Piano and Music Videos

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. The question today is, “How Long Does it Take to Rebuild a Piano?”

There’s a very wide range of time, and there are many aspects to this question. Let’s say you have a piano you want to have rebuilt. Perhaps you have a Steinway, you want to have restored and you decide to send it to Steinway to rebuild. You’re probably going to wait over a year to get your piano back. It can take that long! Now, does that mean they’re taking the entire year to rebuild it? Well, yes and no. They might do parts of different pianos simultaneously. However:

It takes at least months to rebuild a piano.

Now, the other aspect of this question is, what does it mean to rebuild a piano? There are different parts of a piano that can be rebuilt. For example, are you replacing the sound board or repairing the old one? Are you creating a new key set, or are you staying with the original keys? There are different parts of a piano that can be utilized in rebuilding in most instances. Unless you have a piano that’s a complete disaster, you’re going to utilize a lot of the existing parts, so it can take different amounts of time depending upon how much work is required.

Let’s say, for example, you have an unusual piano from the late 1800s with a pre-modern action and it’s an art-case with beautiful scroll work, and some of the scroll work is missing. Perhaps other parts of the piano are destroyed as well, such as the music rack or one of the legs. It could take a very long time to match the woods, to hand-carve the beautiful intricate parts to make the piano match the way it was originally manufactured.

It could take longer than a year.

But I would say that any kind of even the most basic rebuilding that keeps the original action and replaces only some action parts, replaces strings, perhaps pin block, refinish the case, re-guild the plate, has got to take an absolute minimum of two to three months, if that’s all they’re working on. It is a big job. Not only that, you don’t want to rush through it because a piano needs to settle in, and a great part of the work of rebuilding a piano comes after the rebuilding in adjusting everything to play on a high level. On top of that, it’s important to make sure everything is stable.

If a piano has just been rebuilt and hasn’t had fine work performed, it will sound horrendous!

It takes tremendous refinement to get a rebuilt piano to play on a high level. It’s best to let the piano sit, play it, and have technicians work on it, and, of course, even over the next year or two, a rebuilt piano, just like a brand-new piano, is not going to be really settled in and stable for at least a year or two. You must play the piano and have it serviced on a very regular basis until it becomes stable.

So it’s all part of the process. I hope this has been helpful for you. If you have a piano you’re thinking of rebuilding and you want any advice, you’re welcome to contact us here at info@livingpianos.com. Thanks again. I’m Robert Estrin. We’ll see you next time.

949-244-3729

This is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store with the question: What is the future of player piano technology? If you’ve been paying attention in the last couple of decades to what has been going on in this field, it is pretty fantastic. Player pianos have a long, rich history going back to the 19th Century. This was a contraption that went in front of your piano to play it. Soon after was an explosion of the player piano. Every home had to have one, much like how we have big-screen televisions today in just about every home. They were incredibly popular. Three times more pianos were purchased back then than today, with a population less than a third of what it is now. It was really the glory days of the player piano at the turn of the century until the 1920’s when the phonograph and radio came in and wiped out the player piano. However, they made a resurgence in the 1980s with the cassette-based player, floppy disks, CDs, and today we have wireless player pianos.

Wireless Piano Player Technology

Wireless player pianos can both record and play back performances. Yamaha’s Disklavier has been doing that for years on a very high level. Steinway with their Spirio system can now record and playback impeccably. There are other amazing things they can do. For example, the libraries that were created on the piano rolls of the expressive players, which they had at the turn of the century, offers performances of composers and pianists who may have recorded on 78 RPM awful sounding recordings. They recorded on piano rolls which recorded every nuance of their playing and have since been digitized. You can listen to Rachmaninoff or Gershwin play ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ on your modern player piano.

On the Spirio system and the Disklavier, they have their artists come in and make titles. They have other instruments that play through audio in perfect synchronization. You can even have videos of your performers and your piano plays live with the video. These are all things that are happening now. There are other features you may not be aware of. Disklavier can have concerts in multiple cities simultaneously by having their systems set up in concert halls. Auditions are also done this way so that people don’t have to travel so far. They may have a West Coast center and a New York center where people can play at and the judges can be wherever they want to be. The piano will play the same part for them, live.

What is on the horizon with player piano technology?

Are we done? Not by a long shot. One thing that Steinway is doing is taking old audio recordings of Horowitz, Rubinstein, and others and are digitizing them so that your piano plays their actual piano performance, even if they never made piano rolls. That technology may get good enough so that you could do that on your own someday. It isn’t there yet, but it is something to look forward to.

Another thing to look for is the emergence of hybrid pianos. Hybrid pianos use the front end of an acoustic piano, the action, with a digital sound generation. Combine that with player technology and the possibilities are endless. What is in store with player piano technologies? We can only guess. It has been very exciting in the last few years. I look forward myself and have been working on a prototype of a new category of modular concert grand systems that you’ll be hearing more about.

So glad to have you join me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com with a really interesting topic for you today: Secrets of Piano Voicing. Did you know that the voicing on the piano is intrinsically different depending upon what volume you are playing? The balance between the notes in your hands is different when playing loud compared to playing softly.

Here’s how it works. When you’re putting a lot of energy into playing loud on the piano, you can play everything strong and the melody will come right through for you. When you play softly though, you have to delineate the melody notes or they get lost. In the featured video, I demonstrate with the Chopin 20th prelude, which has fortissimo as well as pianissimo sections. When playing loudly, you can play with equal volume. Yet, you will easily be able to discern the top melody notes. On the accompanying video, I play everything equal volume of all the notes in the chords of both hands.

The next section is quiet. I play softly, but equal volume of all the notes as I did playing forte in the previous phrase. But at the softer volume, the melody gets lost.

While there is more than one way to bring out melodies in piano playing, typically they are found on the top line of music. If you reach with the top fingers, you can delineate the melody. For the sake of this presentation, I am bringing out the melody of the top line while playing quietly.

It creates a beautiful sound! On the next section which is even softer, you will hear the performance first playing all the notes with equal volume. Unlike when playing loud, the melody is lost when playing the notes equal volume at softer volumes. When playing softly and bringing out the top notes the balance is very pleasing.

Now, what’s great about this lesson is that you can try this with all your music and discover the more quietly you play, the more exaggerated the difference between melody and harmony must be because of the natural acoustics of the piano. When you play loud, you can hear everything clearly playing all notes at equal volume.

But the quieter you play, the more focus you must bring to the melody.

I hope this has been helpful to you. This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. Thanks so much for joining me.

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

This is LivingPianos.com and I am Robert Estrin with a great subject today, Unique Problems with Steinway Pianos.

Steinway pianos are the de facto standard in the concert world.

In fact, it’s the only company left that still supports the concert market with concert grands in virtually all major cities in the world. This is an arduous task when you consider the cost of each one is in the six figures! Steinway in different periods of time had problems and I’m going to bring up two of them today.

Fortunately, Steinway pianos being manufactured today do not suffer from either of these problems.

I want to let you know that right out of the gate. But early in the 20th century, Steinway had an idea of a way that they could make actions last longer and be less susceptible to corrosion. They used a solution containing paraffin on their actions. If you ever looked at old Steinway pianos or sat down at an old Steinway that’s been neglected, it may have played like a truck. You can look inside and the hammers go up and down very gradually. There’s no speed. Everything’s gummed up. You can actually see green in all the little felt bushings of all the hundreds of action parts on each key. That is an example of vertebrae.

Verdigris is a condition in which a piano action becomes corroded.

This paraffin solution had exactly the opposite effect of the intention that Steinway had in avoiding corrosion. Unfortunately, in certain environments, the actions would gum up like crazy! Sometimes it’s possible to get things moving by treating the action parts with different chemicals. However, with really severe verdigris, all you can do is rebuild the action with all new parts.
Sometimes you can replace center pins if it’s not a really bad problem. You can also try lubricating. But oftentimes problems will recur. With humidity, the air gets inside the piano. You might think you’ve got the problem solved and everything’s moving nicely. Then, a month later, it starts gumming up again. So that’s one problem of early 20th-century Steinways.

Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about vertigris on newer Steinway pianos.

The second problem was in Steinway’s CBS era when they experimented with something else that sounded like a great idea. The thousands of felt parts in actions wear out and are susceptible to humidity. So, Steinway engineers thought about utilizing Teflon.

From around 1968 to 1982 Steinway used Teflon in their piano actions.

What’s wrong with this? I’m a believer that oftentimes there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. However, the problems that plagued them is that some pianos that went to extreme environments the wood would swell and contract with the weather. Of course, Teflon is hard. This created space between the Teflon and the wood creating noise in the actions. Sometimes, rebuilding the actions are necessary for these circumstances. However, I will say this:

The vast majority of the time, the biggest problem with Teflon actions, is finding technicians who know how to service them properly.

Oftentimes Teflon itself isn’t the problem. Using slightly larger center pins can sometimes solve the problem if the Teflon is worn. However, Teflon is very robust and can last many, many years. Teflon is not necessarily a problem. In fact, if I was buying a Steinway piano from that era and it had Teflon and there were no problems, I wouldn’t be concerned. Now, it doesn’t mean there would never be problems. But you know what? It doesn’t matter what piano you have, things will require servicing eventually and parts will wear out if you play a good deal.

That’s the long and short of Teflon. It was something they tried and they eventually gave up the practice. The idea of piano actions that don’t wear out so quickly is a very appealing idea and I applaud them for trying something. If you have a piano with Teflon, if it isn’t giving you problems, you should be fine. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. As long as it’s functioning well, you’re in good shape.

Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store. Keep the questions coming in! info@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729

You piano playing will be on an entirely new level when you stop using the pedal as a crutch and learn how to connect the music with your hands. I hope this tutorial helps your piano practice and your playing. This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store 949-244-3729 info@LivingPianos.com