Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. The subject today is about why a piano should be on an inside wall. You’ve probably heard before that you must put a piano on an inside wall. There is some truth there. Why should that be important?
Pianos are incredibly delicate instruments.
Pianos are robust in some respects. But the wood of the piano, particularly the soundboard, is susceptible to very small changes in the atmosphere in regards to temperature and humidity. This is particularly true with an upright. If you have an upright against a wall and the wall has any drafts at all, then the piano will not hold its tuning as well. Worse yet, if there’s a heating vent or something blowing in the back of the piano, it could destroy the soundboard. So in some homes, it’s really important to avoid an outside wall with your piano.
Modern homes are very well insulated.
You can judge for yourself. Is it a place you would be comfortable sitting day in and day out? If so, your piano should be fine. But if it’s a place that’s drafty or cold or the sun is beating on you, this could be a bad place for your piano. So it’s really just common sense. In a well insulated home, an outside wall shouldn’t present a problem, so long as the sun isn’t beating on your piano and you don’t have a hot air vent or a radiator nearby. But for older, drafty homes, it’s really essential to use an inside wall for your piano.
There’s another thing to consider, which is disturbing neighbors.
If you’re in an apartment, you don’t want your piano on an adjacent wall with another apartment. This is particularly true with an upright. It’s going to throw the sound right into your neighbor’s room. So you could have trouble. There’s a lot to be considered here. I hope this is helpful for you! 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
Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. The subject today is about why a piano should be on an inside wall. You’ve probably heard before that you must put a piano on an inside wall. There is some truth there. Why should that be im
Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. Today’s subject is about how to identify notes on the piano. You have 88 keys on the piano. What are they? I’m sure many of you already know the answer to that question. But for those of you who don’t know what the keys are on the piano, I will explain. We get a lot of pianos here at Living Pianos. Sometimes somebody has carefully put little letters on every one of the keys across the keyboard. Is that necessary? No, it’s not necessary! So, how can you figure out all these notes?
Why do pianos have black and white keys?
I have a video on that subject which you can watch here. The simple answer is, if they were all white keys, you wouldn’t be able to find any of the notes. You would have no reference. If you look at the way the piano keyboard is oriented with groups of two and three black keys, it’s a repeating pattern. Now, here’s how to find the notes on the piano. You have groups of two black keys and groups of three black keys. Any group of two, if you go to the white key just to the left, that is C. Now, what is so significant about that? Well, from there, you can go up the alphabet on the white keys. C, D, E, F G. Then it continues with the first letter of the alphabet. A, B, C. The octave higher C is also below two black keys. So now you can find all the keys on the piano. Any time you have two black keys, the note to the left is a C. The highest note on the keyboard is also a C.
What about the black keys?
The black keys are designated by either sharps or flats. But white keys can also be sharps or flats. Any two keys that are next to each other, black or white, are all called half steps. Two keys together with no keys between are a half step apart. There are white keys that are a half step apart. So what’s the significance of this?
A sharp raises a note a half step.
If you have a C sharp, it raises it a half step to the black key to the right of C. If you have D sharp, it would go up a half step as well to the black key to the right of D. You can even have an E sharp. It would be the same key as F on the piano because a sharp raises a note by a half step, and the next key on the piano is a white key.
There are also flats which lower notes by a half step.
It’s the same principle. So if you have a C flat, it’s the same key as B on the piano. But it would be indicated in your score as C flat. A B flat would be a half step lower than B, etc. So that is the way black keys are designated on the piano. You may wonder why white keys would sometimes be indicated with flats or sharps. Scales are written diatonically with all the letters in order without skipping or repeating any. On the staff they appear on consecutive lines and spaces. They are actually easier to read that way, believe it or not!
I hope this is helpful for you! Now you know all the notes on the piano. You can figure all 88 out just from that brief tutorial. 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
Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. Today’s subject is about how to identify notes on the piano. You have 88 keys on the piano. What are they? I’m sure many of you already know the answer to that question. But for those
Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. I’m here with an incredible practicing tip that will turbocharge the work you do at the piano: Assembly line practicing. What is this all about? I’m going to tell you all about it and how it relates to your piano playing. Early in the 20th century, Henry Ford revolutionized automobile manufacturing by making the assembly line.
The assembly line lets people work on all stages of development simultaneously.
Another great example of this is the post-World War II housing boom. I grew up on Long Island adjacent to Levittown, where potato fields were transformed into whole neighborhoods seemingly in an instant. How was this done? Previously, houses were built from the beginning to the end. Then when the houses were finished, the builders would move on to the next house. Well, there’s a much more efficient way. If you’ve ever been to a neighborhood being built, you see tractors digging dirt. You go a little further and see foundations being laid. Further still you see frames of houses being assembled. Then the electrical and plumbing are being put in. When you get to the very end of the neighborhood, there’s the model home. All the work is being done on all these multiple stages of development simultaneously. It’s an incredibly productive way of building neighborhoods.
How does this relate to your piano practice?
If you have watched my videos, you are probably aware of the way I practice, and the way I teach my students to practice. Rather than practicing a whole piece and eventually trying to memorize it, you flip it. Read through the piece a couple of times, then get right down to work and start memorizing a little chunk at a time. However, this type of practice is incredibly mentally challenging. Everyone thinks that it’s hard just for them, but it’s hard for everyone if you’re doing it right! Let’s say you’re learning a new piece. You learn as much as you can and it’s enough for the day. The next day you can refine what you’ve done the previous day. But you also forge forward.
Eventually you have music at many different stages of development.
The first section is at performance level, like that model home or the finished car coming off the assembly line. Later on, maybe after the double bar in the development section of a sonata movement, it needs further polishing. So you work to refine that. You’re trying to refine what you learned the day before and solidify your memory. Yet you are always memorizing new material to add to the pipeline for the next day.
Your practice becomes exponentially more productive.
You can’t just memorize for an entire practice session. There’s a point of diminishing returns of your effectiveness. There’s only so much you can absorb at one time. So you memorize what you can. Then you refine what you did the previous day and the days before that. The first sections of a piece may be at performance level, especially a multi movement work. You might have the first movement at performance level. The second movement is coming along. This is what I mean by assembly line practice. It’s so effective if you can work on different stages of development all at the same time. Instead of just working on a whole piece and trying to get it up to a high level, then go on to the next piece, you work on all different stages of development within the work. You can even be working on the second and third movements while you’re doing the final polishing on the first movement. I hope this is helpful for you! 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
Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. I’m here with an incredible practicing tip that will turbocharge the work you do at the piano: Assembly line practicing. What is this all about? I’m going to tell you all about it and
Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. The subject today is about how failure breeds success in music. When you see somebody who is accomplished on the piano, you might think it’s easy for them. Things must just come naturally to them. They’re so talented! But if you see behind the scenes what it takes, it’s the people who can fail again and again and again, and yet keep trying who become seasoned artists. This isn’t just in music. This covers a wide range of activities.
As a child I took a vacation with my family to the Finger Lakes and we had an opportunity to water ski.
I wanted to stand up on the skis. I tried and I tried. I’d start up and then bam, I’d be down. I was relentless, trying it again and again and again. I didn’t want to give up. I really wanted nothing more than to be successful. I even stood on the skis outside of the water tied to a tree to try to get the sense of it! Try as I might, I could not seem to stay up on the skis in the water. My sister today says that at the time, they didn’t have skis that fit me. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe she’s just being kind, because I guess it could be an embarrassing situation. Although I wasn’t embarrassed. I just wanted to water ski so darn badly! Eventually they had this contraption that was supposed to hold the skis together and then lift up. I used it and it held the skis together, but it never lifted up! There I went halfway around the lake, hunched over. That was the degree of success I had in water skiing. Many years later, I was on a boat with friends and they were offering water skiing. I tried it again and I was finally successful!
How does this relate to piano?
As a child, my hands were very weak. I have small hands even now. But as a child, I could barely reach an octave. Even in my teens I could only reach an octave around the keys. I was playing some pretty sophisticated music and I couldn’t even reach an octave! I rose to the occasion to play the whole Debussy Children’s Corner suite when I was 13 years old, which was really an achievement for me. There was a strong B-flat octave at the very end of the suite (Golliwog’s Cakewalk). And it just sounded anemic. My father actually had me leave out the octave in the left hand at the end and use all my fingers on the key in each hand to get some power to end the piece strongly. That was a really good workaround. I had to struggle for years to develop strength. When I was in Salzburg, Austria, in high school, I spent a summer studying at the Mozarteum. This was a time when I really practiced a lot. I was working on the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6. I spent hours and hours practicing to the point where I had cracked, bloody nails. I was just trying to develop strength. That piece ends with a huge octave section that you’ve probably heard before. So that’s what I did to try to overcome natural weakness.
Other pianists might have completely different obstacles to overcome.
I remember one of my father’s students who was very talented from an emotional level. He had fire in his playing! It was a pleasure to listen to him. But his brain didn’t always cooperate. So his challenge was just holding the cohesiveness of the form together. Holding together an extended work or a whole program was very difficult for him. He had the fire, the passion, the technique, but musical intellect was his challenge. So he worked very hard. He’s a seasoned artist with a career. Everybody has to find what failures they have and build upon them. It doesn’t all come naturally.
It’s how you deal with failure that makes the difference.
If failure makes you feel defeated, and you stop trying, you won’t ever overcome weakness. But if you choose to fight on and not accept failure, that’s the secret to success! It doesn’t happen easily for people. It just seems that way on the outside. So remember, if you’re suffering from failure in your playing or in anything in life, just keep persevering! You can learn from your mistakes as to how to solve them appropriately in the future. The more things you try, the more things you know that don’t work. Thomas Edison once said of his struggle to invent the light bulb, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” That’s what it is with the piano. You try, and keep trying, until you find the answers that solve your problems so you can overcome failure in your music. I hope this is helpful and perhaps even inspiring to you! 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/RobertEstrinContact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. The subject today is about how failure breeds success in music. When you see somebody who is accomplished on the piano, you might think it’s easy for them. Things must just come naturally to
Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. The subject today is about having a pulse in your music. Your music must have a pulse or it dies! Now that’s an intense statement, but it’s true. Sometimes you listen to seasoned concert artists who become so self-indulgent in their playing that they lose the beat of the music. It really loses its whole energy and purpose when you don’t have the pulse to guide everything and hold on to the structure.
This happens oftentimes in slow pieces.
People think they’re playing very expressively by having so much freedom. A great example of this is in Clair de Lune of Debussy. You might hear somebody start really slowly, but then they lose the pulse! You’re left with this wishy washy wandering sound that isn’t anchored in the music anymore. There’s nothing about it that is implied in the score. Debussy wrote this piece, and it has a beauty that is revealed when the real rhythm is played. The secret then is figuring out what note value the pulse is. If you look through the score, you’ll see eighth notes, since it’s in 9/8 time. So if you have eighth notes ticking, it becomes very difficult because you have tuplets. So you have to fit in two notes to 3 ticks of the metronome which is very difficult.
The pulse needs to be slower.
In the case of Clair de Lune, the pulse is actually the dotted quarter note! When you get down to a reasonable pulse rate, you can feel the music. It’s the same tempo, but with a pulse only ticking on the dotted quarter notes instead of on every eighth note. You have this nice, relaxed pulse. Within that framework there’s so much freedom! You feel the pulse. Then you have the liberty to nuance the notes within that pulse of the larger beat. That is the secret.
Sometimes you can have a pulse so slow that it gives you tremendous freedom.
For example, in Chopin’s Nocturne in B-flat Minor. Play it at a tempo of 90 to the quarter note, and you’ll see how constrained it feels having to fit the notes into that many pulses. This pulse is pretty darn fast! It’s not very relaxing. It sounds very regimented and robotic by quantizing everything to that exact beat. Because it’s not really the beat. The beat should be felt as the unit of six eighth notes. If you take the metronome down to 30 (on a metronome application on your phone), you have a tick for the dotted half note. It’s very slow, but there’s a pulse there. There is a freedom that you have in your playing when you have a slower pulse. Rachmaninoff said, “The larger the phrase, the greater the musician.” And I believe that the slower the pulse, the more control you have. It’s easier to maintain tempo. This is true of everything, particularly fast movements. If you try to play a fast movement while you’re thinking of every eighth or sixteenth note, maintaining tempo is difficult.
Now, for initially getting the music under your fingers, having the pulse on the faster note can be beneficial. It helps you to be absolutely sure of the rhythm and that you’re playing honestly. Playing this way is actually very instructive. But once you have the piece moving more, thinking the longer beat as the pulse can give you freedom within the beat and makes it easier to maintain your tempo. Try it for yourself with your music and let me know how it works! I hope this has been helpful for you! 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
Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. The subject today is about having a pulse in your music. Your music must have a pulse or it dies! Now that’s an intense statement, but it’s true. Sometimes you listen to seasoned conce
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about five used pianos you should buy. There are so many different pianos out there that you should buy if you possibly can. There are some amazing instruments, but it’s all about condition. That is the big challenge with any used piano. That’s the caveat going into this. What are some instruments that you should look for? A lot of it depends upon what you’re after.
If you want a solid workhorse upright, there’s always the dependable Yamaha U1.
The good thing about the U1 is that they’re so popular that there are tons of used ones out there. Not only that, but the Japanese tend not to like used pianos very much. There’s a whole cottage industry of people who refurbish them and ship them to the United States to be sold in the used market. These are sometimes referred to as gray market pianos, which you can read about here:
It’s true that an older U1 might not have the same sound and quality as a newer one. It depends upon how much it’s been played, how much wear, the degree of restoration, and many other factors. But since there are so many of them out there, you could probably go to a number of piano stores and find used U1s. Technicians know how to work on them. They are dependable pianos. It’s easy to go with a good Yamaha if you’re looking for a mid-range upright that’s going to do the job for you without breaking the bank.
I’m a real lover of Baldwin pianos.
I grew up with Baldwin pianos. My father, Morton Estrin, was a Baldwin artist. We had Baldwin Grands in our home. In fact, my sister has my father’s seven foot Baldwin, which we restored for her. And I have his Steinway here, which is a whole other story we’re going to get to next. Baldwin, particularly the Artist Series Baldwins, represent tremendous value. Baldwin suffered a bankruptcy in the early 2000s. There was some quality decline towards the end. Worse than that, now there are Chinese pianos bearing the Baldwin name. It has cheapened the brand. Because of that, you can get a piano that’s on a top-tier level for closer to a mid-range price. Once again, it’s all about the condition and which particular years the pianos were manufactured. There are some deals on Artist Series Baldwins that are worth your attention.
Steinway pianos can be a tremendous investment if they’re rebuilt well.
There are a lot of people who just do what I call cosmetic rebuilds because there are so many people looking for Steinways. The smallest baby grand Steinway costs over $80,000 new! So obviously to get a used one in good condition for less than that can be a tremendous investment. So that’s a great used piano to look for. They are very popular. There are a lot of good used Steinways out there. But there also are a lot of questionable used Steinways out there. Once again, if you have questions, you can always hire a piano technician to check the piano for you.
I mentioned Baldwin and Steinway, I must also mention Mason and Hamlin.
Mason & Hamlin still build pianos outside of Boston. You can sometimes find deals on older Mason and Hamlin pianos. Again, some years were better than others, and condition is of paramount importance. But Mason & Hamlins are built so tough that they tend to last longer than a lot of other pianos. They have the tension resonator bracing underneath which supports the soundboard and the rim of the piano. So a lot of older Mason and Hamlins still have a lot of potential, as long as the worn parts are replaced.
One of the great uprights of all time were Baldwin Hamiltons.
The Baldwin Hamilton used to be the most popular upright in America. In fact, that was a piano I grew up with! My father bought my sister and me a Baldwin Hamilton as our practice piano. They were workhorse pianos. They were in schools and churches and homes. You can still find some of them out there. The furniture style isn’t quite as modern as pianos today. Often, they are in oak or other lighter woods. They are kind of industrial, but they were great practice pianos. If you find one that isn’t worn out, and if the furniture doesn’t bother you, it could be a tremendous piano to get.
Those are five pianos that are worth looking for on the used market.
I mentioned those five pianos, but honestly, any American made piano that’s not worn out, that has been well cared for, could be worth your while. Whether it’s a Knabe, a Chickering or a host of other brands, the methodology of many of these pianos is very similar to what Steinway and Mason & Hamlin make today. But because some of these brands are lesser known, you can get them for so much less money. If they’re not in bad shape, they could be worth putting some money into to get them on a high level. They can last a very long time.
What about other Asian pianos?
Asian pianos tend to not age as gracefully. More than that, let’s say you want to rebuild the action on a low end Chinese piano, for example. Well, maybe that piano only costs $10,000 new. Are you going to spend $5,000 to rebuild the action? It’s kind of questionable. However, sometimes you can find Asian pianos, whether they’re made in Indonesia, Korea, China, or even a Japanese piano that sat in somebody’s home as a furniture piece, rarely played, and everything’s in good shape. It probably needs tuning, regulation, lubrication, and a host of refinements. But maybe it’ll cost you less than $1,000 to do the work on it. If the piano has never been played, you can have a perfectly good instrument for a fraction of what it costs new. So you can’t leave out Asian pianos completely, as long as they don’t need much work. They can be worthwhile for you for the right price!
If you have questions about specific pianos that you’re looking at, you’re welcome to email me Robert@LivingPianos.com. I hope this has been helpful for you! 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
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about five used pianos you should buy. There are so many different pianos out there that you should buy if you possibly can. There are some amazing instruments, b
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about whether you should look at your hands when you play from memory on the piano. This is a really insightful question that someone asked me recently. There are two distinctly different ways of playing the piano. One is playing from memory and the other is reading the music.
When playing with the music, you should strive to keep your eyes on the score the entire time.
You only want to have brief glances at the keys. When you do look at the keys, it must be just your eyes moving. If you play the piano and you are looking at the music ,you can’t look away. You can’t read what you’re not looking at! When playing from the score, you absolutely must keep your eyes on the music.
What About Playing From Memory?
Oftentimes I have students memorize music. At the very first lesson I show my students how to memorize. This is something that almost nobody ever teaches. You think it’s magic that pianists could assimilate all this music. Are pianists some kind of geniuses? No. You just have to know how to memorize. You have to take little chunks of music and build the whole composition bit by bit. When you hear somebody play, it seems like a miracle. But really, if you see what’s behind the curtain, it’s just a lot of little steps that go into it.
I have my students play from memory. The first time they do it, a lot of times they’ll be looking up into space. I always tell them to look at their hands. One of the reasons to memorize music is so that you can look at your hands! When you have leaps, how are you supposed to land in the right place without looking at your hands? Having said that, there are some blind pianists who defy all reason bouncing all over the keyboard. They don’t rely upon looking. That’s great for them. But for everyone else, you have your eyes to utilize so you might as well take advantage!
Looking at your hands is another way to reinforce your memory.
By looking at your hands you see the connections of the keys. You know where to look if there are leaps. A lot of times what you want to do when you’re playing the piano is look at your thumbs rather than the extreme outside fingers. The thumbs can line up everything and they’re close together. When you have leaps, you tend to want to look at the inner part of your hand. That’s one little tip for you.
Does this mean that you should never try to play without looking?
No. The time for that is when you memorize a piece of music. That doesn’t mean you’re done with the score. Far from it. It’s exactly the opposite! The way I learn music, and the way I teach my students to learn music is to read through it a couple of times the first day, then get down to work and start memorizing. The first thing you do is memorize your music, instead of the last thing. Then what do you do? You go back to the score and reinforce the memory by reading the score and keeping your eyes on the music. That’s the time for not looking at your hands. Read from the score to see all the little details that maybe you didn’t catch the first time. Maybe you forgot where a slur ends or a crescendo begins, or the voicing of a chord. You have to constantly go back and reinforce your memory.
Interestingly, you can play the piano without any instrument or anything visual at all.
I have a video about playing the piano from your mind. You can just sit in a chair and play through your music mentally, thinking through every nuance of sound and touch. That is the ultimate practice. You can try it with a piece you know really well. You want to make sure you reinforce that memory. There is no better practice. You don’t have the benefit of finger memory. You don’t have the keyboard to look at or the sound to go by. It’s all in your head. Interestingly, there have been tests of people playing the piano while having their brains scanned. Then they get people to think about playing the piano while doing the same brain scan on the same people. There is zero difference in the brain whether you are playing the piano or thinking about playing the piano. Now, what does this reveal? It tells you that you can practice away from the piano effectively and get all the benefits. You can reinforce the score just using your mind.
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about whether you should look at your hands when you play from memory on the piano. This is a really insightful question that someone asked me recently. There are two distinct
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to talk about the best and worst pianos to buy. This is a big subject, so where do we begin? I’ll start with the worst pianos to buy, then I’ll go to the best pianos to buy so we can end on a happy note!
What are the worst pianos to buy?
Upright pianos have all different heights. Go back far enough, and they were really tall. They got shorter and shorter over time. There were a whole breed of pianos referred to as spinet pianos. Spinet pianos are no longer made, but they were popular because they were very small and inexpensive. In the 1970s, you could get a brand new Kimball Whitney spinet for a few hundred dollars! Can you imagine? So they were popular for that reason. This was before digital pianos existed. So if somebody wanted something really inexpensive, a spinet was an option.
What’s so bad about spinets?
Let’s break it down. Why is the sound so anemic on a spinet? The piano is so short, the strings don’t have much length. Everything in the low register is really lacking. There isn’t much richness even in the high register because the soundboard is so small. Worse than that, in order to fit the action into such a small case, it didn’t have a full length key to reach the back of the action. So the keys were very short, and there were connecting rods to the rest of the action. This is called an indirect blow action, or a drop action. If you open a spinet at the top you can see the keys end right at the end of the fallboard. There are rods connecting the keys to the rest of the action. So they’re not as responsive. They’re also easier to play, which may be a benefit to some people who have hand problems. But generally, it’s not going to prepare a serious pianist to play other pianos. The repetition is also really slow. There are some spinets that are better than others. The Baldwin Acrosonic was the best of that breed. So that’s one kind of piano that generally you want to avoid.
Sometimes a big old upright can be an absolutely glorious instrument.
In fact, you can get a bigger sound out of a tall upright than some smaller baby grands. Old uprights have long string length and big sound boards. They’re formidable, wonderful instruments. But the problem is, most of them were made over a hundred years ago! What you don’t want is to buy an old upright piano just because it looks pretty, because it might need $15,000 or $20,000 worth of work. This is no joke. These pianos get worn out. If the strings are old and rusty and the felt, hammers, and other action parts are worn out, you can get into hundreds of hours of work trying to restore one of these instruments. When you’re all done, you’d be lucky to sell it for a few thousand dollars, because they’re not as popular anymore.
Occasionally you’ll find an old upright that has already been restored. And if that’s the case, it can be a wonderful experience to have an instrument like this. But I wouldn’t buy one to restore. You can find free uprights, mostly the big, tall, old uprights, on websites like PianoAdoption.com. If you look at enough of them, maybe you’ll find one that doesn’t need everything. But generally, if you’re looking for a quality instrument and it seems like a good deal, check with your piano technician before you commit to it.
What are the best pianos to buy?
So now let’s get to some of the pianos that are worthwhile, and that would be restored American pianos or late model American pianos. Steinway and Mason and Hamlin are the only American piano brands left today. But if you go back to the 1970s, and even into the 1980’s, there were a number of piano manufacturers still making high quality pianos in the United States. Some of these instruments may still have good life left in them. More than that, the methodology of these instruments like Chickering, Knabe, and Baldwin was very similar to Steinway and Mason and Hamlin, which are priced astronomically high today. People are not aware of these other brands as much. Because of that they could represent phenomenal value. These pianos could be worth putting some money into if they’re structurally sound, because they are hand-built, top tier pianos. So it can be worthwhile checking out some of those instruments.
What about Asian pianos?
Older Asian pianos that need work should be avoided. These pianos are inexpensive to begin with, so you don’t want to put a bunch of money into them. Perhaps a late model Asian piano can offer good value if they have been well maintained.
So that’s the long and short of it. American pianos are of such high quality that looking for those in the used market can be worthwhile. Even if you have to put a little bit of work into them, they can be worthwhile to get an instrument of a really high caliber. I hope this has been helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
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Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to talk about the best and worst pianos to buy. This is a big subject, so where do we begin? I’ll start with the worst pianos to buy, then I’ll go to the best pia
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to get free sheet music. On the Internet you can get almost everything for free, from movies and TV shows, to books, and yes, sheet music! Of course, there’s a price you pay for something that’s free, which is not knowing the validity of the score. You don’t know the integrity of anything you get for free. However, sometimes it’s nice to have a variety to choose from. If you just want to check out some sheet music, maybe a free music site is just what you’re looking for.
There are a lot of different websites that have a smattering of free music. But the best place is a website called IMSLP.org.
IMSLP is an incredible resource of not just sheet music but also recordings. When you first go to the site it may seem a bit confusing. As soon as you click on something, it tells you you can pay for a subscription, or you can wait 10 seconds for your download. Then you’ll see all the recordings first. But once you figure out how the site works, it’s a treasure trove.
Fair warning, a lot of it is junk.
With some stuff you’re immediately going to see tattered, old, unauthoritative editions. But if you spend the time, there are nuggets of gold in there. If you just want to see two or three different editions of the same piece, it’s a great resource. You’re not going to buy two or three different copies of sheet music, but this allows you to have a reference.
Many of you may have noticed that I co-brand many of my videos with the VirtualSheetMusic.com logo. VirtualSheetMusic.com is not all free, but for a very small subscription fee you get the benefit of integrity of the scores. It’s also very convenient. You can download music right to your iPad or print out the music There are all kinds of technologies to make it easy with automated page turning, and all sorts of cool stuff. So if you’re looking for just free music, check out IMSLP.org, but if you want something more trustworthy and convenient, check out VirtualSheetMusic.com. 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
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to get free sheet music. On the Internet you can get almost everything for free, from movies and TV shows, to books, and yes, sheet music! Of course, there’s a
