Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’ll be examining the pros and cons of digital pianos vs. acoustic pianos. You might think that my opinion would automatically be in favor of acoustic pianos, and I kind of feel that way. However, it’s not a matter of which is better, but which is appropriate for the task.
In some situations, a good digital piano is a great choice.
I have a hybrid instrument that I am developing. With this instrument it’s possible to interface with music software. With a piano, you can put MIDI sensors under the keys that can do some of that. But obviously there are benefits to digital pianos: having different piano sounds, orchestrations, or being able to play with headphones. There are many benefits to technology. Digital pianos don’t require the same maintenance, and they are much more easily moved. Taking even an upright piano to gigs isn’t feasible. Having a good digital piano, one you can put under your arm, is a godsend. So it’s not that one is necessarily better than the other.
What if you have a limited budget for a piano and none of the benefits of a digital piano are particularly important to you?
In that case, should you just automatically get an acoustic piano? Even then, not necessarily. Because if you have a limited amount of money to spend on a piano, for way under $3,000 you can get some seriously good digital pianos. Looking at acoustic pianos in the $3,000 price range, your options are severely limited. You will likely be limited to short uprights with slower actions than grand pianos, and they will have an anemic sound in the bass. You’re not going to get much of an acoustic piano at that price point. If you are looking for something closer to $1,000, good luck finding any kind of acoustic piano in the used market that doesn’t require a lot of work. Additionally, you’re going to have to spend hundreds of dollars just to get it moved into your home and tuned. At that price point, a digital piano could be a better choice for you.
It all comes down to your personal preferences and situation.
While I love playing my grand piano, I also love technology and what it affords. There are many benefits to each of these. You have to find what works for you and what’s important to you. How you’re using the instrument, where you’re playing it, and what your goals are are all important things to consider. If you want to have a concert grand bass in an instrument that’s the size of an upright, you’re not going to be able to achieve that with an acoustic piano. There is a lot to consider with finding the right instrument for yourself. I hope this has been helpful for you. If any of you have questions about this, you’re welcome to contact me anytime. This is my passion and I’m happy to share it with you!
Please consider joining the Living Pianos Patreon to help support us and get access to extra Living Pianos content!
Today I'll be examining the pros and cons of digital pianos vs. acoustic pianos. You might think that my opinion would automatically be in favor of acoustic pianos, and I kind of feel that way. However, it's not a matter of which is better, but which
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question is about what makes a pianist’s sound unique. This is a really tough question to answer, but I’m going to do my best!
My wife is a flutist. When she was very young, she studied with some great concert flutists. At one point she heard her teacher play her cheap student level flute. Sure enough, it no longer sounded like a cheap flute. It sounded like this great flutist! With wind instruments, it’s obvious. And it’s most obvious with singers. As soon as you hear a voice, you know who it is.
If you hear Frank Sinatra, there’s no doubt about who you’re listening to.
With piano, it’s much further removed from singing, certainly. It isn’t even like the distinctive sounds of wind and string players. But indeed, there are unique sounds different pianists produce. I grew up idolizing Horowitz and Rubinstein. The whole methodology of their pianistic approach was so drastically different from one another. So, this enters into it. Certainly, physiology has something to do with the sound of the piano as well. A massive man might have a bigger sound compared to a very slight man or woman. But not always. It goes much deeper. How you hear things will affect the way you approach the keyboard, and results in very different sound production.
What are some of those differences? Well, I was trained from a very young age by my father, Morton Estrin, to have the weight of the arms supported by the fingers instead of having limp fingers floating in midair and letting the fingers push down. Now, in very fast passages that’s exactly what you want to do, because you can’t support much weight when you’re going very quickly. But in a slow melody, you certainly want to have a sense of line. And the best way to get that is to use the weight of the arm. Using this method you can produce a fluid line on the piano like a singer. Playing just with the fingers, without supporting with the weight of the arm, results in a less fluid performance. Naturally, how the pedal comes into play also affects the tone tremendously.
There are some pianists who produce such unique sounds that you know who they are instantly!
I find this amazing. With the human voice, you’ve got the whole inside of the body and the vocal cords and the intonation of speech. On a wind instrument, you have the lips and you also have the throat and the vibrations within the chest cavity. There is so much more to identify sound. What do you have with the piano? The tone is produced by hammers hitting strings. How the heck do you achieve a distinct sound? Well, just like I have revealed previously, growing up I had very small, weak fingers, and yet I grew up hearing my father and some of his spectacular students. I always would strive to get that big beautiful sound. In fact, I contorted my body trying to make my spaghetti fingers produce anything close to the sound I heard from my father. But I made it happen in slow music particularly. Fast pieces were a little bit tougher for me having weak fingers, and I didn’t practice a great deal as a young child. But on slow music though, even from the youngest age, I was able to produce the sounds that I heard just from making it happen.
The sound of a pianist comes down to what they hear in their head and achieving that sound.
So that’s the lesson for today. It’s all about the connection of the hands to the ears. And that’s what you want to strive for in your playing so you can express your voice on the piano. I’d love to hear from any of you who have ideas about how to produce a beautiful sound on the piano! There’s a lot more to this subject, and I may produce a whole series about this on my Patreon channel. Thanks to all of you who have subscribed! I’ll see you next time. Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource. Thanks again for joining me.
I'm Robert Estrin. Today's question is about what makes a pianist's sound unique. This is a really tough question to answer, but I'm going to do my best!
So, what is the 80/20 rule? You may have heard this before. The 80/20 rule is, for example, in the piano, how spending 80% of your time on 20% of the score will benefit your practice. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the 80/20 rule doesn’t apply to the piano exactly. Because I would say it’s more like 90/10!
Really, you’ll learn a piece of music and then spend 90% of your time on 10% of the piece.
There’s just a very small amount that really requires almost all of your time and effort. Of course there is great temptation to always go back to the beginning and play the parts you know, because it’s fun and you want to work on those parts to make them better and better. There’s no end to how well you can play something.
But really laser focusing on the small sections, sometimes spending 98% of your practice time on 2% of the music is necessary. Other days you can have a more fluid type of practice where you’re covering more substantial parts of your piece. Particularly when you’re getting ready for performance, you want to be able to get the sense of playing complete pieces, playing half a program, then playing the whole program is how to prepare for a concert. But certainly in the formative parts of learning music, you want to focus your attention on the parts that need refinement to be productive. I see so many people who spend hours and hours at the piano and don’t seem to accomplish what they are after and this is one way to increase your productivity tremendously. So, in your practice, don’t just keep going through the things you can already play well, even though you can always refine further.
Put your attention where it’s needed early on.
You may feel like you’ll never get through the piece if you spend so much time on a small section. Maybe it’s a four or eight measure phrase, and you’re thinking, my gosh, if I spend an hour or an hour and a half on this, I’m never going to get through the piece! Here’s the epiphany you will have. Spend that time on the front end on some of those hard sections and you will be rewarded because you’ll find that almost all pieces of music have repeats of different themes and technical challenges. And by delving into those sections head-on, you’re going to be able to accomplish so much more as you go further with the learning of the piece.
So yes, the 80/20 rule applies and maybe even it’s even more extreme than that. I’d love to hear from all of you how you feel this applies to your practice and keep the questions coming in. I’m so pleased to have so many subscribers! If you haven’t subscribed yet, you’re welcome to! There’s even more content on my Patreon page. Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPIanos.com , Your Online Piano Resource. Thanks again for joining me.
Hi, I’m Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com. Thanks so much for joining me. The question today is how the 80/20 rule applies to the piano. How it applies may surprise you! So, what is the 80/20 rule? You may have heard this before. The 80/20 ru
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is. about focusing on corrections instead of your mistakes. This may seem counterintuitive. Don’t you have to find your mistakes in order to find the corrections? It’s true that you need to find where your problems are. But beyond that, you don’t want to hunt for what you did wrong. I know a lot of students desperately want to find their mistakes. What’s worse is when they not only want to find the mistakes, but they want to replay them to see exactly what they did wrong. This reinforces the mistakes! You want to learn and cement the corrections right from the get go. This might seem like an arbitrary distinction. But think about when you play a concert, you obviously want to put on a good performance. You want to have the performance securely memorized. You don’t want to go out there thinking, “I hope I remember everything. Am I going to remember the third movement?” If you start thinking that way, it’s a downward spiral, because whatever you think about tends to manifest itself.
Visualization can be extremely valuable in a concert situation.
Conceptualize and see things the way you want them to be in your performance. Imagine yourself on stage in front of an audience. Imagine your performance going well and you’re much more likely for that to happen. But, if in preparation for your concert you’re thinking about the mistakes you might make, it can be crippling. Those thoughts keep percolating in the back of your mind. Then when you get out on stage, it’s going to undermine your performance. It’s the same thing with searching for your mistakes. You don’t want to concentrate on your mistakes. You want to concentrate on the corrections! And that is what is going to assure a good performance for you.
So instead of asking, “What did I do wrong there?” Find out, “What do I need to do right there?”
This is an important distinction that will help the productivity of your practice tremendously. And it’s a lesson for life as well. Remember, you believe what you tell yourself. This is an important fact. So take this to heart, in everything you do and everything you think, because it has a profound effect upon what happens to you in life, and in your music.
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is. about focusing on corrections instead of your mistakes. This may seem counterintuitive. Don’t you have to find your mistakes in order to find the corrections? It
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how important it is to double check your work when practicing the piano. If you’ve ever seen any of my videos on how I practice, you know I break things down to the smallest parts. I take small sections and study the notes carefully, just in the right hand. I figure out the rhythm. Then I count to make sure everything is secure and figure out the best fingering. Then I study all the other details, the expression, the slurs, the staccatos. I look back and forth dozens of times until I have it securely memorized. Then I do the same long process just with this tiny phrase on the left-hand part until that is secure, going back and forth, double and triple checking. Finally I play both hands together. That’s the hardest part! Naturally, there’s a lot of back and forth in that process making sure it’s right. Then I go on phrase by phrase until I have the whole piece memorized connecting phrase by phrase as I go. After all of that, I go back and study the score agan! I take my foot off the pedal and play through really slowly to double-check my work. And yet, with all of this, I still discover things I didn’t catch in the score!
I recommend going back and forth a great deal, particularly in the formative phase of learning a piece.
As I’ve said so many times before, unlearning is much harder than learning. So you must constantly reference the score at every stage of your practice. Even when you think you have a piece beautifully memorized on performance level, go back to the music and play excruciatingly slowly. I bet you will find things you didn’t know were there. After all, there are tens of thousands of details in even a short piece of music. When you consider notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing, and expression, it’s mind boggling that we can learn music at all! That’s why I recommend the method that I just described.
Try it for yourself!
So, any of you who have pieces really solid, go through your score as I just mentioned. Go slowly, using no pedal, reading every detail, and see what you discover in the process. I think it will be richly rewarding. Better than that, be sure to double, triple, quadruple check your work as you learn so you don’t have to unlearn things later. It will save you vast amounts of time in the long run.
I hope this is helpful for you! If you enjoy exploring pianos and piano playing, joining my Patreon family www.patreon.com/robertestrin. It will offer you even more videos and the opportunity to be part of the creative process.
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how important it is to double check your work when practicing the piano. If you’ve ever seen any of my videos on how I practice, you know I break things down t
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we have a piano quiz! You can take this quiz below. It should be a lot of fun! It’s not very long or very difficult. There are just five questions. I’m going to ask all five questions, then go back and give you the answers. You can see how well you’ve done on this. Also, you can email me and let me know any thoughts you have about these questions.
The first three questions are true or false.
1. If you buy a new Steinway piano, it will go up in value. True or false?
2. Concert pianists practice scales and exercises for many hours every day. True or false?
3. If you see the Yamaha name on a piano, you can be assured that it is a good quality mid-range instrument. True or false?
The next two questions are multiple choice.
4. Why are there repeat signs in music? A.) They provide performers with flexibility of timing for programming.
B.) It saves paper!
C.) They help composers increase their output without having to do extra work.
5. Ideally, how often should your piano be tuned? A.) Twice a year is perfect because of seasonal changes.
B.) Having your piano tuned once a month keeps it in tune best.
C.) Your piano should be tuned constantly, every time you play it.
Here are the Answers!
Now we’re going to go back and see how well you did on these questions. Here is the first question, once again:
1. If you buy a new Steinway piano, it will go up in value. True or false? This is a really tough question. If I just had a choice of true or false, I would say true. Now, you might wonder, how can this be? Let’s think about this. My grandfather bought my father a brand new Steinway baby grand in 1939. He paid $900 for it. That same model Steinway now sells for around $80,000. So yes, if you keep it long enough, it’s going to go up in value. But one thing to consider is inflation. Of course, condition is of paramount importance. I rebuilt that particular Steinway of my father’s, so it’s worth quite a bit. But if a Steinway is completely thrashed over the years, if it’s been subjected to the elements, it can have very little value. So, it’s really kind of true or false, depending on the conditions.
Here’s how it can be false.If you buy a brand new Steinway piano, and then just a few years later you want to sell it, you’re going to take a loss because it takes a long time for the yearly increases in the list prices and the sale prices of Steinway pianos to overcome the new versus used value. Like when driving a car off the dealer parking lot, you know that it’s going to lose a tremendous amount of value immediately. The same is true with pianos. But if you keep the piano long enough, the new ones keep going up, so you could be in pretty good shape, provided you take good care of it.
2. Concert pianists practice scales and exercises for many hours every day. True or false? A lot of you are going to be really surprised about this one. The answer is false. You might think concert pianists practice scales, arpeggios and exercises relentlessly. At some point in every concert pianist’s life, they have spent countless hours working on scales, arpeggios, octave exercises, thirds, trills and other technical studies. This goes on for years. But with touring concert pianists, they are so busy learning repertoire. They get such precious little time to practice. So when they’re practicing, they’re going through their programs, their concertos, their chamber music. Sure, they’re going to spend some time with scales, arpeggios and exercises, but the vast amount of the time they spend is rehearsing and practicing for upcoming performances. They don’t have vast amounts of time to practice exercises and scales every day.
3. If you see the Yamaha name on a piano, you can be assured that it is a good quality mid-range instrument. True or false? This is false. Yamaha is a very large music company. In fact, they’re the largest music company in the world! They have pianos on every conceivable level. Most Yamaha pianos you find out there are good mid-range pianos like the U series uprights and CX series grands. They’re good quality pianos for the money with a sweet spot of price and performance, so they’re very popular. But there are also Indonesian-made Yamahas that are entry-level, promotional-level, bare bones instruments. They are well made, of course, but they are far from what I would call fine instruments. On the other end of the spectrum, there are SX and CF series of Yamaha pianos that can be more expensive than Steinways. These instruments are meticulously crafted to the highest possible standards. So, the name Yamaha doesn’t tell you much about the level of piano you’re looking at.
4. Why are there repeat signs in music? Believe it or not, the answer is B.) It saves paper! Now, you might wonder if that’s serious. It is. Here’s the thing about repeat signs. Sometimes you’ll have one edition of a piece with repeats and you’ll have another edition of the same piece with the repeated music printed out in the score. If you saw the repeat notated, you wouldn’t think of leaving it out. But with repeat signs, somehow people get the feeling they are optional. Repeats are an intrinsic part of the composition and composers do it not only to save paper. Think about composers back when they had to write with duck quills. That was no easy task. Anything to save time was a godsend for them. I’m a firm believer in taking repeats. If you find a piece of music where the repeats don’t make sense and it seems too long, consider that maybe your tempo is too slow. The repeats are put in there for good reasons and they make the structure of the piece gel.
5. Ideally, how often should your piano be tuned? I consider twice a year to be the minimum. My father always had his pianos tuned once a month, and yet, by the end of the month they were out of tune. Believe it or not, the answer is C.) Your piano should be tuned constantly every time you play it!
Think about going to a concert featuring a guitar player. Between each song they tune the guitar because it’s going out of tune little by little. Well, so is your piano! It’s just not practical to tune it constantly. At my father’s recording sessions, as well as many other pianists’ recording sessions, the tuner is there. When they hear any notes going out of tune, which can happen at any time, there will be a break in the session, and the tuner will touch-up the few unisons that are out of tune. In a perfect world your piano would be tuned every day! That might be a surprise to some of you, But in recital halls at music conservatories, it’s not unusual for pianos to be tuned daily.
How well did you do? Do any of you have different ideas about these subjects? I know a lot of these questions are subjective in how you answer them. I hope this has been enjoyable for you!
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we have a piano quiz! You can take this quiz below. It should be a lot of fun! It’s not very long or very difficult. There are just five questions. I’m going to ask all five ques
