Piano and Music Videos

Introduction

Welcome to LivingPianos.com! Today, we’re diving into a crucial subject: the importance of granular practice. This technique is an incredibly productive tool for musicians, and I’ll demonstrate its effectiveness using a simple piece by Schumann and a more complex piece by Liszt. By breaking music down into granular elements, you can save a tremendous amount of practice time.

Starting with Schumann

Let’s begin by exploring the opening bars of Schumann’s “Scenes from Childhood: The Poet Speaks.” This beautiful chorale writing may tempt you to play it through a few times to absorb it. However, as you progress, the difficulty of fully absorbing the music can compound. Breaking it down to its essential elements can make this process much more manageable.

Breaking It Down

The obvious first step is to play hands separately. But you can go even further! By breaking the music down to the granular level, you not only save time but also gain a deeper understanding of the piece.

For instance, learn just the melody first. It’s tuneful and memorable, making it easy to grasp. The alto line, although simple, requires attention to detail. Play and memorize it separately to understand its structure fully.

When you combine the parts, concentrate on both the melody and the alto line. This method also applies to the left-hand parts. By understanding each line independently, you transform chords into individual musical lines, similar to how an orchestra functions.

A More Complex Example: Liszt

Now, let’s move to a more complex example with Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz.” I started learning this piece recently and applied granular practice to memorize it efficiently.

Understanding the Complexity

Consider a challenging section in the piece. The right hand might have a repeating chromatic pattern, while the left hand presents a more intricate structure. For example, you can break down the left hand by playing the lower line first, followed by the chords. This method reveals the simplicity beneath the complexity, making it easier to understand and remember.

Putting It Together

Once you understand each part individually, putting them together becomes straightforward. Naturally, you can do the same thing with the right hand. Don’t just play the complete part, break it down even further by playing individual lines in each hand to fully understand the composition. Analyzing the music beforehand this way helps you learn it faster and more thoroughly. By breaking down music into its most essential elements, you can dramatically increase your practice productivity.

Conclusion

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. Today we’re going to talk about how no piano is above the law. I’m going to give you the Ten Commitments of Living Pianos. This is important information for anyone thinking about getting a piano or already owns one. Let’s start with the fact that some pianos, of course, need new parts. Some of our pianos are completely rebuilt and it takes a year or more to rebuild everything. However, no matter the piano, there are ten things that absolutely must be checked:

Tuning

Number one, we have tuning. This is much more involved than you might think. A brand new or newly rebuilt piano requires many tunings to become stable. All of our pianos here at Living Pianos are tuned multiple times to get them stable. Additionally, after the piano acclimates to your home, we send a high-level piano technician to do another fine tuning to ensure everything plays beautifully for you.

Regulation

Action regulation is even more involved. When you push down a key, dozens of parts must work in perfect harmony and synchronicity. Each key has several adjustments that must be meticulously calibrated for optimal performance and evenness throughout the entire piano. This is an arduous task that combines both art and science.

Voicing

Voicing refers to the sound of each note, not the mechanics. Every hammer must be precisely shaped, and its contact with the strings must be exact. The hardness of each hammer also affects the tone, ensuring a beautiful, rich sound that is not too bright or too mellow. Evenness from note to note is crucial, and we spend a considerable amount of time achieving this.

Damper Regulation

You want to get a clean release of chords where all notes end simultaneously without buzzing or noise. This requires damper regulation. Dampers on most keys of the piano need meticulous adjustment to function correctly.

Sustain PedalMiddle Pedal

The middle pedal, or sostenuto pedal, although rarely used, must be functional. It’s crucial for some 20th-century music, and we ensure it works as well as the other pedals.

Soft Pedal Voicing

The soft pedal, or una corda pedal, changes the color of the sound. It must be adjusted to shift the action the right amount. When you push the pedal, the keys move to the right and left, so the hammers strike the strings from a different part. This part of the hammer must be voiced differently to achieve the desired tonal shift.

Inside Cleaning

Pianos collect dirt and dust, especially if not completely rebuilt. Professional cleaning is necessary, including underneath the strings and soundboard. Light corrosion on strings must be cleaned, as any gunk inhibits free vibration of the sound.

Furniture Touch-Up

The piano’s finish needs to look beautiful. Many of our pianos are refinished to look new. Often, a finish just needs refreshing, or minor blemishes need touch-up to maintain the piano’s aesthetic appeal.

Brass Polishing

The brass needs to be polished, and in the case of silver pianos, sometimes re-plated. This ensures that the piano looks as beautiful as it sounds and plays.

These are the Ten Commitments you get from Living Pianos with all our pianos. Use this checklist for any piano you’re considering. These are vital parts of your piano, and at Living Pianos, we rebuild and replace any parts to a high standard to ensure beautiful performance.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to talk about sound design. I know many of you are pianists, but this is definitely worth your while. I’m going to show you something you’re already familiar with, but you may not realize the depth with which this type of music or sound is so involved in your lives all the time.

Historical Background

Instruments have been around for hundreds of years, with the symphony orchestra culminating in the late 19th century. So, what else could be possible? In the 1940s, a French man named Pierre Schaeffer came up with musique concrète. He used turntables, which is interesting because disc jockeys use turntables to create whole new soundscapes today! Schaeffer took sounds, manipulated them, and used tape recorders to gather sounds and mold them into compositions.

This was the infancy of what we’re discussing today. Music synthesizers entered into the equation soon after. In the late 1950s, RCA had their music synthesizer. I remember growing up, my father had a record of the RCA music synthesizer. You can probably find it on YouTube with all kinds of squeaks and weird sounds. At the end of it, they attempted to create a little jazz combo, and I was very taken with it as a kid.

It was Robert Moog’s synthesizer in the 1960s that really caught attention. Wendy Carlos’s famous album, Switched on Bach, took the works of Bach and orchestrated them using the Moog synthesizer. The Moog synthesizer was monophonic, playing one only note at a time. Carlos painstakingly recorded at half speed to get everything perfect, overdubbing all the parts to create different timbres, and brought Bach’s works to life in a new way.

Sound Design in Film

Sound design is most prevalent as a backdrop for video and film. Going back to the infancy of music for film, silent films used ragtime-type music to follow the action. Improvised music for silent films is a lost art, but a few people like Michael Mortilla in Los Angeles has kept it alive. https://www.midilifecrisis.com/

As time went on, film music started to become almost like sound design, even with traditional instruments. For example, Bernard Herrmann, a fantastic film composer, created music for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. There’s a particularly terrifying scene where the music doesn’t sound like music but is incredibly effective. High-piercing strings create tension in a way that symphonic scores hadn’t been used before.

The Impact of Sound Design

John Williams’s scores, like Jaws, use simple musical motifs to create tension. The two-note motif in Jaws is a perfect example of how minimalistic sound design can be highly effective.

Sound design can subtly shift moods, creating emotions without the audience even realizing it. It’s an art form that can stand alone as music because of the emotion it conveys.

Conclusion

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I am giving a tutorial on how to play Burgmüller’s The Limpid Stream. I have a bunch of Burgmüller tutorials for you. This is another beautiful piece. What’s great about these pieces of Burgmüller is that they’re accessible even if you don’t have a virtuoso technique. They are wonderful pieces of music, each with its own unique voice, and this is no exception. What I’m going to do for you first is play the piece. Then I will go through it thoroughly, showing you how to practice all sections of it and how to get the most out of this wonderful piece of music.

First of all, let’s talk about the name The Limpid Stream.

It sounds kind of odd. It’s actually from the French Le Courant Limpide. If you translated that directly, it would be The Clear Current. That still doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. But you could hear that it sounds like a babbling brook, which I think would be a better name for this translation! The Limpid Stream sounds kind of odd in English, doesn’t it? But getting back to the music, essentially this entire piece is broken chords of one sort or another, so naturally, learning it in chords first is critical for being able to understand the harmonies and to develop good fingering. So I’m going to show you how to do the two different sections in chords. It’s in A-B-A form. You have the first section, the second section, then a da capo back to the beginning section.

What I recommend doing is learning it in very small chunks.

If I were learning this, believe it or not, I would just take one measure at a time! That doesn’t sound like much. It’s basically three different chords. You start and end on the G-major chord in the first inversion. The left hand is even simpler. Then you play the hands together in chords. I don’t play the second chord because it’s the same as the first chord. Instead, I just hold it for two beats. After you play it in chords, then you play it as written.

Notice the double-stemmed notes in the right hand.

What is this all about? It’s basically as if you have two different instruments playing. Imagine for a minute that the top triplets are played on a guitar strumming, and the bottom part is played with a viola or something else. On the piano, of course, you can play more than two parts at a time. Even with one hand, there are two parts. So you must hold down that quarter note longer than the value of the eighth so they overlap. Naturally, you have to lift it up so it can replay again. Once you add the pedal, it’s much easier because the pedal can catch these notes. But it’s essential that you practice holding those notes long enough so that the pedal has an opportunity to grab those notes. Because if you just played it as eighths and tried to grab it with the pedal, you might not be able to get the pedal in time. But by holding it long enough, there’s plenty of time to catch those notes with the pedal. You want to pedal half measures. For the second measure, since it’s all just a broken G-major chord, you can just hold the pedal for the whole measure if you want. But doing half-measure pedaling throughout the entire first section works just beautifully.

It’s important to take note of the dynamics.

It’s easy to remember. As the notes get higher, they tend to get louder. As the notes get lower, they tend to get softer. Until the end of the entire section, which ends gently as it’s going up the G-major arpeggio. So the middle section can also be practiced in chords. This is really a great way to learn this section. You will develop good fingering and an understanding of the harmonic underpinnings of the music by practicing in chords first. Once again, I recommend taking very small sections at a time and to play slowly. Even if you’re learning two measures at a time, you may find it helpful to break it down to one measure. Just do that first measure until you get it memorized, then do the second measure until you have it memorized. Then put the two measures together, once again, practicing in chords first.

The right hand is all a series of two-note slurs.

You don’t want it to sound mechanical. The two-note slurs are accomplished with a wrist motion going down on the slur and up on the second note, essentially making the second note of the slur staccato. Why is this? Slurs mean to connect, and staccatos mean to detach. Because the slur ends on the second note, it is de facto detached, which is staccato. To make matters even clearer, Burgmüller puts in eighth rests, so you absolutely must release the second eighth of each group. What better way than with the wrist? I’ve talked about how the wrist plays staccatos with a down-up motion, so it delineates the phrasing. It also helps you avoid accenting the thumb. The thumb is the strongest finger, but here it’s playing on the weakest part of the beat. You can practice this very slowly using a down-up motion with the wrist. The arm doesn’t move up and down, only the wrist. Strike from above to make the slurred note stronger than the staccato note at the end of the slur. Then, finally, when you have the right hand worked out that way, you put the hands together.

The left hand also has slurs. You must delineate the slurs by not connecting what is not slurred.

That is the way to learn this second section. First, learn it in chords. Just learn the right hand, the two-note groups, and get that memorized. Even if it’s one measure, take the smallest amount you need in order to learn it in a reasonable amount of time. If it takes you more than five minutes to learn something, then take a smaller section because you want to be able to digest things quickly and easily. The smaller the section, the easier it is to master it. If you’re learning it from the music, same thing. Take small sections. Even if you aren’t memorizing the music, the small sections give you an opportunity to really study the score and make sure you’re learning accurately right from the get-go. And that is basically the secret to this section.

At the very end, you may need to practice that scale passage slowly with the metronome ticking to quarter notes.

Take a tempo slow enough that you can play it, and be sure to practice that with a decrescendo back to the original theme. It’s not written, but it’s logical. Descending lines tend to get softer, just like when you’re singing, you naturally get louder with the higher notes and softer as you descend in pitch. You want to get that same sound out of the piano, so it gives it an organic quality, like singing, or a wind instrument, or a bowed instrument. You want to achieve a flowing line. Once you can play it at that tempo, then raise it a notch. Keep raising the tempo by one notch every time you not only get it perfectly, but it feels comfortable. It may take you a little while. But if you spend just five minutes, you will get the scale passage up to a faster speed. Keep going to the point of diminishing returns. You might not be able to get it up to performance tempo in one sitting. Don’t worry about it. There’s always tomorrow! Always take your practice to the point of diminishing returns. Don’t beat your head on something that you’re not making any progress with. Always consider taking smaller amounts and playing hands separately.

Try to break things down into smaller elements that you can absorb so that every minute of your practice is productive.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question is: What Are Living Pianos? It sounds like a science fiction story, doesn’t it? Artificial intelligence enables sentient instruments to compose, perform, and even teach music autonomously. Or maybe it’s pianos that are bioengineered to grow and evolve along with the player! There are all kinds of possibilities. But it’s actually something much more terrifying than that. That’s why Living Pianos is committed to bringing new life to old pianos!

Did you know that many pianos end up in landfills?

In Minnesota alone, hundreds of pianos end up in landfills every year. As you’re watching this video, pianos are being thrown in landfills all over the country. It’s a horrifying thing to contemplate. You might wonder why this happens. Well, there’s a huge price gap between hand-built American pianos, which are mostly the ones that end up in landfills here, and Asian production pianos. So when pianos wear out, people will replace them with far cheaper Asian production pianos or even digital pianos.

That’s why Living Pianos specializes in the sale of restored, hand-built pianos, which are so rare today.

There are other companies that do this, but most of them specialize in Steinway because Steinway commands more money in the used market. But we’re not prejudiced against other brands. There used to be hundreds of American piano companies, and there were several dozen that made absolutely stupendous pianos! Of course, Mason & Hamlin pianos are still built outside of Boston. Baldwin was the last casualty of the American piano industry. There are now Asian production pianos with the Baldwin name on the front. But the Artist-Series Baldwins that graced concert halls all around the world are a thing of the past.

We not only restore Steinway, Baldwin, and Mason & Hamlin pianos but also other great American pianos like Knabe, Chickering, Sohmer, and others. You can end up with a piano that has tremendous value instead of having them end up in a landfill. European pianos like Bechstein and Blüthner are also great candidates for restoration. Of course, they’re quite rare in this country.

Knowing which pianos to restore and which ones to stay away from is critical.

You can’t always get good results out of older pianos. One of the really difficult things is restoring pianos that have had some restoration along the way. If you have everything original, even if everything is worn out and in bad condition, at least you know the original specifications. It’s a huge challenge to match the original specs of pianos that have had work done, particularly if the work was subpar. Even with Steinway, you might think you could just order Steinway parts. But it’s not so simple. Steinway has changed their specifications over the years. You have to know exactly what the specification is for each of the almost 10,000 parts of a piano to restore them properly!

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question is: How can you afford a Steinway? If you’ve seen some of my previous videos, you know that a new baby grand Steinway costs over $80,000. So you might think it’s just insurmountable to be able to buy a Steinway. Well, I’ve got some good news for you, as well as some tips on how you can get a great piano without necessarily breaking the bank.

Be aware that there are other great pianos in the world.

Steinway owns the concert market, with over 97% of concert pianists playing Steinway because it is the de facto piano that’s available worldwide in concert halls. So most touring artists play Steinways, unless they can travel with their own pianos. But there are many other great piano brands, such as Bechstein, Bösendorfer, Blüthner, Fazioli, Mason & Hamlin and quite a few others. So, there are many other great pianos you might want to consider. While many of these pianos cost as much as Steinway, or even more, dealers will sometimes discount some of these other brands. Steinway holds their price much firmer because they can. There are only a limited number of them in the world, and they’re highly sought after.

The used market is a gold mine if you can find the right instrument.

Years ago, there were hundreds of American piano companies. Many of them made great pianos, and you can get them for a fraction of what they’re worth. For example, Baldwin was in the concert market, and Baldwins cost as much as Steinways when they were new. But in the used market, you can get a great Baldwin for far less than a Steinway and have a great piano. But let’s get back to Steinway.

You have your heart set on Steinway, and only Steinway will do. How can you possibly afford one?

Once again, the used market is your best option, but you have to be very careful. In fact, Steinway doesn’t even let many people put the Steinway name on the front of rebuilt or refinished pianos. Make sure you find someone who actually plays so they know what the piano feels like, what it sounds like, and if it’s really going to be a Steinway-quality piano. Just having the name on the front isn’t enough.

Another important thing is when you buy a piano.

There are certain times when the prices are just lower. For example, at Living Pianos, on Memorial Day, we drop our prices. Some of our pianos are less than half the usual sale prices, which are already a fraction of the cost of new pianos. We do this to clear out inventory and go on a buying spree in the summer. So you can sometimes get phenomenal deals on Steinways and other pianos if you buy at the right time.