Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

We have a great show today with special guest, Scott Houston; The Piano Guy! A lot of you may know Scott from his many appearances on PBS television. Scott is the perfect person for this series because he has educated countless people all over the world in how to play piano by ear, playing with chords, and dealing with popular styles of music. My background is primarily in classical music. So we’re going to have a real treat for you. There will be tips on both sides for people who play by ear and people who have never tried to play by ear.

The first thing to consider is being able to play popular songs.

Why do you need to play by ear in order to play popular music? Popular songs oftentimes are first conceived by jamming together and later on after the record is produced, somebody goes and transcribes it into sheet music. If you ever try to decipher the sheet music, often times it just doesn’t sound quite right because it’s not the original. Also consider that often, sheet music is just a piano/vocal arrangement where the original was a whole band. So it doesn’t always translate well.

So there is a good place for being able to play by ear or to pick something up and make your own arrangement. People who have traditional classical training may feel a need to see the written score in order to play it. A lead sheet which has the melody line and the chord symbols allow you the freedom to play stylistically correct. It’s not like classical music where the original manuscript is the complete work. In the case of pop songs, Taylor Swift, for instance, may write a tune and by the time it gets out on a piece of sheet music you’re reading, a staff arranger may have produced the sheet music after the record was produced. What Taylor Swift may have done, was to write a melody line and chord changes. That’s the DNA of the song. Arrangers, producers, and musicians may have fleshed out the rest.

There are a few intrinsic piano parts that should be played verbatim if you want them to sound like the recording. The other 95% may just require comping chords that highlight the melody line. By learning to build upon the essential chord structure, it frees you up to sound more authentic than the sheet music in many instances. What makes it even more complicated is that sheet music is usually written with the melody line contained within the piano part. Occasionally you’ll get sheet music that doesn’t have the vocal line in it. It just has the accompaniment which is appropriate when accompanying a singer. In this case, it doesn’t work at all as a piano piece. The opposite is also true. If you’re trying to accompany a singer, you don’t want to double every one of the notes the singer is singing. This is an essential point. It’s 180 degrees opposite when you’re accompanying someone compared to playing a solo on the piano.

The next reason to play by ear is to be able to improvise.

Feeling like you absolutely must read notes to be able to play anything on a piano will keep you from the fun of ever being able to improvise. Using a lead sheet is a terrific way because after all; pop, jazz, rock, and country players use lead sheets most of the time for the melody and basic chord structure rather than have all the notes written out. To give you an extreme example, I’ve seen accomplished classical musicians who can’t even play happy birthday because they have never tried to play by ear! It’s totally alien to them. Playing from a lead sheet and learning chord changes is the crawling and walking before you learn to run in the world of improvisation. Improvisation isn’t a wildly free, play anything, anytime sort of thing for people. What improvisation is most often, is creating a melody line while playing over the chord changes. You’ve got to know the chord changes to a tune or you really can’t improvise. By just doing that, it may provide the foundation you need. Learning chords and learning to play from lead sheets creates the foundation that very naturally leads into improvising. Because it’s not black ink on paper, doesn’t mean it’s not music. Written notation is nothing more than a documentation of music. Music is what we play. It’s the sound we make that’s the music. So, sheet music is nothing more than a recording of music.

It’s a tough thing sometimes to get people who have had nothing but traditional lessons to accept that what you’re playing might not be exactly what is written. Something that is missed in classical circles is that almost all the great composers were improvisers, but we only have the recordings on the paper because there was no audio recording back then. So the score is elevated to the point where people don’t realize that improvisation has always been an essential component of classical music. Many if not most of the great composers were prolific improvisers!

The last of the three benefits of playing by ear is instant gratification.

Most adults who are taking piano lessons don’t plan on doing it for a living or making a career out of it. They’re just wanting to have fun playing the piano. They want to sit down behind this piece of furniture they’ve been dusting for the last 20 years and play something! For that reason, it can be a phenomenally faster route to learn to play three chords which can take about five minutes. By doing that, they’ve got the chord changes to probably 70 or 80,000 songs! This isn’t to suggest that that’s all you ever want to do by any means. But it can be a great way to get someone to experience gratification through playing the piano. It gives an incentive to want to keep going.

Growing up in New York on Long Island, it was amazing; every summer trying to mitigate the humidity with air conditioning was a losing battle. By the middle of July, my father’s pianos would just get dead. Not only that, but the actions became mushy as they absorbed moisture. Indeed, the weather can affect your piano in numerous ways.

As I mentioned, humidity can deaden the tone because the hammers absorb moisture so you get a lifeless sound. The heat comes back in September and the tone livens up along with it. Everything is bound to go out of tune with these seasonal changes as well.

There’s another thing you should be aware of. At the opposite end of the spectrum, if you have extreme dryness where you don’t have environmental control; if you have hairline cracks in the soundboard or bridges, they can open up. Maybe you’ve never had problems before and suddenly you’re hearing buzzes and other problems. They might just go away next time the humidity goes up, or possibly not.

Weather has a profound effect upon pianos and even if you do have humidification or dehumidification systems in your piano, or in the room with the piano, it’s really hard to avoid the effect of seasonal changes on the performance of your piano. However, there are many ways of making it more stable such as treating the room to create stable temperature and humidity. You could possibly use a felt string cover to allow the sound to come through but not let the moisture in your piano.

This is a really interesting question and there is a lot to it. It’s fascinating how various cultures prefer different types of sounds. For example, have you ever noticed that Asian pianos tend to have a brighter sound than American pianos? You might have wondered if it’s because of methodology. Yes, but it also involves cultural preferences. Let’s get back to European pianos now.

I am also a French hornist and my wife is a flautist, so we have played in many orchestras and have been obsessed with listening to orchestras since childhood. If you listen to some of the great recordings by European orchestras like the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam or the Berlin Philharmonic, you’ll notice a very different quality of tonality when it comes to the instruments in European orchestras compared to American orchestras like the Philadelphia Orchestra or the New York Philharmonic.

Each individual instrument is different! With the French horn for example, the American sound is a big fat sound. In fact, most American French hornists play on the F side of the double horn which is three feet longer than the B-flat side. When playing higher notes, they may play on the B-flat side making it a little easier to play, but for the richer and fatter sound, they generally prefer the longer F-horn. In Europe, it’s much more popular to play pretty much on the B-flat horn for most of the notes giving a more open and clear sound with less fatness.

It’s not just French horns and flutes, but all the instruments in the orchestra have that kind of clear projecting sound, more than the fat blending sound. The same exact phenomenon is true with pianos. Listen to a Fazioli, Bosendorfer or a Bechstein and compare that to a Steinway or Mason & Hamlin. You can also compare these to some other great pianos from years past like Baldwin and Knabe and you’ll hear a real difference in the quality of the sound. As I explain to people time and time again, it’s not a question of right or wrong. Some people’s favorite color might be blue and others prefer purple. It comes down to personal preference.

What I find to be true though is that for certain styles of music, one could be more appropriate. For example, when I sit down at a great European piano that’s beautifully regulated, voiced and in tune and play a piece from the Baroque or Classical eras, a European piano can have a perfect quality of sound. The delicacy and the clarity is well suited to those periods of music. On the other hand, sometimes when you are after a massive sound; you really want an American piano for the big fatness that European pianos can lack.

I’m going to stop right here and say that I’m giving a gross generalization and for everything I’ve said there are absolutely exceptions. For example, I’ve sat down on some Bluthners that didn’t have that quality of sound that I’m describing in European pianos. They sometimes have a dark fatness that you don’t hear typically in European pianos. Baldwin still has the American sound, but some are closer to my ears to the European sound than other American pianos. For example, they aren’t quite as fat and voluptuous as the sound of a Mason Hamlin. There seems to be a lot of overlap in this and what I have offered are general observations. You also have to consider Hamburg Steinway which is afterall, a European piano!

The other thing I find is that the typical European piano can be almost like a fine sports car. You have to be careful not to hit the throttle too hard and lose control. If you put a tremendous amount of energy into a fine European piano, sometimes it’s more than necessary. You can get all the sound needed without having to exert so much energy the way you can on a great Steinway. It’s almost endless. You can just keep putting more and more into it getting different colors. Is that a good thing? Maybe, but for some people, they feel they don’t have to work as hard achieving a wide range of sound out of a great Bechstein for example.

So again, this isn’t a right or wrong issue and ultimately it comes down to two things: personal taste and the specific piano which is equally important. You can’t say that all European pianos are one-way or even that all Steinways are the same. After all, each instrument is handcrafted and they’re made with wood, and no two trees are alike. So you have to listen to each piano for what it offers. These are general guidelines that you can put in the back of your head when you’re trying pianos and see how well the specific piano you sit at meets these criteria.

I hope this has been interesting for you! Again, this is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store! 949-244-3729 info@LivingPianos.com

This sounds like a total contradiction. So, I’m going to show you something really fascinating today! You will hear an example of the famous Mozart Sonata in C major K545. Most of you probably know this sonata. I’m going to be demonstrating with the beautiful and lyrical slow movement. I’m going to first play it in a way that is pretty slow. But it won’t sound slow and I’ll explain why in just a minute.

This movement is in ¾ time and I’m playing every single sixteenth note in the left hand as its own beat. So you’re hearing a lot of motion in the music. Now I could play it at the same tempo or even slightly faster, but hearing the eighth notes as the beat. It will start to sound a little bit slower even at the same tempo or faster.

Finally, we’re going to go one step further and make the quarter note the beat. I will play a little bit faster. Yet, it will sound slower than anything you’ve heard so far. It will have a more relaxed quality. It was Rachmaninoff who said,

“The bigger the phrase, the bigger the musician.”

So in your music, try to think the long notes as the pulse of your music; particularly in slow movements. It will have the benefit of creating a relaxed quality. You will also be able to take faster tempos yet make it sound slower which can really help with slow movements that have repeats because they can get ponderously long if you take them too slowly. You can create a relaxed quality in your music at a faster tempo by hearing the longer notes as the beat.

Some people look at fingerprints on a piano with a high gloss finish and think they will never be able to keep it clean. Interestingly, in many ways a high gloss finish is easier to care for than a satin finish. How can this be? The difference is simple. A high gloss finish on pianos is generally a polyester finish. It is a totally sealed finish. You can actually clean it with Windex without damaging it believe it or not! Be sure to use a soft cotton cloth. You never want to use anything that has any fibers in it because as robust as high gloss finishes are, certain things can mess them up very quickly.

For example, if you take a music book and toss it on the piano making it spin, you’ll notice little tiny hairline scratches on the finish just from tossing the book on the piano. Polyester finishes were first introduced in this country from Asian Manufacturers at the NAMM music trade show. To demonstrate how robust they are, they set a piano on fire! The downside of high gloss finishes is that if they’re damaged, very few people know how to repair them. However, they are generally very strong finishes unless a metal object hits them. Hairline scratches can be buffed out by a professional furniture person if they’re not too deep.

Satin Finishes

Satin finishes are somewhat porous finishes which are hand-rubbed. They have multi-layers of lacquer, yet they’re still open finishes. You’ll see fingerprints in the finish and may wonder how to polish them out. You do not want to use cleaning products like pledge because they leave a wax residue which can build up over time and must be professionally removed. There are some piano polishes which are specifically designed for satin or high gloss piano finishes which won’t damage the piano. General furniture polishes are not advisable on pianos.

How do you clean a satin finish? It’s really simple: you take a soft cotton cloth and rub it in the direction of the grain of the finish. If there are persistent blemishes from dirty hands or even just the natural oils in your skin, take a slightly damp cloth and rub it in the direction of the grain of the finish. You should be able to get rid of all the fingerprints so long as there is nothing embedded in there or if it got dented by a sharp object.

I wear shoes that are comfortable and don’t squeak. It’s always important to test your shoes to make sure you don’t get pedal squeak. It can sometimes happen depending upon the sole of the shoes. I’ve worn so many different types of shoes – even sneakers and all sorts of other footwear. I’ve even played barefoot! It’s possible to play the piano with all sorts of different types of shoes. Sometimes I see women wearing high heels and I wonder how they can negotiate the pedal!

A great deal of it comes down to what you are used to. Of course, if you’re going to be playing a concert, you want to test the shoes you’re going to be wearing and be comfortable with them. Just imagine if you practice all the time in sandals. Then you go out in a public performance wearing dress shoes and feel a dramatic difference in the feel of the pedal. This could be a real challenge! So, you have to get used to the shoes you’re going to wear in performance.

The other thing to consider is that pedals, as I’ve talked about before, are different on all pianos. So, some pedals travel a very short distance and other pedals travel quite far. Also, where they engage is different. Even the height of pedals can be different. Have you ever had the experience of going to a piano that’s on one of those spider dollies or an upright on a dolly in a school? The whole piano can be up high and you’re trying to reach the pedals at a drastic angle. This can be tough to deal with!

I’ve actually had the circumstance of playing in concerts where the piano was on one of those dollies, so the piano was higher from the floor than usual and it was uncomfortable. I was also sitting too low even with the bench in the highest position. We found a piece of ¾ inch plywood to put the bench on extending all the way underneath the pedals as well, and that solved the problem perfectly!

There are a lot of solutions to the myriad situations you find with pianos, but one thing to note is the importance of getting used to wearing a variety of shoes. It’s one less variable to worry about. Test the shoes you are planning to wear for a performance, ideally on the piano you are going to be playing on and you should be in good shape.

You may have heard the term “Asian Production Pianos.” What does that mean? Here is some historical context. The piano industry started in Europe centuries ago offering hand-built pianos from many manufacturers. Eventually manufacturing migrated to the United States which had well over 1,000 companies making pianos a century ago. The Japanese followed with the giants, Yamaha and Kawai. This is when the scale of production increased to a point where technologies were employed to produce massive numbers of pianos which would be classified as “Asian Production Pianos”. Later the Koreans produced pianos including Samick and Young Chang. Today, hundreds of companies in China are manufacturing pianos. The vast majority of these pianos are production pianos meaning that they produce vast numbers of instruments.

Just because pianos are made in Asia does not necessarily mean that they are Asian production pianos. Here is an example: Yamaha is a very large piano manufacturer and they make many pianos and many of them would be classified as Asian production pianos. Even their CX series would be in my opinion classified as an Asian production piano. This simply means that they make a lot of them! When you take a company like Mason Hamlin which only make around 100 to 150 pianos a year and European companies like Sauter which make a only a few hundred pianos a year, these are hand-crafted pianos. Steinway is the most notable example of hand-built pianos of the highest order.

When it comes to production pianos, Pearl River would be a classic example. Last year they made around 130,000 pianos! Obviously, there have to be technologies employed to this massive scale of production from seasoning woods to crafting actions with thousands of parts. Just one of their factories is over 1 million square feet ! So, that is a great example of an Asian production piano. However, Pearl River does have other name brands they sell in more limited quantities with more hand work.

When it comes to Yamaha, just because it’s a Yamaha doesn’t mean that it’s an Asian production piano. They have their CF and SX series which are hand built pianos. I would not classify these as Asian production pianos even though they are produced by Yamaha. They are handmade in limited production in separate factories from where they make their other pianos such as the CX series.