Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The topic today is about the magic of the five finger position on the piano. This is particularly important for beginning students. First I’m going to explain what I mean. Put your five fingers over five keys, for example right now I’m over C, D, E, F, G in both hands. Interestingly, when young students are playing, you’ll notice that they will constantly be looking down, even if they are in a five finger position. But the keys aren’t going to go anywhere! If you just leave your hands in this position you should be able to have your eyes closed and play whatever key you want. This is a great way to develop reading skills, because you know which fingers go down in each hand in order to play those five notes.
Of course, it can be shifted to other keys.
You might rest your fingers over G, A, B, C, D. Whatever the position, once you are comfortable in that position you should be able to play without looking down at your hands at all. This is invaluable, because as music gets more complex you can do things like reach one note beyond. It’s not a far reach to be able to play one key beyond in one hand or the other. Getting that sense of the keyboard, of where the notes are and where your hands are on them without having to look down is so important. And if you don’t do it in the five finger position when you first start, you’ll likely never do it. So it’s really important to get comfortable playing in that position without having to look down at your hands, to develop your connection between your fingers and the keyboard, irrespective of looking at them.
That is the secret of the five finger position!
There’s amazing things you can do just with five keys on the piano! So test yourself. Close your eyes and play, and see if you can hit the keys you intend to hit. Naturally, if you’re at a more advanced level, go back to some easier music. If you find your reading skills are really lacking, try to find books that are in that five finger position and sight read without looking down at your hands at all. Get comfortable with that, and build up from there. This could be a tremendous help for you to develop your sight reading skills with that connection to the keyboard just from the feel of the keys. I hope this is helpful for you! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please consider joining the Living Pianos Patreon to help support us and get access to extra Living Pianos content! www.patreon.com/robertestrin
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The topic today is about the magic of the five finger position on the piano. This is particularly important for beginning students. First I’m going to explain what I mean. Put your five fing
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is very thought-provoking. Can you learn to play the piano while you sleep? This might sound absurd, but there’s actually scientific evidence supporting the idea that there is a possibility of learning music while you sleep!
There was a study where researchers taught a group of people to play piano melodies using a technique borrowed from the video game Guitar Hero. Afterwards, all the volunteers slept. When they woke up, they were all asked to play the music again. Unbeknownst to the sleeping participants, one group heard the melody they had just learned as they slept, while the other group did not. The volunteers who heard the music while they slept, even though they had no memory of it, played the melody far better than those who didn’t hear it. So indeed, you can absorb some information while sleeping.
Things you think about just before bedtime can seep into your subconscious.
There have been other studies showing how what you think about just before going to bed affects you. Now you probably are already somewhat aware of this phenomenon. Did you ever think of scary things before going to bed? Maybe you watched a horror movie before bed and then had nightmares. So, you can actually leverage your practice time by doing some practicing, or at least mentally refreshing the music you learned during the day, just before going to bed. That way it’s percolating in your head and will get reinforced.
Sometimes I will have music going on in my head all night long!
Every time I wake up, I’ll still be at that same place in the music. The same themes keep playing mentally. Indeed, your subconscious is affected by your consciousness just before bedtime, and even while you’re sleeping. I’m not sure if there’s any way of leveraging the time you’re asleep by playing recordings of pieces you are learning. But certainly refreshing the music you played throughout the day just before bedtime is going to help you reinforce things by cementing it in your subconscious.
I bet you didn’t expect this, but there are scientific studies proving this phenomena. I do it all the time! Sometimes I actually come up with music in the middle of the night. Surprisingly, I’ll play it through a few times in my head and in the morning I still remember it! So, you can cement things through your sleep, by just refreshing before bedtime. Try it out and see how it works for you! Thanks again for joining me! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please consider joining the Living Pianos Patreon to help support us and get access to extra Living Pianos content!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is very thought-provoking. Can you learn to play the piano while you sleep? This might sound absurd, but there’s actually scientific evidence supporting the idea that ther
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question comes from a viewer. Mike asks, “How has technology changed how we learn and experience music?” This is a deep subject. I’m going to give some pointers and a bit of a historical perspective.
We take modern technology for granted to a great extent. But early in the 20th century, pianists and musicians of every ilk had no idea what other people did in music. People would only know the few musicians who toured in their area. Until finally, when recording came about, people were able to hear other performers! People living in rural areas didn’t even have access to symphony orchestras. So, people would learn how to play four hand arrangements of Beethoven symphonies (and others), because there were no opportunities to hear the music any other way.
Today it’s so easy. You can just go on YouTube or Spotify and instantly have access to many performances of almost anything you can think of!
One thing that this has done is make performers much more homogenous. If you listen to recordings from the infancy of recording in the 1930s, the variety of interpretations was astounding because everybody didn’t hear everybody else. There wasn’t a “normal” performance at that point. Listen to Cortot, Schnabel, Rachmaninoff, Hofmann or Levine and you can’t believe the variety of ideas in their interpretations of pieces. So, it’s a little bit sad that people now are so highly influenced by each other that everybody sounds more and more like one another. That’s one of the downsides. The positive is being exposed to so many great instrumentalists, as well as so much music literally at your fingertips. It’s phenomenal! So it’s a balance, but overall I think it’s positive.
In terms of learning music, MIDI, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface that came about in the 1980s, was a tremendous development.
Previous to MIDI, anybody who wanted a computer music system had to invest tens of thousands of dollars in a turnkey system by a company that offered them. For example, New England Digital had the Synclavier system, Fairlight had theirs. This was very expensive! MIDI enabled products from any manufacturer to connect to any other. So this ushered in things like music notation transcription software. With this you could take any keyboard that has MIDI and it could print out the music on your computer. What a time saver that is!
The downside of that is some people will just play into their computers, not really giving thought to each note. When you’re working with a pencil, much less a quill and ink, you are thinking about every note you’re writing, because it’s an arduous task and you don’t want to get it wrong. But if you could just play things in, the same thought isn’t required. I’ve seen some compositions where it was obvious they didn’t really understand what they were writing, because the way it was notated didn’t make sense rhythmically. Just because you have these tools doesn’t mean they’re necessarily going to be used in a positive way.
There are music education software programs for things like note reading.
It used to be the best tools in music education you could hope for were flashcards. Now you have apps that can help you learn to read music! There are even music software programs that can show you if you’re playing something right. It shows you what notes you missed! So there are tremendous opportunities and developments in music education regarding technology, not to mention what’s possible with recording. You can use an iPhone to make what would have been a professional video or audio recording in the 1980s, and share it with the world at the click of a few buttons. It’s pretty remarkable!
Overall I’d say technology is ushering in a lot of positive new learning strategies. And we have easy access to almost everything ever recorded! We have all kinds of tools at our disposal and yes, they can be used positively. But it doesn’t mean that we’re going to have better music just because we have these tools. Having great teachers is invaluable, technology or not. So, that’s my take on this subject. It’s a deep subject. We can get a lot of discussions going in the comments on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please consider joining the Living Pianos Patreon to help support us and get access to extra Living Pianos content! www.patreon.com/robertestrin
We take modern technology for granted to a great extent. But early in the 20th century, pianists and musicians of every ilk had no idea what other people did in music. People would only know the few musicians who toured in their area. Until finally,
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about the Secret of Music: Order Versus Randomness. This is a weighty topic. The essential truth is that familiarness is comfortable, but if things are too familiar and predictable they can be boring. This is true of everything, not just music. On the other side, randomness is very interesting but it can be difficult to digest. Listening to music that’s all random can sound cacophonous and it’s difficult to make sense of it.
Something that has an element of order but enough randomness to keep you wondering what’s coming next can be very engaging!
Looking at a painting that contains a bunch of random squiggly lines and different colors might be interesting for a while. But it’s exhausting trying to make sense of it, because as humans, we seek to find order in things in order to gain understanding. Conversely, something that is predictably geometric is equally boring since there is nothing new to surprise you and keep you engaged. Elements of both order and randomness are intrinsically important in art and music.
Here’s an historical perspective on this. The origins of written music goes back to Gregorian chant in the 9th century, which was monophonic plainsong based upon liturgical text. The music grew in complexity somewhat during the Renaissance gaining polyphony and other elements. Music got more and more complex in the later Baroque era. In fact, during Bach’s later years, he was writing some fantastically complex music like Art of the Fugue. He had actually lost favor in the public and many composers writing the new simpler, structured Classical style were more popular than he was, including his own son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach! Can you imagine such a thing? So music became more and more complex. I wouldn’t describe the late Baroque music as being random, but if you listen to a complex multi-voice fugue it can almost feel random the first time you hear it if you’re not musically astute and comfortable with that level of complexity. This is one of the reasons why music with a structured form became much more popular in the Classical era with Mozart and Haydn. With very clear repetition, development and recapitulation of themes, it was very digestible music. Over the centuries, music became more and more complex once again. Beethoven expanded the form. Then in the Romantic era, music became more overtly emotional.
Harmonies became more and more complicated, until finally composers were writing things that were not based upon tonality.
Alexander Scriabin, at the turn of the 20th century, was writing pieces based upon all different intervals, even ninths! Bartok was also writing music that bordered on atonality. But it was Arnold Schoenberg who came up with the twelve-tone system which systematically avoided repetition of any of the 12 possible notes in what was called a tone row. Music composed with the 12-tone system was extremely difficult to sing. Things went even further with Anton Webern who serialized not just pitches, but rhythms, systematically avoiding rhythmic patterns. Even textures and articulations were serialized in a similar manner. So, there was very little to grab onto. As a work of sheer mathematics, many of these works were brilliant compositions. But this music is extremely challenging to listen to.
This led to a major breakdown of music once again which led to minimalism.
People wanted something that was digestible with repeated patterns. Not to say that minimalism is simple, because the way things are nested and overlapped can be quite fascinating. But compared to what came before, it was much more listenable. So, you see the historical pattern of music becoming more and more complex over time until there’s a breakdown to something simpler, and then the process starts all over again. The intrinsic nature of what makes music tick is that balance between order and randomness.
I hope this is enlightening for you. I’d love to hear your opinions on this subject! It’s really fascinating how our brains perceive things. The comfort of the familiar, and the exploration of the new, and how those two things are balanced is really what it’s all about in music and art, and in life itself! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please consider joining the Living Pianos Patreon to help support us and get access to extra Living Pianos content! There are some exciting new developments you’re going to hear about soon!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about the Secret of Music: Order Versus Randomness. This is a weighty topic. The essential truth is that familiarness is comfortable, but if things are too familiar and pred
Hi, this is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com with some great news for you: we are putting together a complete piano course for you! Since you are followers of Living Pianos, you get to decide what will be offered!
we are putting together a complete piano course for you! Since you are followers of Living Pianos, you get to decide what will be offered!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. There are many aspects to becoming a successful musician. Like any other field, it requires a combination of talent, intelligence, training, and consistent work. We could explore all the intricacies of the nuts and bolts of carving out a career. But today I am going to focus attention on one particular aspect of how to approach developing a career in music which relates to almost any endeavor. Sometimes, the hardest thing is just knowing where to begin. You are faced with a myriad of possibilities of what to do each moment of every day. The great trumpeter Adoph Herseth said:
“Analysis = Paralysis”
It would be comforting to have a clear vision of all the steps involved in carving out a successful life in music or whatever it is you want to achieve. But the reality is often murky with vague possibilities of how to approach building a meaningful career. But sometimes you just have to do something in order to know how to proceed.
It’s like if you were lost in the woods. Obviously, just standing there, you aren’t going to escape to safety before dark. But you certainly don’t want to get deeper into the abyss surrounding you! So, what is necessary is to start moving and looking for clues. Perhaps you know that there is a mountainside beyond the road you entered the forest. But you can’t see through the thick brush. But if you come upon a stream, you can notice the direction of the water and surmise that it must be coming from a higher elevation. So, you can follow the stream and hope it leads to something familiar. Then maybe there is a clearing and you can see the mountainside and then you know you are on the right path. Or perhaps not! You may have to make adjustments along the journey to safety. It’s exactly the same thing when trying to carve out a new path in your life.
You must take steps in the general direction you want to go even though you don’t know exactly where you are headed!
As time goes on, you make the necessary adjustments in your direction in order to achieve the desired goal. You will learn how to achieve success as you face obstacles learning what works and what doesn’t work. Whole new avenues of possibilities will emerge as you bravely power on without the comfort of a clear plan. This is the way most people find fulfillment in their lives. Only from the outside looking in, in hindsight does it ever appear that people know exactly what they are doing.
Adversity and unexpected twists and turns form the foundation for building a plan of action.
So, even if you don’t know exactly where you are going or how you are going to get there, you must move in the general direction in order to gain clues and insights as to how to achieve a fulfilling life in music or whatever it is you have a passion for in life – just like finding your way out when you are lost in the wilderness.
I hope this life lesson resonates with you. I would love to hear from those of you who have either bravely forged ahead in life even though you didn’t know exactly where you were headed, or from those of you who are trying to gain the courage to take the first step to a new life. You must keep moving forward as you learn from both adversity and success.
Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. There are many aspects to becoming a successful musician. Like any other field, it requires a combination of talent, intelligence, training, and consistent work. We could explore all the intricaci
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about how to approach teaching music lessons online. There are many challenges. I deal with piano, and a lot of you are pianists as well. But this applies to all music teachers and the particular challenges of dealing with younger students is really important. It’s an interesting thing that everybody’s going online now. We’re all interfacing with video chat! One of the great things is that people realize now that they’re not restricted to just their neighborhood teacher. Now, the world is at your fingertips.
Teaching music online, particularly to young children presents uni
Conveying hand position, relaxed shoulders, and even how people sit at the piano can be tough when teaching remotely. Parents can help tremendously in this regard. In addition, kids’ emotions can be a bit fragile at the moment since everything has changed in their lives. It’s important to keep things fun and positive.
Like so many musicians, my daughter Jenny had a packed schedule of performances with orchestras cancelled indefinitely. Fortunately, teaching is one area musicians can still be engaged in. However, it requires an understanding of how to deal with a new medium.
We have a very special guest. I’m incredibly pleased to bring today somebody who has been teaching since she was a teenager. It’s been the whole crux of her career along with performing and composing, my sister Coren Estrin Mino. Hello Coren!
Coren Estrin Mino:
Hi, Bob. It’s really good to see you, although I wish we could be in person.
Robert Estrin:
This is pretty good, actually.
Coren Estrin Mino:
This is amazing. This is so fun.
Robert Estrin:
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been doing virtual visits with more people in the last couple of months than I’ve done in the rest of my life combined.
Coren Estrin Mino:
Yes, this is true. I’m visiting with a lot of people I haven’t seen in a really long time.
Robert Estrin:
It’s opening everybody’s consciousness. We’re going to talk about the unique challenges of teaching music lessons online, because there are people out there trying to figure out how to deal with all this technology. I remember when I first started doing this, I had a friend who I wanted to do a video chat with. I’m pretty adept at technology and my friend happens to be a computer teacher. Even we were struggling for 10 or 15 minutes to get any of the platforms to work! It’s a funny thing, sometimes everything just works seamlessly and other times, nothing seems to work. Tell me about what your experiences have been. Afterall, you’ve been teaching in person for so long.
What have been the challenges for you in getting set up in this whole new world online?
Coren Estrin Mino:
Well, in a nutshell, everything! I am not computer illiterate by any stretch, but this was really new for me and I was really struggling my first two weeks of doing this in March. Terrible sound, just terrible glitches, sound cutting out, a delay between the visual and the audio. There were so many problems! So I was complaining about this to my son, Brian, who helped me enormously. He told me some things I needed to do to improve my setup. The main thing he told me about were these headphones with the microphone. One of the things that was happening to me my first couple of weeks, I was losing my voice because all of us, when we are video chatting, if our headphones don’t have our own voice in them, we don’t realize we’re shouting. There’s a psychological distancing from your device. You feel like you’re far away from people. So you tend to shout. I was getting very hoarse, because if you’re giving 12 to 15 piano lessons a day and you’re shouting all day long, your voice doesn’t hold up. And mine certainly didn’t.
Robert Estrin:
I found the same thing at first when I was doing video lessons. I just used my iPad. I have a nice iPad Pro with a big screen which works great. The audio and the video are fine. But in order to get the piano keys in the shot, the iPad had to be far enough away. So, I had to be shouting. It was really exhausting until I figured out how to incorporate streaming into my studio.
You had talked to me about your issues with the internet. What was your solution for that?
Coren Estrin Mino:
That’s a really good question. Brian recommended that I get an extra router, which is made by a company called, Orbi. That improved the sound. Then, I upgraded my internet service as well. Those changes made huge improvements. There was no longer a delay between audio and visual. One of the things that kept happening was a bubbly sound. It almost sounded like my piano was underwater, and that disappeared completely. The one thing that I will never have any control over is what my students are using, what their internet is, what device they’re doing their piano lessons on. So I have at least improved my situation as much as I can without putting thousands of dollars into it.
Robert Estrin:
There are some other tips that people should be aware of. These video chat platforms are not meant for music. They are optimized for spoken voice. There are all kinds of settings for noise reduction of different types. If you have those enabled, which they are by default, when you first start chatting, when you play anything quiet, the notes sound really weird. I think it’s important for people to understand that there are settings in Zoom and in Skype and in some of the other platforms. We’re using Zoom right now for everybody. And one nice thing about Zoom is that you can record your call, just like we’re doing. That’s how we’re able to share this with you.
We disabled the noise reduction on both ends so that we can play music with no problems. That’s really essential when you’re giving lessons, isn’t it?
Coren Estrin Mino:
Yeah, absolutely. There are some entertaining things that happen on their end, I’ll hear their dogs barking or somebody chatting in the next room. And that actually is a bit of a problem. My headphones pick up ambient noise almost as loud as the sounds I really want to hear, which is my students talking or playing the piano. So, I sent out a message to everybody to please try to keep the noise level down in their homes while the piano lessons are going on.
Robert Estrin:
Now, I know you teach a wide range of students from beginners to advanced adults, but teaching younger children online, I’m wondering how you engage them. They’re looking on a screen, maybe some of them are even on phones. How do you deal with that?
What methodology is there for keeping children engaged remotely?
Coren Estrin Mino:
That is actually a huge issue. Anybody who’s teaching children online, any subject, knows it’s not easy to engage children remotely. The best solution for that is to have a parent sitting in the room with the child.
Robert Estrin:
It’s got to be the right parent though, of course.
Coren Estrin Mino:
Well, I’ve had good luck. The one little issue that comes up with parents sometimes is a parent wants to jump in and answer a question. If the child doesn’t answer right away, they’ll just jump in and tell the child the answer. That’s a natural response. Most parents though let me conduct the lesson and I will say, “Could you please point to measure three?” And they’ll do that. So the child knows where we are. That’s the biggest problem, a child not understanding. If I say we’re on line two, measure three, they don’t respond to that. They don’t understand that. If I stop them to look at a little correction, their default is to start again from the beginning.
Robert Estrin:
That’s a timeless problem with students anyway. I have a video on that subject!
Coren Estrin Mino:
So, you know what I’m talking about. It’s very hard for me to convey where we are in the music. One of the most important facets of my teaching has had to disappear. I play duets with my students, especially the young ones.
Not being able to play duets with my students has been very challenging because it’s one of the best ways to get young students to sense pulse in music.
Robert Estrin:
Also great for sight reading.
Coren Estrin Mino:
And dynamics, or even a music that they have prepared that they are not sight reading, pieces they have actually learned. By me playing a duet with them, I can exaggerate the dynamics a little bit and say, “Copy what I’m doing.” So, they understand how loud is loud, how soft is soft. And I can’t do that now. So, I’ve had to rely on some ingenuity, I guess, in trying to get kids to do things. Plus, I have to always make sure that what they’re doing is what I’m hearing. The electronics make dynamics, tone, and balance very difficult to hear sometimes, especially if they are on devices that are old or not great to begin with. Phones are not necessarily bad. If they have a brand new iPhone, for example, I’m going to get good sound from that.
Robert Estrin:
Right. In terms of the transmission.
I would imagine it’s hard for them to see if you’re trying to show them anything on a small screen.
Coren Estrin Mino:
Exactly. Well, I don’t do a lot of that. Sometimes I will pick up a book and I’ll say, “This is what I’m talking about right here.” I’ll resort to pointing to the place in the score. For a while I had thought of getting a little handheld camera, but my son informed me that even though for people who are way more tech savvy than I, they could go back and forth between the computer and the little camera easily. For me, that was just a step that would have been too time consuming to do quickly in a lesson.
Robert Estrin:
Another thing you can do with some of these platforms like Zoom is screen-sharing. So if you have something up on your computer screen, instead of seeing you, they’ll see what you’re seeing on the computer, and that could be one way of sharing.
Coren Estrin Mino:
That’s a great idea. I’m mostly with my students using FaceTime. Almost all my students have Apple products. I’m also using some Skype and a couple students are using Zoom.
Robert Estrin:
Right. I think that Skype and FaceTime actually have the best video quality, but Zoom is very flexible.
Coren Estrin Mino:
Exactly. So those have been some of my challenges. I did send home a note to parents, to please purchase a tripod for their devices. I’m getting very tired of phones falling off stacks of books or a phone being on the edge of the piano. Whatever end of the piano the phone is on, I’m either hearing way too much bass or way too much treble. So, a little bit of distance from the keyboard makes it so that I can hear a truer sound as well as being better visually. I don’t like when I can see the keys, but I can’t see my student’s face. That’s very uncomfortable for me. With a lot of the phones that’s what’s happening. And I don’t like that.
Robert Estrin:
I’m with you there.
For everybody out there, are you still accepting students?
Coren Estrin Mino:
Yes, I am accepting students, particularly adults, because they can come in the morning. So, yes, so I am more than happy to speak with anybody who is interested.
Robert Estrin:
I know that you always have a packed schedule because you’ve been teaching for so long. When did you start teaching?
Coren Estrin Mino:
I have been teaching since I was 13.
Robert Estrin:
13? Wow!
Coren Estrin Mino:
Yes. I started taking students at 13 and our dad started giving me students when I was about 15. Then when I went to college, you inherited my students.
Robert Estrin:
That’s right. And that’s when I started assisting dad. That’s what got both of us into it from such a young age.
Coren Estrin Mino:
That’s right. I did the same thing with my children. And I know you did the same thing with yours. My children started teaching when they were very, very young, so I think we carried that through very nicely.
Robert Estrin:
So, we’re carrying the torch for future generations! If any of you out there have questions about the technology, you’re welcome to email me. I can tell you what I’m doing and help any of you who are teachers or students trying to figure out how to do all of this. We’re happy to help you, and we’re here for everybody. I want to thank Coren for joining us. And it’s been a pleasure visiting with you virtually.
Coren Estrin Mino:
Yes, it has been.
Robert Estrin:
Coren has had many students go on to illustrious, professional careers as teachers and concert pianists. She’s really good with a wide range of students. So, if you have any questions, address them to me and we’ll help any of you, whatever you’re trying to do with your music! Again, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource. Thanks so much for joining us here today. We’ll see you next time.
Please consider joining the Living Pianos Patreon to help support us and get access to extra Living Pianos content! www.patreon.com/robertestrin
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about how to approach teaching music lessons online. There are many challenges. I deal with piano, and a lot of you are pianists as well. But this applies to all music teach
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!
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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 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.
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
