Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin with a personal story about every piano I’ve lived with! I started selling pianos out of my home decades ago. So, I’m not going to include every single piano I have literally lived with, but every single one that was my practice piano. There are a lot of them, so let’s get started!

When I was born, there was a big old Sohmer upright in my bedroom.

Before I studied piano, my older sister studied with my father. He had a studio upstairs in our home. This was in a Levitt house. This is the house where my father taught Billy Joel among many other people. We moved when I was about five years old. That old Sohmer was my practice piano when we moved. It was a good piano, but my father had in his studio in our home a Baldwin L 6′ 3″ grand, as well as a Steinway model S, a beautiful little baby grand his father had given to him in the 1930s. So, I got to play those pianos as well.

Eventually, because my sister and I both studied the piano with my father and had to practice. So, my father bought a brand new Baldwin Hamilton studio upright.

I was about 12 years old. That piano was upstairs, and the Sohmer upright was downstairs. Both my sister and I taught piano also. We would teach in the playroom where that big old Sohmer was. But upstairs, we had the nicer Hamilton to play and practice on.

My father taught at Hofstra University, but he also did a great deal of teaching right in our home. He taught countless hours, but always had an hour long dinner break from 6:00 to 7:00. I would finish dinner by 6:30 and dash downstairs to play the pianos in his studio.

A few years later, my father stepped it up and bought a brand new 7 foot Baldwin SF-10 semi-concert grand. That piano was such a joy to play! At that point, the Steinway baby grand went upstairs, and my parents sold the Sohmer upright. So, then my sister and I had the beautiful Steinway baby grand to practice on, and in the playroom was the Baldwin Hamilton. I was in heaven, especially those 30 minutes after dinner playing that 7′ Baldwin. I absolutely loved it! But practicing on the Steinway baby grand was not so bad either!

When I moved to New York City to attend the Manhattan School of Music, my father was nice enough to let me take the Steinway baby grand.

I had that piano in my apartment to practice on. When I moved to Southern Illinois University to study with Ruth Slenczynska, he moved that piano into my apartment there. Then, when I transferred to Indiana University, Bloomington, I took the piano with me. Eventually, I lived with a family in a beautiful house in the country. It was wonderful living with nice people in a gorgeous house, and they had a nice baby grand. It wasn’t as good as the Steinway, but there was no place to put the Steinway. So, the Steinway ended up going to my sister in Ohio, and I practiced on their Schumann baby grand. It was rebuilt, and nothing special. But I had a serviceable instrument to practice on.

Eventually, I moved out of that house and I didn’t have a piano! I had just graduated, so I didn’t have much money. I found a big old Gulbransen upright, not unlike the old Sohmer upright from years ago. It was a nice piano with a good sound. Although, it was only an upright piano. But it served pretty well. Of course, I needed a grand piano for repetition, trills, not to mention the una corda pedal.

After we got married, my wife and I took all the money that we got as gifts and put that toward a brand new Baldwin Model M 5′ 2″ baby grand.

It was a struggle to make those payments. At that time, the interest rate was 18%! Can you believe that? It took five years to pay it off. In the meantime, I was building up my teaching. When people would call me for lessons, the first question I would ask is, “Do you have a piano?” And most people didn’t have pianos! This was before you could buy a serviceable digital piano for a few hundred bucks. They didn’t exist yet! So, I bought an old upright and had my tuner fix it up. If somebody called me for lessons, I could offer the piano for sale so I could accept the student. Then I was brave and I bought two uprights!

Pretty soon we had 27 pianos in our home!

We didn’t have a huge home, but it was built on a hill with a walkout basement. There was also a big picture window where I put my recording studio. We had a lot of pianos and started getting serious with selling pianos. There was such a need for it, because most people didn’t grow up with pianos and didn’t know how to buy a used piano. So, I made it my business to help people to get pianos. Of course, it also helped my teaching business and the recording studio. Everything was working well.

At a certain point, I got a used Baldwin L.

This Baldwin L was a nice piano. So,I decided to put up my Baldwin M for sale along with the L. Even though the Baldwin M was newer and more refined, the L was longer and had a bigger bass. Instead of a 5′ 2″ like my Baldwin M, it was 6′ 3″. So, I put them both up for sale thinking, “Whichever one sells, I’ll keep the other one.” Famous last words! They both sold almost immediately!

And there I was without a piano!

Can you believe this? At that point I had to find a new piano. I found a Kawai baby grand that became my practice instrument. It was a good little piano. Of course, I still wanted something bigger. That’s when I came across a young woman who was helping her father (a retired piano technician) sell his 6′ 2″ Steinway XR grand. So, that became my piano. I also bought a state-of-the-art Kurzweil K250 for my recording studio . This was a full-fledged synthesizer workstation that not only had all the instruments of the orchestra, it also had a beautiful piano sound with 88 real wooden keys. That was in the control room of my studio.

I outfitted my Steinway grand with MIDI. I became a dealer of this technology. I started helping people around the country who wanted to interface their acoustic pianos with computers. This was way back in the ’80s! I could play the Steinway grand and hear the sounds of the Kurzweil. So I could, for example, layer an orchestra with the piano performance. It was great for the recording studio.

Living in the small town of Bloomington, Indiana was great for a lot of reasons.

You could get on your bike and in 10 minutes, you’re in the country. It was idyllic. But at the same time, a town of 50,000 is a difficult place to make a living as a musician. We had a music store and recording studio downtown called, Music House. My wife was traveling three hours away to play with various orchestras. And even though I had a full-line music store, a recording studio, a lesson program, and a piano rebuilding shop, it was still tough to make ends meet. So, we moved to Los Angeles. I sold my Steinway, but I had a lot of new pianos because we had inventory from the store. The piano I brought to California was a brand new 6′ 1″ Wurlitzer. But soon after moving to California, I found yet another 6′ 3″ Baldwin L grand piano in the used market. I got a great deal on it. So, I sold the Wurlitzer to a church that was looking for a piano. They were very happy with it, and I was very happy with my Baldwin L. I had my technician dial it in, and that was it. I was satisfied with my piano.

My piano tuner, who was a master technician, had been a concert technician for years. He owned a 7 foot Mason & Hamlin BB. This piano was his personal piano, and he had babied it. He put new hammers and dialed it in to perfection. It was a Pre-Aeolian Mason & Hamlin from 1929. He wanted to sell it, and I agreed to help him. So, he put it in my studio. But as soon as I played it, I wanted it!

As great as the 6′ 3″ Baldwin L was, to go to that 7′ range, was a whole new ball game.

I asked my technician to give me a chance to see if I could sell my Baldwin so I could afford to buy his Mason & Hamlin. He gave me that chance, and I managed to do it! Then I had the ultimate piano. It was the nicest piano I’d ever played! I loved it! I thought it would be my piano forever.

I had another Baldwin L that I had for sale. It was in my studio along with my other instruments. A concert pianist from San Diego came to look at it. He had friends who were looking for a piano, and they asked him to check out the Baldwin L for them. So, he came in and he played that piano. Then he sat down at my Mason & Hamlin BB. I let him know that that piano wasn’t for sale. But he played it for a long time before eventually leaving. A few days later he came back. He let me know that his friends were interested in buying the Baldwin, but he had to have the Mason & Hamlin. He made me a generous offer I couldn’t refuse. I knew with the money from the sale of the two grands I could replace that Mason & Hamlin. But the only way to go was bigger! So, I went on a hunt for the ultimate concert grand!

I ended up finding an absolutely out of this world 9′ Baldwin SD-10 concert grand.

This piano had sustain, power, clarity, warmth, everything I could possibly hope for. My piano technician had been a master technician in the concert market in Dallas for years. He tuned and serviced countless concert grands for performances. He said that my piano was among the best two or three pianos he had ever come across in his life. I was set! We moved into a big live-work loft with 19-foot ceilings and started a concert series, Art District Concerts, right in our own home. It was awesome! We could fit 80 people comfortably there. And that piano sounded glorious in that room.

Eventually, we moved out of the loft and our new living room was just normal size. Concert grand pianos are meant for large halls. It was just too loud! It had so much volume that I would practice with this piano completely closed with a felt string cover. I decided to sell the piano because it was just too big for where I was living. The good news was, I had several people interested, including two new concert halls that were looking for pianos, and they both wanted this piano. Of course with concert halls there are committees who make these decisions. And as it went through the boards, we were just waiting to see which one was going to get that spectacular piano.

Both parties had agreed to have me play the dedication concert for my piano.

As luck would have it, one Sunday afternoon, an elderly couple came in from the desert. The man sat down and played one piece on my SD-10 concert grand and wrote me a check for my asking price. That was it, just one piece.

The one piece he played was Chopstix!

So, that’s who ended up with my concert grand, the greatest piano of all time. I’m sure he enjoys it.

Right around the same time, I inherited my father’s 7′ Baldwin SF-10, that magnificent piano that I loved so much as a kid.

I had the piano beautifully restored, and that is my personal piano to this day. This SF-10 is a glorious instrument, one of the finest pianos I’ve ever played. In this whole lineage of pianos, I think I ended up with the right one. I remember as a teenager, when this piano came to our house, how excited we all were and how beautiful the tone was. And it’s still producing such gorgeous music after all these years. You can hear a performance of the Chopin E-flat Nocturne, Opus 9 no. 2 I played on this piano.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this personal story about all my pianos, and thanks so much for joining me. Again, I’m Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource. We’ll see you next time.

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Thanks for joining us here at LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is, “How Can A Piano With A Heavy Action Feel Light?” How can that be possible? Believe it or not, we have discovered this to be true! Sometimes we get a piano in and the action feels comfortable and light, but when the technicians weigh it out it’s really heavy. Typically, you want somewhere between 48 – 60 grams of down weight. Of course the lower notes on a piano are harder to push down than the higher notes. The keys are longer and the hammers have more felt. So, the action doesn’t have the same weight throughout the keyboard. But, generally, a piano should be somewhere in that 48 – 60 gram zone. A piano that has 65 – 70 grams of down weight in the middle register is a heavy piano. We have had some pianos with heavy actions that didn’t feel heavy. The flip side is also true. Sometimes a piano feels heavy and it’s not. You feel like you’re working so hard to push down the keys. How can this be?

It comes down to psychoacoustics.

The amount of energy you have to expend to get sound out makes you feel like a piano action is either heavy or light. For example, let’s say you’re playing a 9 foot concert grand piano with bright voicing and a heavy action in a very small, live room. If you play that piano in that room, you will feel like you barely have to touch the keys to get a big sound. The heavy action will feel light to you. The opposite can also be true. Let’s say you’re playing a small piano in a big room that has carpet, drapes, and soft furniture absorbing all the sound. You’re working so hard to get sound out that it feels heavy to you! So, there’s more to action weight than you might think. I will say this: If your piano action is extremely heavy, you could possibly do hand damage. So, you want to avoid actions that are out of that zone. Secondly, if a piano is really light, let’s say in the low 40s, it’s almost impossible to get very fast repetition because you don’t have any weight to overcome the friction of the action. That’s why there’s a certain zone of normal action weight. Within that range, there’s heavy normal and light normal. Psychoacoustics play a role in that as well.

It’s important to match your piano to your room to have the right playing experience.

There’s nothing worse than having a piano that you have to keep closed because it’s too loud. Or conversely, if you have a small grand piano in a school or a church in a big auditorium everyone’s pounding the heck out of it trying to get the sound out. This will wear out the piano quickly, and the piano will produce an ugly, harsh sound. So it’s very important to consider the acoustics in your room, as well as the weight of the action.

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com. Today’s question is “Why is it So Hard to Sight-Read Ragtime Music?” Ragtime music is so much fun to listen to and it’s fun to play as well. But it’s extraordinarily difficult to sight-read! And you might wonder why. To give you an example as to why it is so difficult to sight-read ragtime music, I’m going to compare it to something that is as far removed from ragtime as you can get, which is Bach.

Baroque era music can be played without your hands jumping around the keyboard.

Even though the music is complex, you don’t need to look at your hands because it’s all right there under your fingers. The hands don’t leap around like they do in ragtime. Music which has octaves alternating with chords in the left hand, which is very typical of ragtime music, is all but impossible to play without looking at your hands. So if you’re reading the score, how do you look at your hands and the score? It can be maddening! There’s a lot of music that falls into that category where you just need to look at your hands to handle the leaps. But here’s the good news: if you go to the trouble of memorizing ragtime, it’s not particularly difficult to play! There’s a certain technique that’s required. It’s the same technique utilized in pieces of Liszt, such as the end of his 6th Hungarian Rhapsody. The left hand goes all over the place!

Leaping back and forth from octaves to chords makes sight-reading nearly impossible.

That’s why ragtime or any music that has fast leaps is extraordinarily difficult to read. Even some relatively simple accompaniments, like some works by Fritz Kreisler. They’re absolutely glorious works and they have very simple piano parts. But the left hand has leaps in several sections making it very hard to read. There are two ways you can approach this. One way is to have the score memorized. The other way is to work on practicing those leaps without looking. I love to be well prepared when I have an accompaniment like that so I can either choose to look down at the hands or follow the score. I like to practice keeping my eyes on the score and get it to the point where I can do it just by feel. Now think about this. There are some sensational blind pianists out there. So, it is possible to be able to sight-read music that has leaps, but it’s extraordinarily difficult.

Thanks so much for joining me. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. See you next time!

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I’m Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. Today I’m going to tell you about the man who could sight-read anything on the piano. Now that seems like a bold claim, so let me back up a bit and give you some perspective on this.

My father, Morton Estrin, would sight read anything, anytime, with anyone. For example, I remember once we were visiting my uncle Harvey Estrin. Harvey was a top-line studio musician in New York City, a woodwind man who played on many film scores, commercials, the ABC orchestra, and much more. His wife, Trudy Kane, was the principal flutist in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. We had a social visit, and Trudy handed my father the score of a piece he’d never even heard before. I believe it was the Reinecke Flute Sonata for flute and piano. Indeed, my father and Trudy played this together, and it was a beautiful performance – right at sight! I was amazed at the cohesiveness of the performance, and that he could sight read with that level of musicianship.

However, there are always limits, aren’t there?

I actually majored in both piano and French horn at the Manhattan School of Music. I played French horn from the time I was in fourth grade. My father was kind enough to accompany me whenever I’d ask him. As a matter of fact, I probably pushed that a little harder than I should have in retrospect, because he was very busy between his performing and teaching, but he was so gracious about it.

If any of you pianists out there have ever accompanied concertos, you probably know that many of them are incredibly awkward. For example, the Strauss Second Horn Concerto has so much going on in the orchestral writing, that if you look at the score, the piano reduction is filled with little notes in the orchestra part that you can’t possibly play on the piano. There aren’t enough fingers in the hands!

Sometimes there are other problems. A good example of this is, the Telemann Horn Concerto. Telemann is credited with composing more music than any other composer who ever lived, so this is a rather obscure work, except maybe to French hornists! My father was kind enough to accompany me on this. In fact, I still have the music to that piece, and in looking at the score, I can see that he wrote in fingering. So, he practiced this piece. The orchestra part has repeated 16th notes in the right hand. Repeated notes on the strings is easy. The bow goes back and forth. On the piano, it’s not so easy. You can see why my father wrote in fingerings for this.

The man who could sight-read anything is the great pianist John Ogdon.

John Ogden won the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition the same year Vladimir Ashkenazy won it. They tied for first place. John Ogdon had an illustrious career. His recordings of the Brahms Concertos, his Liszt recordings (and more) reveal spectacular playing! I was fortunate enough to study with him during my time at Indiana University

It came to our attention, all of us who studied with him at Indiana University, that he could sight-read anything. So, we would come into lessons and put scores in front of him. It seemed like there was nothing he couldn’t read! But, I wondered if maybe he knew the pieces.

One day he invited me to his home and he told me to bring my horn; he’d accompany me.

I couldn’t believe it! I brought a stack of music. And just for fun, I brought that Telemann Concerto with that impossible piano part. What I haven’t told you yet is that as hard as the repeated 16th notes in the right hand are, underneath those were eighth notes in the right hand. So every other note, you’ve got a note underneath it in the tenor line, and that’s just the right hand! My father didn’t even bother trying to play those other notes. And he had practiced to the point of writing in fingerings just to be able to negotiate the repeated notes!

I put the score in front of John Ogdon. He said, “I’ve never seen this.” And I said, “Well, it goes kind of fast.” He sailed into it even faster than I played it and nailed it perfectly. He didn’t leave out any notes! If I hadn’t seen this with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears, I would tell anyone that this is absolutely impossible. But yet, John Ogdon could read anything.

That is my story about John Ogden’s incredible sight-reading ability. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this story – and there’s lots more videos coming your way. Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

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I’m Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. Today’s topic is, “How Long Does a Piano Last?” This is a really fascinating subject, and there’s more to it than you might imagine.

There are many considerations for how long a piano will last.

The quality of the instrument, the environment where the instrument lives, how much the instrument is played, and the how often the piano is serviced, all enter into how long a piano lasts. These are all factors that contribute to the wear and tear of a piano. If I was to throw out a number, I’d say a fine piano can last 50 to 100 years. But could a piano really last that long? It depends. You couldn’t expect to buy a bottom tier Chinese or Indonesian piano, subject it to a harsh climate, play it for hours a day, and for it to last anywhere close to 50 years without major work. But well built and properly maintained pianos can last generations.

We see some older instruments in immaculate condition.

Right now at Living Pianos, the oldest piano we currently have is a Steinway concert grand built in 1875. The piano has been masterfully rebuilt, so it plays like it did when it was young.

You can click on this link to see the piano:
Steinway

The record for the oldest piano we ever had with all original parts was a 1907 Steinway Model O. We had two of our technicians go through this piano inside and out, determining that absolutely everything was original. Nothing was worn. Because it was a Steinway, if it needed new strings or new hammers or anything else, we would have put the work into it. But it was determined that we would just be replacing perfectly good parts.

How can a piano last so long?

If you have a piano here in Southern California and it’s in a stable environment, kept closed, away from sunlight, stable temperature, stable humidity, barely ever played, and tuned on a regular basis, indeed, a piano could be a hundred years old and play like new. Of course, for every piano like that, there are tens of thousands that are long since gone. There is no set amount of time that a piano will last. You have to know the history of the instrument.

How do you find the history of a piano?

Pianos don’t have a paper trail like cars or houses do. You have to do some simple detective work. Just look inside the piano for signs of corrosion around the strings and pins. Look at the hammers to see how much felt is left on them. Wiggle the keys. If they make a clicking sound, that means the felt bushings are worn. So pianos could be worn out. They can also get thrashed from the environment, and they can be neglected. If a piano hasn’t been tuned for 5, 10 or 15 years, it can take its toll when you tune it since it could add thousands of pounds of string tension compromising the structure of the piano.

The year of manufacturer tells you very little about how long that piano is going to last.

If a piano is kept in a harsh environment it will age much faster. If a piano is kept near the beach, it could be rusted out. In a school or restaurant, a piano might be worn out in as little as 10 years from heavy use. And yet, there are pre-World War II pianos in immaculate condition. Certainly with rebuilt pianos, it doesn’t necessarily matter how old they are. If the fundamental structure is good and the rebuilding work was top quality, a rebuilt piano can last as long as a new piano. You may get another 50 to 100 years out of a well rebuilt piano! Your mileage may vary. And that is the message for today.

If any of you are wondering about the condition of your piano we can help you. Write to us at: info@livingpianos.com.

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This is Robert Estrin with LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store with a viewer question. “Why don’t they make pianos like they used to?” So many of the magnificent, American pianos from years ago are just names stenciled on the front of Asian production pianos today. Names you don’t even hear about anymore like AB Chase, Knabe and Chickering were wonderful pianos years ago. There were well over a thousand companies producing pianos in the United States and dozens of companies were making stupendous pianos! You might wonder why they don’t make pianos like they used to.

Have you ever gone downtown and seen a beautiful old car and asked yourself, “Why don’t they make the ‘57 Chevy anymore? It’s such a cool car! I wish they would make Corvettes like they used to!” With cars, it’s pretty obvious. As technologies move on, mileage and safety standards have generally made cars better. But what about pianos?

Have pianos improved?

Not necessarily. However, they do make pianos the way they used to, just in very tiny numbers. Steinway and Mason and Hamlin are both manufacturing a limited number of pianos in the United States very much like they used to. However, Mason & Hamlin is utilizing newer technologies in their actions using synthetic materials in place of traditional wood parts. There are some new rigs and new robotics utilized in manufacturing, but for the most part, American pianos utilize Old World style of wet sand cast plate, hardwood rim, and a tremendous amount of handcrafting. Indeed, many of the great German and other European piano manufacturers from over a hundred years ago are still building pianos like they did centuries ago with the addition of some computer-aided design and manufacturing techniques for more exacting standards of production.

The vast majority of pianos today are made in Asia with a very different methodology from American and European pianos.

You might wonder why. Just look at the difference in the price of a Bechstein or a Steinway compared to a Kawai or a Samick. Asian companies produce pianos that are fully functional and quite good for a fraction of the cost of hand-crafted pianos by utilizing different technologies. Take a company like Pearl River. There aren’t too many companies like them!

Pearl River made over 140,000 pianos last year!

It’s a mind-boggling number. There is no way they could be producing pianos the same way Steinway does. Steinway made a little over a thousand pianos last year. It is just not a scalable manufacturing process.

In order to be able to produce a large number of pianos on a consistent level, it is necessary to be able to utilize newer technologies and newer materials in order to accomplish that. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. If you want that Old World style of piano building, they are available if you’ve got the bucks to pay for them. But, vast amounts of resources have been opened up to people who couldn’t afford those pianos. Some of the modernization and new techniques of making pianos in a way they didn’t have before opens up a whole segment of the market to pianos. In China, where they bought 450,000 new pianos last year, obviously those weren’t mostly hand-built instruments. It would be impossible!

That is why they don’t make pianos the way they used to. It opens up markets at different price points. Yet, those Old World style pianos are still available in very small numbers for very high prices. I hope this has been interesting for you. I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com.

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