Has anyone ever made a backwards piano? Shouldn’t left handed people have a go of it with a piano where the high keys are on the bottom and the low keys are on the top? It seems like a crazy idea but indeed, the Dutch team Poletti and Tuinman built such a piano. I think about the fact that we’ve learned how to play piano as it is, what an arduous task it would be to relearn the piano!

Famously, there are some guitar players such as Jimi Hendrix who played guitar flipped over. Some players even reversed the strings – and that’s interesting enough! But here’s an interesting fact: You can actually try out a backwards piano! How can this be? There is music software available which I first utilized back in the 1990s from Mark of the Unicorn called, Performer. It had a function where you could set the MIDI keyboard controller to play the notes in reverse order from top to bottom. I found it so fascinating to hear pieces played upside down! One of the facts of inverting music is that everything major becomes minor and everything minor becomes major. As a result, you get really interesting music. It’s like hearing an entirely fresh piece with a totally different emotional content that can still work heard upside down!

If you ever get a chance to play an upside down keyboard, which is probably going to be through MIDI because it’s hard to find any actual pianos built that way, you’re going to find that you can play pieces you know and have refreshing new compositions you can play instantly almost like whole new pieces!

The bottom line is this, you need some conventions in the world. For example, in your country, you know what side of the street to drive on. Imagine how haphazard it would be otherwise. It’s the same thing with the piano. To relearn everything would be an arduous task. Indeed, with the piano you have to be ambidextrous anyway because both hands have an equal role to play. But it is certainly fascinating playing such a piano.

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com. info@livingpianos.com

The Backwards Piano – A Left-Handed Piano?

Has anyone ever made a backwards piano? Shouldn’t left handed people have a go of it with a piano where the high keys are on the bottom and the low keys are on the top? It seems like a crazy idea but indeed, the Dutch team Poletti and Tuinman built

I have vast experience with editing recordings, having owned several recording studios over the years and have been present during my father’s recording sessions from a young age. I have produced countless albums as well as demo recordings. Yes, there is editing in Classical recordings and you might wonder how this works. You play a piece, and miss a note. So, can you put the correct note in there? How does it work? With modern technology you almost can! In previous years, not that long ago in the days of tape, it was possible to razorblade edit and you would not believe what was possible even then!

Here’s the key: To be able to get successful edits in music, you have to have a keen understanding of the work. That’s why the producer of a recording and the engineer have to understand music in a deep way. For example, if you were to try to edit a performance to make a perfect recording by playing until you missed something, then started there and continued on to the next place you missed, then going through the whole piece that way, you might get all the notes, but you probably will not get much of a musical performance. Continuity and cohesiveness has to be achieved in the editing process. So what is generally done is to play complete works several times. You choose the best take as the foundation and replace key sections to achieve accuracy.

You don’t just put in missed notes here and there, but you might take the first exposition of a sonata and maybe a development from a different take then perhaps the recapitulation will come back to the first take. If there’s a particularly thorny section of a piece of music that is really difficult to play accurately, it’s important to remember that you cannot edit in anything that you can’t play. You have to be able to play all the notes at some point! If there’s a particularly difficult section, they might have the performer play that section many times so they know it’s covered. In a worst case scenario, it’s possible to cut in before and after that section. It’s critical to know where you’re going to try to cut in later so that you don’t just try to squeeze something in.

If you have total silence, you can always cut in. A strong, decisive chord that punctuates a new section can mask edits as well. So there’s a great deal of editing in recordings, but not the way you may think. It’s not about replacing missed notes even though with digital technology that may be possible. It’s almost at the point where you can do that, but you’ll never get a fluid performance on a high level of expression and continuity trying to edit that way. You’ve got to be able to play the notes, it’s just a matter of saving time. Think how many performances you would have to do in order to get a perfect performance of a work that takes 20 or 30 minutes. You might miss one little thing here or there which may go unnoticed in a live performance, but in a recording you listen to again and again it becomes an annoyance. So, in a best case scenario, editing enables note perfect recordings in the hands of a producer who has the ability to draw out the best performance of an artist.

Is There Editing in Classical Recordings?

I have vast experience with editing recordings, having owned several recording studios over the years and have been present during my father’s recording sessions from a young age. I have produced countless albums as well as demo recordings. Yes, th

Do Classical performers play exactly what is written? There’s a lot to this question. Of course, naturally, Classical pianists strive for accuracy. But what is accurate? There is a real challenge with composers who lived hundreds of years ago. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to look at some of the great composers’ scores, Beethoven comes to mind, there are scrawls on the page and sections scribbled out. Trying to decipher what they meant is no easy task.

It takes a lot of scholarly work. That’s why the editions you look at is critical and there are urtext editions which strive to present exactly what the composers wrote. How do they know what the composers wrote? Sometimes there are autographed scores and early editions and there are often discrepancies. Decisions have to be made as to what the composers’ intentions really were. Particularly with composers with sloppy calligraphy, it can be a real task! Ultimately, the performer must have conviction about the notes they play regardless of what is supposedly authoritative. If something seems wrong, you shouldn’t play it even if it is supposed to be authoritative. Maybe somewhere somebody got it wrong! You must have conviction as to what you’re playing.

There’s an entire other side to this question that is perhaps even more significant which is this: the musical score only has notes, rhythm, phrasing and expression. There is a whole lot more to the music than that! Consider this analogy of a play or motion picture. The words are all written out, yet the actor or actress must take those written words and create a character out of it. The words themselves really don’t come to life until the performer creates that character.

Exactly the same thing is true with a musical performance. The notes are just the skeleton of the work and it’s your job as a performer to flesh out the living, breathing work of music. In order to do that, many decisions have to be made that are not in the score. You might wonder what else there is besides the notes, rhythm, phrasing and expression. There are the ups and downs of the expression as well as rubato (the slight speeding up and slowing down in Romantic period music) which gives flavor and emotion to the music.

All of these things and more are left up to the performer. So it’s more than just a matter of accuracy, it’s all the things a performer brings to a performance to turn it into a piece of music. There are only basic directions in the score. So that’s the job of the performer. It’s not just about being accurate and if you want to prove that to yourself, listen to a computer playing a score of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin or anyone else. You can program in everything and still it’s no music is it?

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com info@livingpianos.com

Should You Play Music Exactly as Written?

Do Classical performers play exactly what is written? There’s a lot to this question. Of course, naturally, Classical pianists strive for accuracy. But what is accurate? There is a real challenge with composers who lived hundreds of years ago. If y

Some pipe organs can produce frequencies lower than the threshold of human hearing which is around 20 cycles per second. The Bösendorfer Imperial which goes all the way down to the C below the standard low A on other pianos produces notes lower than 20 cycles per second. Part of this phenomenon can be explained by the how you can feel rather than hear those extremely low frequencies. Certainly a massive pipe organ in a cathedral can energize an entire room with sonic energy with low, rumbling frequencies. But there is much more to it than that and it has to do with the overtone series.

I have a video about atonality which touches on the overtone series:

DOES ATONALITY GO AGAINST NATURE? THE OVERTONE SERIES – ATONALITY PART 2

The overtone series is a characteristic of all pitched sounds in nature as well as musical instruments. Anything that makes pitched sounds contains color tones above the fundamental tone. It’s a series of tones that goes up by an octave, then a fifth, then two octaves above the fundamental pitch and on and on. All these color tones affect the quality of the tone. That’s why in its simplest form a trumpet sounds distinctly different from a violin playing the same pitch. It has to do with the overtone series and how these overtones interact. So when you’re hearing an extremely low note, you are actually hearing more overtones than fundamental pitch! Your mind constructs the fundamental pitch particularly in descending lines that go lower than your hearing.

As a young child I performed an experiment utilizing my father’s tape recorder and my tape recorder. I recorded the lowest note of the piano at one speed, then played it back 4 times faster which raised the pitch 2 octaves. To my shock, instead of hearing a single note I head a chord! This is because on smaller grand pianos, the fundamental tone is so weak, that the overtones are actually as loud or louder than the fundamental tone! So, this is how you’re able to hear notes that are below 20 cycles per second such as the Bösendorfer Imperial which goes lower than your hearing as do some pipe organs with immense pipes that produce frequencies in the low double digits of frequencies. It’s not only that you feel the room shaking, but you hear the overtones and you surmise the fundamental pitch that you can’t actually hear. So the question is answered for you very simply, you’re not hearing something you can’t hear but your mind makes an image of that low tone in a convincing way.

Again, this is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. info@LivingPianos.com

How Can You Hear Lower than Human Hearing?

Some pipe organs can produce frequencies lower than the threshold of human hearing which is around 20 cycles per second. The Bösendorfer Imperial which goes all the way down to the C below the standard low A on other pianos produces notes lower than

This is a really loaded question. A lot of people think they should learn the notes of a piece first and later add the fingering, phrasing and expression. There’s a great fallacy in thinking that you can learn just the notes first. You might think that you should at least learn the rhythm with the notes and maybe you might even think the fingering should be learned initially. But can you add the expression and phrasing later? Here’s why this just doesn’t work.

Whenever you play a piece of music, you’re reinforcing the performance. The fallacy is that you can play without phrasing or expression such as dynamics. It’s virtually impossible to play without any phrasing or expression. How can this be? Well, what is phrasing? Phrasing is basically the way in which notes are connected or detached. So, if you play a passage that is written to be played staccato and you’re playing it legato, you are learning wrong phrasing. You will become used to playing it that way. The same is true for expression.

Why can’t you just add the expression later – things like dynamics (loud and soft). It’s because you’re always playing at a dynamic level! So if something is written to be played softly (piano) and you’re playing it medium loud (mezzo forte), you’re learning the wrong dynamic. Not that you’re meaning to, but you can’t play without dynamics. So, you’re learning the wrong dynamics and here’s why it’s so important to learn correctly all of the elements of your score right from the beginning. It’s because

Unlearning is much harder than learning.

Once you reinforce mistakes, getting rid of them is incredibly difficult and it takes massive amounts of practice to unlearn what you’ve solidified wrong.

So you may think you’re going to just get the notes and that you will add other elements later. This is a great mistake that does not serve you well in your practice. Take the extra time as you’re learning your music to learn all the details of the score right from the beginning and you will be rewarded by not having to go through the tedious process of trying to unlearn what is learned wrong.

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com. info@LivingPianos.com

Should You Learn the Notes of a Piece First?

This is a really loaded question. A lot of people think they should learn the notes of a piece first and later add the fingering, phrasing and expression. There’s a great fallacy in thinking that you can learn just the notes first. You might think

The questions today is, “Do performers make mistakes?” I am referring specifically to Classical performers. You see them on stage playing and it seems effortless and perfect, but do they make mistakes? There is a lot to this question because first of all, of course performers make mistakes and brilliant performers sometimes have train wrecks, but it’s quite rare. Usually what happens is there’ll be something that may distract the performer and they have a mishap, but unless you’re intimately familiar with the score, seasoned performers know how to hide the mistakes well enough to not disrupt the performance. It’s not just that they’re trying to make themselves look great, it’s also that they don’t want the audience to feel uncomfortable.

This is an important skill, but there is more to it than that because performers today actually do play scarily accurately. If you compare performers from a generation or two ago, some of the greatest pianists of all time like Alfred Cortot, Arthur Rubinstein to Artur Schnabel, there are countless recordings that were made years ago where you’ll hear mistakes often in pre-WWII recordings of great artists with lots of missed notes. It is important to note that these recordings were made before the advent of editing. Yet even live performances today are on a much higher level of accuracy generally than years ago. What happened and how is everybody playing so accurately today and what does this mean?

I’ve talked about this quite a bit and of course today it’s quite obvious everybody hears everyone because of the internet. Even before that we had a generation of musicians growing up hearing edited recordings that were note perfect. As a result, everyone is expected to achieve this high level and there’s a certain homogenization of interpretations and tempos as well as voicing and other aspects of performance because everybody knows how everyone else plays. There is a standard level that is accepted today whereas years ago there was much greater variety. It’s true that the accuracy of performers and the sheer technical mastery that so many pianists and other instrumentalists have achieved is awe-inspiring.

On the flip side there isn’t as much experimentation. When listening to historical recordings, made from 78 rpm records, performers often take chances and liberties that nobody would dare today. Occasionally they’d fall flat on their faces. But when they didn’t, they achieved highs rarely heard anymore. So, accuracy is important and it is important not to make an audience feel uncomfortable. But yes, performers do make mistakes even though they hide them extremely well! It’s not all about accuracy, is it? I’m interested in your comments which you post here on LivingPianos.com or on YouTube. It’s a great subject and I would like to know what some of you think about the great old performers and if the missed notes are too bothersome to where you’d rather have more perfect performances even if it sacrifices a bit of the wild expression! Thanks for joining me Robert@LivingPianos.com.

Do Performers Make Mistakes?

The questions today is, “Do performers make mistakes?” I am referring specifically to Classical performers. You see them on stage playing and it seems effortless and perfect, but do they make mistakes? There is a lot to this question beca

What is an acceptable level of action noise on a piano? You might not have ever thought about this before, but the action indeed with almost a hundred parts to each note can have some noise to it, particularly older actions. There is a way I like to test pianos. First of all, having the lid opened or closed is going to make a dramatic difference in the amount of action noise you hear. When a piano is open on a grand piano or in an upright that has the possibility of lifting up the lid or some other way of getting the sound out, you’re going to hear the mechanical noise of the action.

One way you can test how much noise your action has is to push down on a bunch of keys with the palms of your hands and then let up very quickly. Pianos that are older and are located in dry environments can have dried out leather and felt parts. This can cause extraneous noise. There can be a lot of reasons for that. So, what do you do about such a thing? Well, if the parts are not too far gone, sometimes they can be treated with chemicals to soften them up or even brushed with metal brushes to get these parts to soften up to lessen the action noise. Other times, the parts are too far gone and parts do have to be replaced in order to get a high level of performance and to minimize the level of noise.

So what is an acceptable level of noise depends upon the kind of music you play as well as the situation. For example, if you like to play aggressive pop music or rock, action noise is really not going to be much of a problem because the sound of your music is always going to be above the level of the action noise. Perhaps for a new age pianist or anyone who plays delicate music, the noise could be more distracting. As I mentioned earlier, if the piano is opened or closed, it is going to determine how much noise you hear from the action.

In recording situations, it can be vital to have a dead quiet action, particularly if you use close miking techniques for certain types of sonorities. The miking of a piano has a dramatic effect upon its tone. A close microphone can capture a very intimate kind of compressed sound that can be very appealing for certain styles of music, but you must have a really quiet action or it can be very distracting to your recordings. So, you can determine if action noise is a problem for you on your piano. I hope this has been helpful for you – info@LivingPianos.com

What is an Acceptable Level of Action Noise on a Piano?

What is an acceptable level of action noise on a piano? You might not have ever thought about this before, but the action indeed with almost a hundred parts to each note can have some noise to it, particularly older actions. There is a way I like to

Is it okay to use the pedal when playing Bach? This is a great question and there are many different ideas about this. Why should there even be issues with using the pedal or not when it comes to playing Bach? Bach lived from 1685 to 1750 and the very earliest pianos were invented just around 1700. While Bach got a chance to try some of these early instruments, he really never wrote for the piano. He never wrote for any specific keyboard instrument other than the organ. All his other works are written for clavier, which means simply “keyboard”. It is up to the performer to decide which keyboard. No keyboards had pedals anytime during Bach’s life (other than the organ, but that’s a completely different matter).

There are many purists who feel that you shouldn’t use the pedal simply because Bach did not have one. Other people feel that if Bach was alive today, he would love to use the pedal! There are different schools of thought. There is some music that absolutely calls for the pedal. Why? Music is written sometimes where there are notes to be held, yet you run out of fingers since you have to move your hands to another part of the keyboard. So the only way to hold those notes that are written to be held is to sustain them by using the pedal.

You can certainly play Bach without the pedal and get very good results. When I studied with Ruth Slenczynska, she insisted upon using no pedal in Bach and it works great! I am going to offer an example, of the beginning of Bach’s 5th French Suite. Why would you use pedal and how would you use pedal in Bach? You don’t use it to connect notes that you can’t hold with your fingers because there is nothing that is written that necessitates the use of the of the pedal for this purpose. Instead you use the pedal to add color. You’ll notice that even in this fast music, there are little touches of pedal to enhance the tone of key notes.

The important thing is that you must practice Bach using no pedal at all. In fact, I recommend practicing all of your music without any pedal until you can play as connected as possible finding the best fingering that accomplishes this first. Then it becomes obvious where the pedal can be utilized.

I am going to play the first section of the Bach 5th French Suite with the repeat as written. The first time I will play it with no pedal. Then upon the repeat, I will utilize the pedal to add color. If you listen to the video, you can determine which performance you prefer. I would love to hear from all of you in the comments on LivingPianos.com and YouTube.

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com. info@LivingPianos.com

Should You Use the Piano Pedal In Bach?

Is it okay to use the pedal when playing Bach? This is a great question and there are many different ideas about this. Why should there even be issues with using the pedal or not when it comes to playing Bach? Bach lived from 1685 to 1750 and the ver

Is the music industry imploding? This sounds like a horrible topic to bring up, but it occurred to me because there are a couple of big bankruptcies going on right now that you may or may not be aware of. One of them is the venerable American guitar manufacturer Gibson. They have been around for over 100 years and they are one of the leading guitar makers in the world. Yet they are facing bankruptcy. Gibson owns many different brand names including drum companies, other guitar brands like Epiphone and Steinberger and more.

They carry a whole range of products, even pianos! Gibson has been involved in the piano business and owns names like Baldwin, Wurlitzer, Chickering, and Hamilton. So, they are an important segment of the piano industry. What got Gibson in trouble more than anything was expanding their business into consumer audio. They own Teac and Phillips. Perhaps they should have just stayed with their core mission of musical instruments because they were doing just fine with that for a long time. Hopefully, they will be rescued from bankruptcy and will emerge stronger once they let go of some of their ancillary businesses.

The other bankruptcy is one that’s extremely troubling and may be related in some way which I’ll explain in a moment. The other company trying to stave off bankruptcy is the huge retailer, Guitar Center. Any of you who follow Guitar Center may not be shocked by this because although they’re the biggest music retailer in the United States, they have been very leveraged for a long time. Purchased by private equity firm Bain Capital in 2007, they’ve amassed major debt having suffered through the economic downturn caused by the housing crises. All the while they have been opening up new stores at a furious rate. In fact, they’re so big that Guitar Center by themselves is bigger than the next 27 American music retail companies combined! So it is a big deal when a major force in the music industry like this is facing bankruptcy.

Part of it I think has more to do with guitars than anything else because people were buying guitars at a voracious rate not that long ago and things have stabilized somewhat which could explain both the Gibson and Guitar Center bankruptcies. I’m sure there’s a lot more to it and I believe that some of this may be coincidental. It just seems shocking that two major companies are facing bankruptcies at the same time. Music will always be with us. I am an eternal optimist in this regard. But we all have to do our parts to support music wherever we can and in any way as educators, performers and as audiences. So let’s keep music alive and hope these companies emerge stronger and fresh companies grow in the music industry so future generations can enjoy music.

Is the Music Industry Imploding?

Is the music industry imploding? This sounds like a horrible topic to bring up, but it occurred to me because there are a couple of big bankruptcies going on right now that you may or may not be aware of. One of them is the venerable American guitar