Piano and Music Videos

Can't find what you're looking for?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we have an important topic: How to avoid destroying your piano. While we’ve discussed many things you should do for your piano, today we’ll focus on what to avoid. Some of these tips are common sense, but others might surprise you.

Avoid Hot Air Vents

Placing your grand piano over a hot air vent or near one can cause significant damage in just a few months. The dry air can warp and crack the soundboard, making the piano a total loss unless you opt for expensive repairs. Always ensure that your piano is not in the path of a hot air vent.

Stable Temperature and Humidity

Maintaining a stable environment is crucial for your piano. Extreme temperature swings can affect tuning stability, while high humidity can cause rust and corrosion. Conversely, very low humidity can dry out the pin block and felt parts, leading to a noisy action and other issues. Aim for 45-50% humidity, and use a hygrometer to monitor the levels. Consider using a room humidifier or a piano lifesaver system to keep conditions stable.

Protect from Sunlight

Sunlight can bleach your piano’s finish in a matter of months. It can also affect tuning stability if it shines directly on the soundboard. Even if you use window treatments to block UV light, it can still damage your piano. So protect your piano from direct sunlight to keep the finish looking new.

Regular Tuning

Pianos that haven’t been tuned for years will require multiple tunings to stabilize. Similar to changing the oil in your car, regular maintenance is essential. Neglecting this can lead to pitch issues and unstable tuning.

Avoid Furniture Polish

Using furniture polish on your piano can cause wax build-up that requires professional removal. For satin finishes, use a soft microfiber or cotton cloth. For high gloss finishes, a microfiber cloth with a bit of Windex works well.

Reshape Piano Hammers

Piano hammers can become grooved and hardened over time, leading to a harsh tone. They need to be reshaped periodically, but this should be done by an experienced technician to avoid damage.

Don’t Tune with Pliers

Using pliers to tune your piano can strip the tuning pins, causing severe damage. Invest in a proper tuning wrench or hammer, available on Amazon, and avoid makeshift tools.

Avoid Wood Stoves

Wood stoves can severely dry out a room, damaging your piano’s finish and internal components. If you must have a wood stove in the same room, use a humidifier to add moisture back into the air.

Beach Environments

Living near the beach can expose your piano to high humidity, leading to rust and corrosion. Use a string cover to protect the strings from excessive humidity if you can’t keep windows closed.

Use Correct Parts

Replacing piano parts with incorrect ones, like using Steinway hammers on a non-Steinway piano, can severely affect the instrument’s performance. Always consult an experienced piano technician for the right parts.

Ivory Key Maintenance

Closing the fallboard over ivory keys can cause them to yellow. Keep the fallboard open to maintain the bright, white appearance of the keys. Dusting the keys regularly is sufficient to keep them clean.

Conclusion

These tips will help you maintain your piano in optimal condition. If you enjoyed these tips, consider subscribing to LivingPianos.com for more articles and resources.

I am Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. Thanks for joining me! For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel!
www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin.
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com.

How to Avoid Destroying Your Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is: What WAS Living Piano? I recently made videos, “What IS Living Pianos?” and “What ARE Living Pianos?” But What WAS Living Piano? Well, Living Piano actually predates Living Pianos by a number of years. It was a live show that I performed throughout the state of California dozens of times at universities, colleges, art centers, conventions, and even on a cruise in which I presented a historic concert experience showing the entire lineage of the invention of the piano, starting with the harpsichord, going through to the earliest piano of Mozart, the fortepiano, to the modern piano and beyond with cutting-edge technologies including my modular piano system prototypes.

I would dress up in period costumes and play the period styles on the instruments they were actually written for!

What was remarkable about the show is that I performed it for so many different people, from senior citizens to preschoolers, and everybody was fascinated. The piano is so ubiquitous, but most people never have actually experienced the development of the piano that took thousands of people over hundreds of years to achieve. Living Piano allowed people to hear how the piano evolved and what the music written for it at different times sounded like on these instruments. Not only that, but I gave the audience a chance to come up afterwards and inspect the instruments and try them out for themselves. People loved the show!

It was an incredibly impractical show.

When you become an early instrument specialist, you not only have to learn how to play the instruments and transport them, but you also have to learn how to service them. Every time you play a harpsichord, you have to tune it! It doesn’t hold its tuning very well at all. You wouldn’t even believe the complexity of what it takes to do a show like this. But I’m glad I experienced it. It was the impetus for Living Pianos. It gave me a chance to perform in so many different places including annual conventions of the Piano Technicians Guild and the Piano Teachers Association. It was really quite a show. If you’re interested in learning more, you can watch the Short documentary about the Living Piano live show! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

What WAS Living Piano?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question is: What is Living Pianos? In a nutshell, it’s my life! And it’s your life too, if you have a passion for the piano the way I do. It’s actually a double entendre. There are two meanings to Living Pianos.

I have a video called What are Living Pianos?

That video tells about the restored American and European pianos that are so rare today, which we sell all over the world and have been doing so since 2006! But it’s much more than that. It’s really about living the piano. As a matter of fact, if you type “living the piano” in your browser, Living Pianos comes up!

I was lucky enough to grow up in a musical household.

My entire family is made up of musicians of one sort or another. Pianos have always been central. My father, Morton Estrin, was a concert pianist. He was my teacher and my sister’s teacher. He taught countless people, from Billy Joel to conductors, composers, and pianists the world over. My sister, Coren Estrin Mino, is also a pianist and a teacher. My uncle was a professional musician. The list goes on and on. My life is centered around teaching, performing, and media. This is what makes me want to get up in the morning!

My mission is to keep the piano alive in the 21st century, in the United States and around the world.

This is no easy task when you consider that the piano has been on a slow decline for over a hundred years. That’s why connecting with people like you who care about the piano is enriching. It makes me feel like there is value to my life. So I thank you all for joining me and encourage you to subscribe to LivingPianos.com and YouTube! You’ll find a treasure trove of content I’ve been putting together for many years! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

What is Living Pianos?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is: What happens to old pianos? I’m going to tell you right now that what I’m going to share with you today is very disturbing. For those of you who love piano like I do, seeing what I’m going to show you is really heartbreaking.

There are some companies, like Living Pianos, that restore old pianos.

Most companies that restore pianos specialize in Steinway and maybe a couple of other brands. Used Steinways command more money than other brands because everybody sees them on the concert stage. Everyone knows they are high-quality pianos. But most people don’t know about other high-quality piano brands that were around in the United States when there were hundreds of companies making pianos in this country. And many of them were great instruments.

The problem is that restoring a piano is extremely expensive.

Many top piano restorers get between $30,000 and $40,000 to completely rebuild a piano to make it like new again. As a matter of fact, I took a personal tour of Steinway. The CEO and all the people treated me like royalty there. They gave me a grand tour of the entire facility. And when we passed their rebuilding shop, they said, “It’s a lot easier to build pianos than to rebuild them.” Pianos that have never had any work done to them are actually easier to rebuild than pianos where some work has been done along the way because you don’t know the specifications of the matching parts.

There are resources for old pianos, such as PianoAdoption.com.

PianoAdoption.com is a great place to go if you have a piano you just want to get rid of and you don’t have the heart to see it go to the dump, which is what happens to many old pianos, unfortunately. This is something that happens on a regular basis all around the country. It’s heartbreaking to see what happens when pianos need more work than they’re worth. I have a friend who has a piano business. He revealed to me that this past year, believe it or not, he had to trash 170 pianos of his that he had in storage because there was no way he was going to be able to restore them.

You actually have to pay money when you have an old piano that you can’t get rid of.

You would think somebody would want these instruments. If you have a piano that looks gorgeous, somebody might want it just for the furniture. And there are some pianos that can be restored, thank goodness. But for every piano we take in to restore, sadly, we have to turn down dozens that just aren’t worth it because of compromises in the fundamental structure. There’s only so much you can do to bring life to older pianos. Some are excellent candidates, and you can get stellar results. Others, you just can’t get life out of them anymore. Sadly, those pianos end up in the landfill. Sorry to bring you down with this. But the good news is that we and other businesses restore pianos so that we have these treasures from when the United States was the epicenter of the piano industry. Unlike today, when only about 2500 pianos are built each year in North America. That’s why it is our mission to bring life back to old pianos and to spread the joy of the piano to you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Supplemental Content:
New York Times Article

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/arts/music/for-more-pianos-last-note-is-thud-in-the-dump.html

What Happens to Old Pianos?

Welcome to Living Pianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about the similarities between the preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier and Bach chorales. If you know the Well-Tempered Clavier you know that these are monumental works. Bach decided to write these preludes and fugues to celebrate the fact that it was finally possible for keyboard instruments to be tuned in such a way as to be able to play in all the keys. Before that, instruments had to be tuned for specific keys. So he decided to write preludes and fugues in every single major and minor key. But there are 48 preludes and fugues, because he did it twice! There are two books of preludes and fugues. The fugues are masters of counterpoint. The preludes are beautiful little gems in their own right.

The four-part writing in Bach chorales is really the basis for the writing of all of Western music, one could argue.

I had the good fortune of studying four-part harmony with my father when I was a child. I really mastered the art of voice leadings, doublings, and all of that. It stays with me to this day to understand the structure of the music I’m studying, as well as for composing, arranging and improvising. You can see the relationship between the Bach chorales, which are the pure four voice writing containing soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, parts, and what he did in the preludes and fugues. Naturally, none of the preludes are based upon strict four-voice writing, but they’re still based upon the same structure of harmony, voice leadings, doublings, and all of that. For example, if you take the famous C Major Prelude from Book 1, what would happen if it were played more like a four voice chorale? If I were to play it with some passing tones and other non-chord tones, it really wouldn’t be so different from a Bach chorale. But what about another prelude that maybe is not as obvious, like the C Minor Prelude, also from Book 1. Well, it really has the fundamental structure of a chorale as well.

Looking at the music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich, and other composers, you’ll see the same foundation of the essential elements of a Bach chorale.

It’s all just embellishment of one sort or another. Did you ever realize that? Everything back then has just grown like a forest of music from the original seeds of inspiration going back centuries! It’s really remarkable how the language of music has grown. And you can hear how the Bach chorale transcends into more complex music. We could go further, whether it’s Beethoven, the second movement of one of his sonatas, like the Opus 10 Number 1, for example. It’s essentially a chorale. It’s broken up, but it’s the same basic structure. It’s remarkable, isn’t it?

I want you to think about your music, whatever music you’re playing. Whether it’s 21st century or 15th century, even. Notice how these same elements have been in music all along, exemplified beautifully in Bach chorales. I hope this has been interesting for you! Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

www.LivingPianos.com
www.Facebook.com/LivingPianos
949-244-3729

How the Well Tempered Clavier are Like Bach Chorales: The Seeds of Western Music

Welcome to Living Pianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about the similarities between the preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier and Bach chorales. If you know the Well-Tempered Clavier you know that these are monumenta

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I have an interesting question for you. Which are better, wood pianos or black ebony pianos? When you go to the symphony, onstage you see that classic black piano. You generally think of a piano as being black. But sometimes you see exotic woods, like rosewood. You see carved pianos, and they cost substantially more sometimes. But is there a benefit to wood pianos versus black pianos? That’s an interesting question with many ramifications.

Structurally and sonically, there is absolutely no difference between wood and ebony pianos.

There are many elements of the woods used in pianos that do make a tremendous difference in the sound quality. But pianos have had veneers on them for well over 100 years. So whatever the veneer is on top, whether it has a natural wood finish or a sprayed lacquer, whether it’s high gloss or satin, makes no difference in the sound of the piano. However, the wood underneath that finish, even on the rim of the piano can make a big difference in the tone of the piano. Many Asian production pianos utilize soft luan mahogany which is indigenous to the region. Luan rims are easier to bend than the hardwoods used in American and German pianos. So why do they do it? Since the soundboard is embedded into the rim, having a hardwood in the rim actually becomes part of the resonating chamber. So indeed the wood that a piano is made from does make a difference in the sound, but the finish does not. However, when piano companies are dealing with exotic woods, and intricate carved cases, they may naturally spend more time refining the instrument to the highest level since it provides a showcase for their work.

The wood of the soundboard has much more significance.

Almost all pianos today have spruce soundboards, but there are many different quality levels of spruce. Some soundboards are laminated woods with a cross grain. This kind of defeats the purpose of the fine spruce because generally the cement between those layers is going to inhibit the sound. But a laminated soundboard is far stronger, will last longer and is impervious to cracks, just like plywood is stronger than regular hardwood. So there are many things to consider about the different woods of a piano. For example, if you had the opportunity to have a wood piano or a black piano, and you really didn’t care one way or the other, black pianos tend to be more popular. So if you ever were to sell that piano, you might have an easier time selling a black piano than a wood piano.

There are people who love wood pianos and are willing to pay a premium.

With new pianos, wood finishes tend to cost a little more because they have to have matching veneers instead of essentially just spraying over with black paint. However, if you have a really beautiful wood piano, even though it might be harder to connect with someone who’s looking for that particular shade of wood, that person may be willing to pay a premium to get it. So there’s a lot to weigh here in choosing the finish of a piano. Ultimately you should get what you like because chances are, you’re not buying a piano to sell it. You’re buying a piano to enjoy it!

Choose the finish that you like best!

Get what you like! If you ever need to sell your piano, you want to have a long enough timeline so that you’re not under the gun. Because it’s not always easy to connect with someone looking for the piano you happen to have. Anything that’s relatively expensive, you want to have time to list it and get it into shape. But in terms of the sound and the playing, there is absolutely no difference in the finish of your piano!

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

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

www.LivingPianos.com
www.Facebook.com/LivingPianos
949-244-3729