Piano and Music Videos

This is Robert Estrin with LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store with a viewer question. “Why don’t they make pianos like they used to?” So many of the magnificent, American pianos from years ago are just names stenciled on the front of Asian production pianos today. Names you don’t even hear about anymore like AB Chase, Knabe and Chickering were wonderful pianos years ago. There were well over a thousand companies producing pianos in the United States and dozens of companies were making stupendous pianos! You might wonder why they don’t make pianos like they used to.

Have you ever gone downtown and seen a beautiful old car and asked yourself, “Why don’t they make the ‘57 Chevy anymore? It’s such a cool car! I wish they would make Corvettes like they used to!” With cars, it’s pretty obvious. As technologies move on, mileage and safety standards have generally made cars better. But what about pianos?

Have pianos improved?

Not necessarily. However, they do make pianos the way they used to, just in very tiny numbers. Steinway and Mason and Hamlin are both manufacturing a limited number of pianos in the United States very much like they used to. However, Mason & Hamlin is utilizing newer technologies in their actions using synthetic materials in place of traditional wood parts. There are some new rigs and new robotics utilized in manufacturing, but for the most part, American pianos utilize Old World style of wet sand cast plate, hardwood rim, and a tremendous amount of handcrafting. Indeed, many of the great German and other European piano manufacturers from over a hundred years ago are still building pianos like they did centuries ago with the addition of some computer-aided design and manufacturing techniques for more exacting standards of production.

The vast majority of pianos today are made in Asia with a very different methodology from American and European pianos.

You might wonder why. Just look at the difference in the price of a Bechstein or a Steinway compared to a Kawai or a Samick. Asian companies produce pianos that are fully functional and quite good for a fraction of the cost of hand-crafted pianos by utilizing different technologies. Take a company like Pearl River. There aren’t too many companies like them!

Pearl River made over 140,000 pianos last year!

It’s a mind-boggling number. There is no way they could be producing pianos the same way Steinway does. Steinway made a little over a thousand pianos last year. It is just not a scalable manufacturing process.

In order to be able to produce a large number of pianos on a consistent level, it is necessary to be able to utilize newer technologies and newer materials in order to accomplish that. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. If you want that Old World style of piano building, they are available if you’ve got the bucks to pay for them. But, vast amounts of resources have been opened up to people who couldn’t afford those pianos. Some of the modernization and new techniques of making pianos in a way they didn’t have before opens up a whole segment of the market to pianos. In China, where they bought 450,000 new pianos last year, obviously those weren’t mostly hand-built instruments. It would be impossible!

That is why they don’t make pianos the way they used to. It opens up markets at different price points. Yet, those Old World style pianos are still available in very small numbers for very high prices. I hope this has been interesting for you. I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com.

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Robert Estrin here from LivingPianos.com with another great question. When was the golden age of pianos? You may have heard the term, “Golden Era”, particularly referring to American pianos. Did you know,

A hundred years ago there were over a thousand companies manufacturing pianos in the United States!

Even before the Great Depression and the crash of the stock market in 1929 there were still hundreds of piano companies in the U.S. The piano was as ubiquitous in homes as big screen televisions are today and in no small part by the player piano.

The player piano was the first home entertainment system.

In the late 1920’s the piano plummeted as radio and phonograph technologies came about. Of course when the Great Depression hit, the piano industry was heavily impacted. The golden era was really before this time. Yet, you could say it extended to before World War II when there were still hundreds of piano companies in this country.

However, during the 1930’s there was tremendous attrition of the piano market for the reasons I articulated: The Great Depression as well as technologies in audio such as radio and the phonograph dealt a death blow to the piano market. Yet there were still many companies making fine pianos.

Ten times more new pianos were sold in the United States sometime between the turn of the century and before World War I.

Remember, that was when the population was less than ⅓ of what we have today! The piano was extremely popular. That was the golden era.

Today, the piano has a renascence of activity in:

China where there are more companies manufacturing pianos than there are piano stores in the United States!

80% of the world’s piano students are in China today. You’ve got to be thankful that the piano is alive and well, just not in the United States like it used to be.

Of course, there are many of you who love the piano just as I do and they will always be around. Keep the questions coming in, again I’m Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

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This is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store with the question: What is the future of player piano technology? If you’ve been paying attention in the last couple of decades to what has been going on in this field, it is pretty fantastic. Player pianos have a long, rich history going back to the 19th Century. This was a contraption that went in front of your piano to play it. Soon after was an explosion of the player piano. Every home had to have one, much like how we have big-screen televisions today in just about every home. They were incredibly popular. Three times more pianos were purchased back then than today, with a population less than a third of what it is now. It was really the glory days of the player piano at the turn of the century until the 1920’s when the phonograph and radio came in and wiped out the player piano. However, they made a resurgence in the 1980s with the cassette-based player, floppy disks, CDs, and today we have wireless player pianos.

Wireless Piano Player Technology

Wireless player pianos can both record and play back performances. Yamaha’s Disklavier has been doing that for years on a very high level. Steinway with their Spirio system can now record and playback impeccably. There are other amazing things they can do. For example, the libraries that were created on the piano rolls of the expressive players, which they had at the turn of the century, offers performances of composers and pianists who may have recorded on 78 RPM awful sounding recordings. They recorded on piano rolls which recorded every nuance of their playing and have since been digitized. You can listen to Rachmaninoff or Gershwin play ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ on your modern player piano.

On the Spirio system and the Disklavier, they have their artists come in and make titles. They have other instruments that play through audio in perfect synchronization. You can even have videos of your performers and your piano plays live with the video. These are all things that are happening now. There are other features you may not be aware of. Disklavier can have concerts in multiple cities simultaneously by having their systems set up in concert halls. Auditions are also done this way so that people don’t have to travel so far. They may have a West Coast center and a New York center where people can play at and the judges can be wherever they want to be. The piano will play the same part for them, live.

What is on the horizon with player piano technology?

Are we done? Not by a long shot. One thing that Steinway is doing is taking old audio recordings of Horowitz, Rubinstein, and others and are digitizing them so that your piano plays their actual piano performance, even if they never made piano rolls. That technology may get good enough so that you could do that on your own someday. It isn’t there yet, but it is something to look forward to.

Another thing to look for is the emergence of hybrid pianos. Hybrid pianos use the front end of an acoustic piano, the action, with a digital sound generation. Combine that with player technology and the possibilities are endless. What is in store with player piano technologies? We can only guess. It has been very exciting in the last few years. I look forward myself and have been working on a prototype of a new category of modular concert grand systems that you’ll be hearing more about.

So glad to have you join me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. The question today is, “Is socialism good for music?” This is a very complex question and there’s a lot to think about. So, let’s start with the first thing that’s probably going to come to a lot of your minds, which is the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had quite a vibrant music scene and composers like Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, and others, were funded by the government and had illustrious careers and wrote great music. Shostakovich, in particular, suffered under authoritarian rule. It was great that the artists were funded. There were phenomenal performers such as cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, pianist Sviatoslav Richter as well as many orchestral musicians who could make a decent living. But at the same time,

Authoritarian rule was a heavy hand telling people what they could play and what they could compose.

The music had to glorify the state. So it was really a double-edged sword. What about today? Is there socialized music today? Socialism is essentially something that is publicly funded.

Germany has 133 symphony orchestras that are publicly funded.

That’s in addition to private orchestras. They have a vibrant classical music scene! Now, not all of them have budgets as high as the Berlin Philharmonic. There are different tiers of orchestras just like there are here.

In the United States, orchestras are endowed with private donations

and are always struggling. Many go bankrupt and there are fewer and fewer of them as the years go on. So, Germany has something going that is vibrant for the classical music scene. Is there any socialized music in the United States? Can you believe there are 140 publicly funded bands?

There are 5,000 professional musicians paid for with our tax dollars right here in the United States.

In fact, the government spent 1.5 billion dollars in a recent four year period on military bands. There are 140 military bands in the U.S. The Air Force, Marines, the Army, and the Navy all have music programs. They spent over $155 million just on instruments and equipment in that same recent four year period. So, there’s a tremendous amount of money going into music in this country, and that’s basically a social program for music and musicians. It’s all about how money is spent and how it’s delegated along with the rules that come with it. The Soviet Union was very harsh, glorifying music for the Communist Party. And in Germany, it’s glorifying the great traditions of Western music. And here it’s about the military. So, there are different ways that public money can be utilized in music. I’d love to get your opinions about the different ways public funding can help music and what your thoughts are about what I’ve outlined here today. I’d love to hear from you. Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store.

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949-244-3729

This is LivingPianos.com and I am Robert Estrin with a great subject today, Unique Problems with Steinway Pianos.

Steinway pianos are the de facto standard in the concert world.

In fact, it’s the only company left that still supports the concert market with concert grands in virtually all major cities in the world. This is an arduous task when you consider the cost of each one is in the six figures! Steinway in different periods of time had problems and I’m going to bring up two of them today.

Fortunately, Steinway pianos being manufactured today do not suffer from either of these problems.

I want to let you know that right out of the gate. But early in the 20th century, Steinway had an idea of a way that they could make actions last longer and be less susceptible to corrosion. They used a solution containing paraffin on their actions. If you ever looked at old Steinway pianos or sat down at an old Steinway that’s been neglected, it may have played like a truck. You can look inside and the hammers go up and down very gradually. There’s no speed. Everything’s gummed up. You can actually see green in all the little felt bushings of all the hundreds of action parts on each key. That is an example of vertebrae.

Verdigris is a condition in which a piano action becomes corroded.

This paraffin solution had exactly the opposite effect of the intention that Steinway had in avoiding corrosion. Unfortunately, in certain environments, the actions would gum up like crazy! Sometimes it’s possible to get things moving by treating the action parts with different chemicals. However, with really severe verdigris, all you can do is rebuild the action with all new parts.
Sometimes you can replace center pins if it’s not a really bad problem. You can also try lubricating. But oftentimes problems will recur. With humidity, the air gets inside the piano. You might think you’ve got the problem solved and everything’s moving nicely. Then, a month later, it starts gumming up again. So that’s one problem of early 20th-century Steinways.

Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about vertigris on newer Steinway pianos.

The second problem was in Steinway’s CBS era when they experimented with something else that sounded like a great idea. The thousands of felt parts in actions wear out and are susceptible to humidity. So, Steinway engineers thought about utilizing Teflon.

From around 1968 to 1982 Steinway used Teflon in their piano actions.

What’s wrong with this? I’m a believer that oftentimes there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. However, the problems that plagued them is that some pianos that went to extreme environments the wood would swell and contract with the weather. Of course, Teflon is hard. This created space between the Teflon and the wood creating noise in the actions. Sometimes, rebuilding the actions are necessary for these circumstances. However, I will say this:

The vast majority of the time, the biggest problem with Teflon actions, is finding technicians who know how to service them properly.

Oftentimes Teflon itself isn’t the problem. Using slightly larger center pins can sometimes solve the problem if the Teflon is worn. However, Teflon is very robust and can last many, many years. Teflon is not necessarily a problem. In fact, if I was buying a Steinway piano from that era and it had Teflon and there were no problems, I wouldn’t be concerned. Now, it doesn’t mean there would never be problems. But you know what? It doesn’t matter what piano you have, things will require servicing eventually and parts will wear out if you play a good deal.

That’s the long and short of Teflon. It was something they tried and they eventually gave up the practice. The idea of piano actions that don’t wear out so quickly is a very appealing idea and I applaud them for trying something. If you have a piano with Teflon, if it isn’t giving you problems, you should be fine. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. As long as it’s functioning well, you’re in good shape.

Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store. Keep the questions coming in! info@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729