you can hit the keys you intend to hit. Naturally, if you’re at a more advanced level, go back to some easier music. If you find your reading skills are really lacking, try to find books that are in that five finger position and sight read without looking down at your hands at all. Get comfortable with that, and build up from there. This could be a tremendous help for you to develop your sight reading skills with that connection to the keyboard just from the feel of the keys. I hope this is helpful for you! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is very thought-provoking. Can you learn to play the piano while you sleep? This might sound absurd, but there’s actually scientific evidence supporting the idea that there is a possibility of learning music while you sleep!

There was a study where researchers taught a group of people to play piano melodies using a technique borrowed from the video game Guitar Hero. Afterwards, all the volunteers slept. When they woke up, they were all asked to play the music again. Unbeknownst to the sleeping participants, one group heard the melody they had just learned as they slept, while the other group did not. The volunteers who heard the music while they slept, even though they had no memory of it, played the melody far better than those who didn’t hear it. So indeed, you can absorb some information while sleeping.

Things you think about just before bedtime can seep into your subconscious.

There have been other studies showing how what you think about just before going to bed affects you. Now you probably are already somewhat aware of this phenomenon. Did you ever think of scary things before going to bed? Maybe you watched a horror movie before bed and then had nightmares. So, you can actually leverage your practice time by doing some practicing, or at least mentally refreshing the music you learned during the day, just before going to bed. That way it’s percolating in your head and will get reinforced.

Sometimes I will have music going on in my head all night long!

Every time I wake up, I’ll still be at that same place in the music. The same themes keep playing mentally. Indeed, your subconscious is affected by your consciousness just before bedtime, and even while you’re sleeping. I’m not sure if there’s any way of leveraging the time you’re asleep by playing recordings of pieces you are learning. But certainly refreshing the music you played throughout the day just before bedtime is going to help you reinforce things by cementing it in your subconscious.

I bet you didn’t expect this, but there are scientific studies proving this phenomena. I do it all the time! Sometimes I actually come up with music in the middle of the night. Surprisingly, I’ll play it through a few times in my head and in the morning I still remember it! So, you can cement things through your sleep, by just refreshing before bedtime. Try it out and see how it works for you! Thanks again for joining me! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question comes from a viewer. Mike asks, “How has technology changed how we learn and experience music?” This is a deep subject. I’m going to give some pointers and a bit of a historical perspective.

We take modern technology for granted to a great extent. But early in the 20th century, pianists and musicians of every ilk had no idea what other people did in music. People would only know the few musicians who toured in their area. Until finally, when recording came about, people were able to hear other performers! People living in rural areas didn’t even have access to symphony orchestras. So, people would learn how to play four hand arrangements of Beethoven symphonies (and others), because there were no opportunities to hear the music any other way.

Today it’s so easy. You can just go on YouTube or Spotify and instantly have access to many performances of almost anything you can think of!

One thing that this has done is make performers much more homogenous. If you listen to recordings from the infancy of recording in the 1930s, the variety of interpretations was astounding because everybody didn’t hear everybody else. There wasn’t a “normal” performance at that point. Listen to Cortot, Schnabel, Rachmaninoff, Hofmann or Levine and you can’t believe the variety of ideas in their interpretations of pieces. So, it’s a little bit sad that people now are so highly influenced by each other that everybody sounds more and more like one another. That’s one of the downsides. The positive is being exposed to so many great instrumentalists, as well as so much music literally at your fingertips. It’s phenomenal! So it’s a balance, but overall I think it’s positive.

In terms of learning music, MIDI, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface that came about in the 1980s, was a tremendous development.

Previous to MIDI, anybody who wanted a computer music system had to invest tens of thousands of dollars in a turnkey system by a company that offered them. For example, New England Digital had the Synclavier system, Fairlight had theirs. This was very expensive! MIDI enabled products from any manufacturer to connect to any other. So this ushered in things like music notation transcription software. With this you could take any keyboard that has MIDI and it could print out the music on your computer. What a time saver that is!

The downside of that is some people will just play into their computers, not really giving thought to each note. When you’re working with a pencil, much less a quill and ink, you are thinking about every note you’re writing, because it’s an arduous task and you don’t want to get it wrong. But if you could just play things in, the same thought isn’t required. I’ve seen some compositions where it was obvious they didn’t really understand what they were writing, because the way it was notated didn’t make sense rhythmically. Just because you have these tools doesn’t mean they’re necessarily going to be used in a positive way.

There are music education software programs for things like note reading.

It used to be the best tools in music education you could hope for were flashcards. Now you have apps that can help you learn to read music! There are even music software programs that can show you if you’re playing something right. It shows you what notes you missed! So there are tremendous opportunities and developments in music education regarding technology, not to mention what’s possible with recording. You can use an iPhone to make what would have been a professional video or audio recording in the 1980s, and share it with the world at the click of a few buttons. It’s pretty remarkable!

Overall I’d say technology is ushering in a lot of positive new learning strategies. And we have easy access to almost everything ever recorded! We have all kinds of tools at our disposal and yes, they can be used positively. But it doesn’t mean that we’re going to have better music just because we have these tools. Having great teachers is invaluable, technology or not. So, that’s my take on this subject. It’s a deep subject. We can get a lot of discussions going in the comments on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about the Secret of Music: Order Versus Randomness. This is a weighty topic. The essential truth is that familiarness is comfortable, but if things are too familiar and predictable they can be boring. This is true of everything, not just music. On the other side, randomness is very interesting but it can be difficult to digest. Listening to music that’s all random can sound cacophonous and it’s difficult to make sense of it.

Something that has an element of order but enough randomness to keep you wondering what’s coming next can be very engaging!

Looking at a painting that contains a bunch of random squiggly lines and different colors might be interesting for a while. But it’s exhausting trying to make sense of it, because as humans, we seek to find order in things in order to gain understanding. Conversely, something that is predictably geometric is equally boring since there is nothing new to surprise you and keep you engaged. Elements of both order and randomness are intrinsically important in art and music.

Here’s an historical perspective on this. The origins of written music goes back to Gregorian chant in the 9th century, which was monophonic plainsong based upon liturgical text. The music grew in complexity somewhat during the Renaissance gaining polyphony and other elements. Music got more and more complex in the later Baroque era. In fact, during Bach’s later years, he was writing some fantastically complex music like Art of the Fugue. He had actually lost favor in the public and many composers writing the new simpler, structured Classical style were more popular than he was, including his own son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach! Can you imagine such a thing? So music became more and more complex. I wouldn’t describe the late Baroque music as being random, but if you listen to a complex multi-voice fugue it can almost feel random the first time you hear it if you’re not musically astute and comfortable with that level of complexity. This is one of the reasons why music with a structured form became much more popular in the Classical era with Mozart and Haydn. With very clear repetition, development and recapitulation of themes, it was very digestible music. Over the centuries, music became more and more complex once again. Beethoven expanded the form. Then in the Romantic era, music became more overtly emotional.

Harmonies became more and more complicated, until finally composers were writing things that were not based upon tonality.

Alexander Scriabin, at the turn of the 20th century, was writing pieces based upon all different intervals, even ninths! Bartok was also writing music that bordered on atonality. But it was Arnold Schoenberg who came up with the twelve-tone system which systematically avoided repetition of any of the 12 possible notes in what was called a tone row. Music composed with the 12-tone system was extremely difficult to sing. Things went even further with Anton Webern who serialized not just pitches, but rhythms, systematically avoiding rhythmic patterns. Even textures and articulations were serialized in a similar manner. So, there was very little to grab onto. As a work of sheer mathematics, many of these works were brilliant compositions. But this music is extremely challenging to listen to.

This led to a major breakdown of music once again which led to minimalism.

People wanted something that was digestible with repeated patterns. Not to say that minimalism is simple, because the way things are nested and overlapped can be quite fascinating. But compared to what came before, it was much more listenable. So, you see the historical pattern of music becoming more and more complex over time until there’s a breakdown to something simpler, and then the process starts all over again. The intrinsic nature of what makes music tick is that balance between order and randomness.

I hope this is enlightening for you. I’d love to hear your opinions on this subject! It’s really fascinating how our brains perceive things. The comfort of the familiar, and the exploration of the new, and how those two things are balanced is really what it’s all about in music and art, and in life itself! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Hi, this is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com with some great news for you: we are putting together a complete piano course for you! Since you are followers of Living Pianos, you get to decide what will be offered!

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. There are many aspects to becoming a successful musician. Like any other field, it requires a combination of talent, intelligence, training, and consistent work. We could explore all the intricacies of the nuts and bolts of carving out a career. But today I am going to focus attention on one particular aspect of how to approach developing a career in music which relates to almost any endeavor. Sometimes, the hardest thing is just knowing where to begin. You are faced with a myriad of possibilities of what to do each moment of every day. The great trumpeter Adoph Herseth said:

“Analysis = Paralysis”

It would be comforting to have a clear vision of all the steps involved in carving out a successful life in music or whatever it is you want to achieve. But the reality is often murky with vague possibilities of how to approach building a meaningful career. But sometimes you just have to do something in order to know how to proceed.

It’s like if you were lost in the woods. Obviously, just standing there, you aren’t going to escape to safety before dark. But you certainly don’t want to get deeper into the abyss surrounding you! So, what is necessary is to start moving and looking for clues. Perhaps you know that there is a mountainside beyond the road you entered the forest. But you can’t see through the thick brush. But if you come upon a stream, you can notice the direction of the water and surmise that it must be coming from a higher elevation. So, you can follow the stream and hope it leads to something familiar. Then maybe there is a clearing and you can see the mountainside and then you know you are on the right path. Or perhaps not! You may have to make adjustments along the journey to safety. It’s exactly the same thing when trying to carve out a new path in your life.

You must take steps in the general direction you want to go even though you don’t know exactly where you are headed!

As time goes on, you make the necessary adjustments in your direction in order to achieve the desired goal. You will learn how to achieve success as you face obstacles learning what works and what doesn’t work. Whole new avenues of possibilities will emerge as you bravely power on without the comfort of a clear plan. This is the way most people find fulfillment in their lives. Only from the outside looking in, in hindsight does it ever appear that people know exactly what they are doing.

Adversity and unexpected twists and turns form the foundation for building a plan of action.

So, even if you don’t know exactly where you are going or how you are going to get there, you must move in the general direction in order to gain clues and insights as to how to achieve a fulfilling life in music or whatever it is you have a passion for in life – just like finding your way out when you are lost in the wilderness.

I hope this life lesson resonates with you. I would love to hear from those of you who have either bravely forged ahead in life even though you didn’t know exactly where you were headed, or from those of you who are trying to gain the courage to take the first step to a new life. You must keep moving forward as you learn from both adversity and success.

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about how to approach teaching music lessons online. There are many challenges. I deal with piano, and a lot of you are pianists as well. But this applies to all music teachers and the particular challenges of dealing with younger students is really important. It’s an interesting thing that everybody’s going online now. We’re all interfacing with video chat! One of the great things is that people realize now that they’re not restricted to just their neighborhood teacher. Now, the world is at your fingertips.

Teaching music online, particularly to young children presents uni

Conveying hand position, relaxed shoulders, and even how people sit at the piano can be tough when teaching remotely. Parents can help tremendously in this regard. In addition, kids’ emotions can be a bit fragile at the moment since everything has changed in their lives. It’s important to keep things fun and positive.

Like so many musicians, my daughter Jenny had a packed schedule of performances with orchestras cancelled indefinitely. Fortunately, teaching is one area musicians can still be engaged in. However, it requires an understanding of how to deal with a new medium.

We have a very special guest. I’m incredibly pleased to bring today somebody who has been teaching since she was a teenager. It’s been the whole crux of her career along with performing and composing, my sister Coren Estrin Mino. Hello Coren!

Coren Estrin Mino:
Hi, Bob. It’s really good to see you, although I wish we could be in person.

Robert Estrin:
This is pretty good, actually.

Coren Estrin Mino:
This is amazing. This is so fun.

Robert Estrin:
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been doing virtual visits with more people in the last couple of months than I’ve done in the rest of my life combined.

Coren Estrin Mino:
Yes, this is true. I’m visiting with a lot of people I haven’t seen in a really long time.

Robert Estrin:
It’s opening everybody’s consciousness. We’re going to talk about the unique challenges of teaching music lessons online, because there are people out there trying to figure out how to deal with all this technology. I remember when I first started doing this, I had a friend who I wanted to do a video chat with. I’m pretty adept at technology and my friend happens to be a computer teacher. Even we were struggling for 10 or 15 minutes to get any of the platforms to work! It’s a funny thing, sometimes everything just works seamlessly and other times, nothing seems to work. Tell me about what your experiences have been. Afterall, you’ve been teaching in person for so long.

What have been the challenges for you in getting set up in this whole new world online?

Coren Estrin Mino:
Well, in a nutshell, everything! I am not computer illiterate by any stretch, but this was really new for me and I was really struggling my first two weeks of doing this in March. Terrible sound, just terrible glitches, sound cutting out, a delay between the visual and the audio. There were so many problems! So I was complaining about this to my son, Brian, who helped me enormously. He told me some things I needed to do to improve my setup. The main thing he told me about were these headphones with the microphone. One of the things that was happening to me my first couple of weeks, I was losing my voice because all of us, when we are video chatting, if our headphones don’t have our own voice in them, we don’t realize we’re shouting. There’s a psychological distancing from your device. You feel like you’re far away from people. So you tend to shout. I was getting very hoarse, because if you’re giving 12 to 15 piano lessons a day and you’re shouting all day long, your voice doesn’t hold up. And mine certainly didn’t.

Robert Estrin:
I found the same thing at first when I was doing video lessons. I just used my iPad. I have a nice iPad Pro with a big screen which works great. The audio and the video are fine. But in order to get the piano keys in the shot, the iPad had to be far enough away. So, I had to be shouting. It was really exhausting until I figured out how to incorporate streaming into my studio.

You had talked to me about your issues with the internet. What was your solution for that?

Coren Estrin Mino:
That’s a really good question. Brian recommended that I get an extra router, which is made by a company called, Orbi. That improved the sound. Then, I upgraded my internet service as well. Those changes made huge improvements. There was no longer a delay between audio and visual. One of the things that kept happening was a bubbly sound. It almost sounded like my piano was underwater, and that disappeared completely. The one thing that I will never have any control over is what my students are using, what their internet is, what device they’re doing their piano lessons on. So I have at least improved my situation as much as I can without putting thousands of dollars into it.

Robert Estrin:
There are some other tips that people should be aware of. These video chat platforms are not meant for music. They are optimized for spoken voice. There are all kinds of settings for noise reduction of different types. If you have those enabled, which they are by default, when you first start chatting, when you play anything quiet, the notes sound really weird. I think it’s important for people to understand that there are settings in Zoom and in Skype and in some of the other platforms. We’re using Zoom right now for everybody. And one nice thing about Zoom is that you can record your call, just like we’re doing. That’s how we’re able to share this with you.

We disabled the noise reduction on both ends so that we can play music with no problems. That’s really essential when you’re giving lessons, isn’t it?

Coren Estrin Mino:
Yeah, absolutely. There are some entertaining things that happen on their end, I’ll hear their dogs barking or somebody chatting in the next room. And that actually is a bit of a problem. My headphones pick up ambient noise almost as loud as the sounds I really want to hear, which is my students talking or playing the piano. So, I sent out a message to everybody to please try to keep the noise level down in their homes while the piano lessons are going on.

Robert Estrin:
Now, I know you teach a wide range of students from beginners to advanced adults, but teaching younger children online, I’m wondering how you engage them. They’re looking on a screen, maybe some of them are even on phones. How do you deal with that?

What methodology is there for keeping children engaged remotely?

Coren Estrin Mino:
That is actually a huge issue. Anybody who’s teaching children online, any subject, knows it’s not easy to engage children remotely. The best solution for that is to have a parent sitting in the room with the child.

Robert Estrin:
It’s got to be the right parent though, of course.

Coren Estrin Mino:
Well, I’ve had good luck. The one little issue that comes up with parents sometimes is a parent wants to jump in and answer a question. If the child doesn’t answer right away, they’ll just jump in and tell the child the answer. That’s a natural response. Most parents though let me conduct the lesson and I will say, “Could you please point to measure three?” And they’ll do that. So the child knows where we are. That’s the biggest problem, a child not understanding. If I say we’re on line two, measure three, they don’t respond to that. They don’t understand that. If I stop them to look at a little correction, their default is to start again from the beginning.

Robert Estrin:
That’s a timeless problem with students anyway. I have a video on that subject!

Coren Estrin Mino:
So, you know what I’m talking about. It’s very hard for me to convey where we are in the music. One of the most important facets of my teaching has had to disappear. I play duets with my students, especially the young ones.

Not being able to play duets with my students has been very challenging because it’s one of the best ways to get young students to sense pulse in music.

Robert Estrin:
Also great for sight reading.

Coren Estrin Mino:
And dynamics, or even a music that they have prepared that they are not sight reading, pieces they have actually learned. By me playing a duet with them, I can exaggerate the dynamics a little bit and say, “Copy what I’m doing.” So, they understand how loud is loud, how soft is soft. And I can’t do that now. So, I’ve had to rely on some ingenuity, I guess, in trying to get kids to do things. Plus, I have to always make sure that what they’re doing is what I’m hearing. The electronics make dynamics, tone, and balance very difficult to hear sometimes, especially if they are on devices that are old or not great to begin with. Phones are not necessarily bad. If they have a brand new iPhone, for example, I’m going to get good sound from that.

Robert Estrin:
Right. In terms of the transmission.

I would imagine it’s hard for them to see if you’re trying to show them anything on a small screen.

Coren Estrin Mino:
Exactly. Well, I don’t do a lot of that. Sometimes I will pick up a book and I’ll say, “This is what I’m talking about right here.” I’ll resort to pointing to the place in the score. For a while I had thought of getting a little handheld camera, but my son informed me that even though for people who are way more tech savvy than I, they could go back and forth between the computer and the little camera easily. For me, that was just a step that would have been too time consuming to do quickly in a lesson.

Robert Estrin:
Another thing you can do with some of these platforms like Zoom is screen-sharing. So if you have something up on your computer screen, instead of seeing you, they’ll see what you’re seeing on the computer, and that could be one way of sharing.

Coren Estrin Mino:
That’s a great idea. I’m mostly with my students using FaceTime. Almost all my students have Apple products. I’m also using some Skype and a couple students are using Zoom.

Robert Estrin:
Right. I think that Skype and FaceTime actually have the best video quality, but Zoom is very flexible.

Coren Estrin Mino:
Exactly. So those have been some of my challenges. I did send home a note to parents, to please purchase a tripod for their devices. I’m getting very tired of phones falling off stacks of books or a phone being on the edge of the piano. Whatever end of the piano the phone is on, I’m either hearing way too much bass or way too much treble. So, a little bit of distance from the keyboard makes it so that I can hear a truer sound as well as being better visually. I don’t like when I can see the keys, but I can’t see my student’s face. That’s very uncomfortable for me. With a lot of the phones that’s what’s happening. And I don’t like that.

Robert Estrin:
I’m with you there.

For everybody out there, are you still accepting students?

Coren Estrin Mino:
Yes, I am accepting students, particularly adults, because they can come in the morning. So, yes, so I am more than happy to speak with anybody who is interested.

Robert Estrin:
I know that you always have a packed schedule because you’ve been teaching for so long. When did you start teaching?

Coren Estrin Mino:
I have been teaching since I was 13.

Robert Estrin:
13? Wow!

Coren Estrin Mino:
Yes. I started taking students at 13 and our dad started giving me students when I was about 15. Then when I went to college, you inherited my students.

Robert Estrin:
That’s right. And that’s when I started assisting dad. That’s what got both of us into it from such a young age.

Coren Estrin Mino:
That’s right. I did the same thing with my children. And I know you did the same thing with yours. My children started teaching when they were very, very young, so I think we carried that through very nicely.

Robert Estrin:
So, we’re carrying the torch for future generations! If any of you out there have questions about the technology, you’re welcome to email me. I can tell you what I’m doing and help any of you who are teachers or students trying to figure out how to do all of this. We’re happy to help you, and we’re here for everybody. I want to thank Coren for joining us. And it’s been a pleasure visiting with you virtually.

Coren Estrin Mino:
Yes, it has been.

Robert Estrin:
Coren has had many students go on to illustrious, professional careers as teachers and concert pianists. She’s really good with a wide range of students. So, if you have any questions, address them to me and we’ll help any of you, whatever you’re trying to do with your music! Again, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource. Thanks so much for joining us here today. We’ll see you next time.

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Robert@LivingPianos.com
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Coren Mino Estrin
corenmino@msn.com