Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Today, we are going to demonstrate some fundamental differences in American and European pianos. Naturally, there is a tremendous variance of pianos within Europe as well as in the United States. However, what we are going to show is how it is necessary to approach playing American and European pianos with dramatically different techniques in order to get the sound you are after out of them.

You will hear the beginning of Debussy Claire De Lune on the 9′ 2″ Petrof Concert Grand. Then you will hear the same section performed on a Steinway Model D Concert Grand.

Next, I will play the Debussy on the Petrof the same way I approached the keyboard on the Steinway. You will notice that the Petrof doesn’t require the same support of the keys. A more delicate approach is all that is required to get the sound out. Like a fine sports car, the piano responds to the most gentle motions. Playing on the Petrof with the technique utilized previously on the Steinway creates a crass, overblown performance.

Next, I play the Debussy on the Steinway with the technique utilized on the Petrof. It results in a lifeless sound that lacks projection.

Each instrument has unique responses to touch. You must approach every piano in a unique manner in order to achieve the sound you are after. Even the room acoustics play a large part in the technique you must use in order to achieve the desired sound.

I am also a French hornist.

There is a parallel with American French horn playing versus European hornists.

Generally, in the U.S., people play larger bore horns with bigger mouthpieces than in Europe. More than that, American horn players like myself tend to play more on the F-horn side of the instrument rather than the B-flat side as European hornists do. The thumb valve adds around 3 feet of tubing to the horn! So, European horn players have a more open sound and an elegance whereas American French horn sound tends to be bigger and fatter.

The same is true of American pianos compared to European pianos. American pianos require more arm weight which is analogous to using more breath which is necessary on larger French horns. While European pianos have an open, clear sound and respond to smaller gradations of touch and require a more refined approach than American pianos.

A lot of people have noticed that I have lost weight. In the past, I have gone up and down in weight which I know is not very healthy. But lately, I feel great and can go hours without eating, yet retaining energy. Musicians are typically very busy and it’s hard to have enough time to eat!

On a recent trip to New York to hear my student Bijan Taghavi play his senior recital at The Manhattan School of Music, I discovered that a lot of the music students there do what I’ve been doing which is:

Intermittent Fasting – doing all your eating within a limited number of hours of the day, say from 9 or 10 in the morning until 6 or 7 at night

You may have heard about the:

Keto Diet – basically, you stop eating carbohydrates, particularly refined carbohydrates, but eat lots of vegetables. You even avoid eating healthy carbohydrates like potatoes, rice and bread. In a few days your metabolism changes and you don’t get the big swings of hunger and energy throughout the day. So you can go long periods of time without eating and maintain energy and clarity.

If you’re healthy and want to lose weight, and your doctor says it’s O.K., I recommend it. It’s been great for me!

This is a really interesting question and it brings to mind a video I made years ago demonstrating how the pedals interact with tone and techniques that add sustain to the tone of the piano by utilizing the pedals. If you push down the sustain pedal after you’ve played a note, you can enhance the tone after the initial attack. You can also depress the una corda pedal (soft pedal) which shifts the action so only two of the three strings are struck directly by the hammer for each note which makes the attack softer and creates a more sustained tone. By using these two techniques in conjunction with one another, you can achieve a very sustained tone. But what about just using the soft pedal alone? Is that ever done?

Here’s an interesting fact for you. Way back when the first piano was developed by Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1600, he had sort of a una corda pedal. It wasn’t like a modern type, but indeed he had a mechanism on his early pianos that could provide a softer tone. However, that piano didn’t have a sustain pedal! Later on in Mozart’s era, the early pianos had a lever that could be operated with the knee that did the same thing as the sustain pedal on modern pianos. You could combine changes of registration achieved by engaging felt on the strings, along with the sustain lever, thereby softening and sustaining the tone. This is like on a modern piano combining the sustain pedal along with the soft pedal. For example, in the second movement of the Mozart sonata K330 in C major; I always love to take the una corda pedal in the minor section. I use the sustain pedal along with the una corda pedal to achieve a soft, singing sound.

If you’re playing Baroque music which predated the invention of the piano, composers wrote for various keyboard instruments including the harpsichord, clavichord, virginal as well as others. These instruments had no sustain pedal. Yet there were changes of sound with registrations which engaged different sets of strings. This is why many people believe that you should not use the sustain pedal in Baroque music for the reason that it wasn’t on any of the keyboard instruments of the time that composers like Bach and Scarlatti were writing music for. So this is one instance where there is a good case for using the una corda pedal without using the sustain pedal. You can hear the change of color on the accompanying video which demonstrates engaging the una corda for a change of tone. Indeed it is possible to use just the una corda pedal without necessarily combining it with the sustain pedal as is usually the case.

Today you are going to get a glimpse in the accompanying video into our studio where we record our videos! Starting out in the control room, you will hear a brief snippet of a recording project for a film score we recorded this weekend. It is a documentary which features ragtime music. Through some creative equalization and other techniques, we reproduced the sound of a piano going through a 1930’s radio! The piano was recorded on my new prototype which provides a virtual concert grand experience which I will demonstrate briefly for you. As you can hear, it sounds like a first class concert grand! It’s funny that we downgraded the audio experience to 1930’s technology for the film!

Moving into the performance room, you see grand pianos, microphones, lights and the equipment we use to record videos. The acoustics are dialed in with bass traps in the corners to avoid a muddy sound, while keeping reflections for natural reverberation.

Recording has been a passion of mine since childhood. My father had professional recording equipment in his teaching studio growing up. I would get his hand-me-down equipment which I played with as a young child. Eventually, I got into recording music both in the studio and on location for fun and later professionally.

I also had the good fortune of attending my father’s recording sessions from a young age. The Connoisseur Society Recordings from then were state-of-the-art and hold up well on CD today. In fact there was an artistry to these recordings that is quite rare as you can hear on some of these links on YouTube:

We have a great show today with special guest, Scott Houston; The Piano Guy! A lot of you may know Scott from his many appearances on PBS television. Scott is the perfect person for this series because he has educated countless people all over the world in how to play piano by ear, playing with chords, and dealing with popular styles of music. My background is primarily in classical music. So we’re going to have a real treat for you. There will be tips on both sides for people who play by ear and people who have never tried to play by ear.

The first thing to consider is being able to play popular songs.

Why do you need to play by ear in order to play popular music? Popular songs oftentimes are first conceived by jamming together and later on after the record is produced, somebody goes and transcribes it into sheet music. If you ever try to decipher the sheet music, often times it just doesn’t sound quite right because it’s not the original. Also consider that often, sheet music is just a piano/vocal arrangement where the original was a whole band. So it doesn’t always translate well.

So there is a good place for being able to play by ear or to pick something up and make your own arrangement. People who have traditional classical training may feel a need to see the written score in order to play it. A lead sheet which has the melody line and the chord symbols allow you the freedom to play stylistically correct. It’s not like classical music where the original manuscript is the complete work. In the case of pop songs, Taylor Swift, for instance, may write a tune and by the time it gets out on a piece of sheet music you’re reading, a staff arranger may have produced the sheet music after the record was produced. What Taylor Swift may have done, was to write a melody line and chord changes. That’s the DNA of the song. Arrangers, producers, and musicians may have fleshed out the rest.

There are a few intrinsic piano parts that should be played verbatim if you want them to sound like the recording. The other 95% may just require comping chords that highlight the melody line. By learning to build upon the essential chord structure, it frees you up to sound more authentic than the sheet music in many instances. What makes it even more complicated is that sheet music is usually written with the melody line contained within the piano part. Occasionally you’ll get sheet music that doesn’t have the vocal line in it. It just has the accompaniment which is appropriate when accompanying a singer. In this case, it doesn’t work at all as a piano piece. The opposite is also true. If you’re trying to accompany a singer, you don’t want to double every one of the notes the singer is singing. This is an essential point. It’s 180 degrees opposite when you’re accompanying someone compared to playing a solo on the piano.

The next reason to play by ear is to be able to improvise.

Feeling like you absolutely must read notes to be able to play anything on a piano will keep you from the fun of ever being able to improvise. Using a lead sheet is a terrific way because after all; pop, jazz, rock, and country players use lead sheets most of the time for the melody and basic chord structure rather than have all the notes written out. To give you an extreme example, I’ve seen accomplished classical musicians who can’t even play happy birthday because they have never tried to play by ear! It’s totally alien to them. Playing from a lead sheet and learning chord changes is the crawling and walking before you learn to run in the world of improvisation. Improvisation isn’t a wildly free, play anything, anytime sort of thing for people. What improvisation is most often, is creating a melody line while playing over the chord changes. You’ve got to know the chord changes to a tune or you really can’t improvise. By just doing that, it may provide the foundation you need. Learning chords and learning to play from lead sheets creates the foundation that very naturally leads into improvising. Because it’s not black ink on paper, doesn’t mean it’s not music. Written notation is nothing more than a documentation of music. Music is what we play. It’s the sound we make that’s the music. So, sheet music is nothing more than a recording of music.

It’s a tough thing sometimes to get people who have had nothing but traditional lessons to accept that what you’re playing might not be exactly what is written. Something that is missed in classical circles is that almost all the great composers were improvisers, but we only have the recordings on the paper because there was no audio recording back then. So the score is elevated to the point where people don’t realize that improvisation has always been an essential component of classical music. Many if not most of the great composers were prolific improvisers!

The last of the three benefits of playing by ear is instant gratification.

Most adults who are taking piano lessons don’t plan on doing it for a living or making a career out of it. They’re just wanting to have fun playing the piano. They want to sit down behind this piece of furniture they’ve been dusting for the last 20 years and play something! For that reason, it can be a phenomenally faster route to learn to play three chords which can take about five minutes. By doing that, they’ve got the chord changes to probably 70 or 80,000 songs! This isn’t to suggest that that’s all you ever want to do by any means. But it can be a great way to get someone to experience gratification through playing the piano. It gives an incentive to want to keep going.

Growing up in New York on Long Island, it was amazing; every summer trying to mitigate the humidity with air conditioning was a losing battle. By the middle of July, my father’s pianos would just get dead. Not only that, but the actions became mushy as they absorbed moisture. Indeed, the weather can affect your piano in numerous ways.

As I mentioned, humidity can deaden the tone because the hammers absorb moisture so you get a lifeless sound. The heat comes back in September and the tone livens up along with it. Everything is bound to go out of tune with these seasonal changes as well.

There’s another thing you should be aware of. At the opposite end of the spectrum, if you have extreme dryness where you don’t have environmental control; if you have hairline cracks in the soundboard or bridges, they can open up. Maybe you’ve never had problems before and suddenly you’re hearing buzzes and other problems. They might just go away next time the humidity goes up, or possibly not.

Weather has a profound effect upon pianos and even if you do have humidification or dehumidification systems in your piano, or in the room with the piano, it’s really hard to avoid the effect of seasonal changes on the performance of your piano. However, there are many ways of making it more stable such as treating the room to create stable temperature and humidity. You could possibly use a felt string cover to allow the sound to come through but not let the moisture in your piano.

This is a really interesting question and there is a lot to it. It’s fascinating how various cultures prefer different types of sounds. For example, have you ever noticed that Asian pianos tend to have a brighter sound than American pianos? You might have wondered if it’s because of methodology. Yes, but it also involves cultural preferences. Let’s get back to European pianos now.

I am also a French hornist and my wife is a flautist, so we have played in many orchestras and have been obsessed with listening to orchestras since childhood. If you listen to some of the great recordings by European orchestras like the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam or the Berlin Philharmonic, you’ll notice a very different quality of tonality when it comes to the instruments in European orchestras compared to American orchestras like the Philadelphia Orchestra or the New York Philharmonic.

Each individual instrument is different! With the French horn for example, the American sound is a big fat sound. In fact, most American French hornists play on the F side of the double horn which is three feet longer than the B-flat side. When playing higher notes, they may play on the B-flat side making it a little easier to play, but for the richer and fatter sound, they generally prefer the longer F-horn. In Europe, it’s much more popular to play pretty much on the B-flat horn for most of the notes giving a more open and clear sound with less fatness.

It’s not just French horns and flutes, but all the instruments in the orchestra have that kind of clear projecting sound, more than the fat blending sound. The same exact phenomenon is true with pianos. Listen to a Fazioli, Bosendorfer or a Bechstein and compare that to a Steinway or Mason & Hamlin. You can also compare these to some other great pianos from years past like Baldwin and Knabe and you’ll hear a real difference in the quality of the sound. As I explain to people time and time again, it’s not a question of right or wrong. Some people’s favorite color might be blue and others prefer purple. It comes down to personal preference.

What I find to be true though is that for certain styles of music, one could be more appropriate. For example, when I sit down at a great European piano that’s beautifully regulated, voiced and in tune and play a piece from the Baroque or Classical eras, a European piano can have a perfect quality of sound. The delicacy and the clarity is well suited to those periods of music. On the other hand, sometimes when you are after a massive sound; you really want an American piano for the big fatness that European pianos can lack.

I’m going to stop right here and say that I’m giving a gross generalization and for everything I’ve said there are absolutely exceptions. For example, I’ve sat down on some Bluthners that didn’t have that quality of sound that I’m describing in European pianos. They sometimes have a dark fatness that you don’t hear typically in European pianos. Baldwin still has the American sound, but some are closer to my ears to the European sound than other American pianos. For example, they aren’t quite as fat and voluptuous as the sound of a Mason Hamlin. There seems to be a lot of overlap in this and what I have offered are general observations. You also have to consider Hamburg Steinway which is afterall, a European piano!

The other thing I find is that the typical European piano can be almost like a fine sports car. You have to be careful not to hit the throttle too hard and lose control. If you put a tremendous amount of energy into a fine European piano, sometimes it’s more than necessary. You can get all the sound needed without having to exert so much energy the way you can on a great Steinway. It’s almost endless. You can just keep putting more and more into it getting different colors. Is that a good thing? Maybe, but for some people, they feel they don’t have to work as hard achieving a wide range of sound out of a great Bechstein for example.

So again, this isn’t a right or wrong issue and ultimately it comes down to two things: personal taste and the specific piano which is equally important. You can’t say that all European pianos are one-way or even that all Steinways are the same. After all, each instrument is handcrafted and they’re made with wood, and no two trees are alike. So you have to listen to each piano for what it offers. These are general guidelines that you can put in the back of your head when you’re trying pianos and see how well the specific piano you sit at meets these criteria.

I hope this has been interesting for you! Again, this is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store! 949-244-3729 info@LivingPianos.com