Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to take your piano playing to the next level. This is a really fascinating subject. This transcends piano. It even transcends other musical instruments! With almost anything anyone wants to master, it really comes down to a critical mass of practicing. What do I mean by this? The term critical mass is typically associated in physics with radioactive material. You put enough of it together and it starts a chain reaction. But you could have plutonium and it would never start a chain reaction, no matter how much you have, unless you put enough of it in one space at one time. That’s what causes the chain reaction. It’s the same thing with your piano practice or any other endeavor you want to master.
There has to be an extended period of time where you’re spending just about every waking moment at the piano.
Anyone who’s really mastered an instrument has gone through this process. Once you go through that process, you will be forever changed. You will be on another level. You can depend upon what you have given yourself with that experience. Another example of this, since I’m into physics, is something called escape velocity. For example, if you were to go into a rocket, and just keep going and going and going straight up, you will never go into orbit. In fact, the way to go into orbit is not by how far you go, but how fast you go. You have to reach a certain speed to escape the force of Earth’s gravitational pull. There has to be enough speed generated. You have to have enough energy to be able to get your piano playing on that level.
You can practice for your whole life one or two hours a day and never reach that pinnacle of achievement of a true virtuoso technique.
To be a really accomplished concert level player, you have to go through this process. There is no substitute for that. Now that I’ve made this bold statement, since a lot of people watch my videos, I’m interested in your feelings about this. It doesn’t have to be just piano, any field of endeavor. Are there any of you who feel you’ve mastered painting, or physics, or anything, and you haven’t gone through that process of total absorption for an extended amount of time? I want to hear from you! I want to know if it’s possible, because my feeling is that it’s not possible. I believe that’s what it takes, and there is no shortcut to that. You can grow. You can become better. But you’re never going to be on that top echelon level without going through this process. Talk to any friends you have who have mastered their instrument or their craft, and ask them if they’ve gone through this process. I’m really interested in the comments on this one here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. I’m here today with the piano owned by Thomas Edison! This piano was purchased by Thomas Edison in 1890 for $725! It’s a Steinway Model B with 85 keys, which is the last year Steinway offered pianos with less than 88 keys. This piano has had some restoration, but is largely original. There are other artifacts about it that are so fascinating, you’re not going to believe it!
This instrument was one of the first pianos ever recorded!
Everybody knows that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but he also invented the phonograph two years earlier in 1877. I have here a recording made, perhaps on this piano, from the late 1800s. It’s played on an original Edison phonograph which used wax cylinders instead of familiar discs. You can hear quite a difference in the recording quality compared to modern recording. But it is remarkable that recordings could be made so long ago. I have the original invoice here from 1890 from Steinway, and a letter Thomas Edison wrote to Steinway from his laboratory.
From the Laboratory
of
Thomas A. Edison
Orange, New Jersey, June 2nd, 90-
Steinway and Sons,
Gents,
I have decided to keep your grand piano.
For some reason unknown to me It gives
better results than any so far tried.
Please send bill with lowest price.
Yours,
Thomas A. Edison
Isn’t that unbelievable? Well, you might wonder where this piano came from.
I’m very pleased to introduce to you someone who you may have seen before here at LivingPianos.com, The Steinway Hunter: Bob Friedman who located this piano and whose home in upstate New York I am in right now.
Robert Estrin:
Bob, it’s a pleasure to be with you here.
Bob Friedman:
Well, thank you. It’s nice that you came to visit me.
Robert Estrin:
A lot of people might not know that you are The Steinway Hunter.
You have perhaps found and sold more Steinway pianos than anyone ever!
I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s arguably true, wouldn’t you say?
Bob Friedman:
I’d say that I haven’t stopped for close to 50 years now. So if I get up to bat every day and do this until the big leagues close, then maybe that will be true!
Robert Estrin:
I know there are so many great stories in The Steinway Hunter, your book, which is a fabulous read. But tell us about how you came upon this piano.
Bob Friedman:
Interestingly enough, it was put up for sale on EstateSale.com in Huntington, Long Island.
Robert Estrin:
Did they even know what they had?
Bob Friedman:
They knew what they had, but they didn’t know the value in the history of the instrument. After all the research was done and all the paperwork confirmed that it was Thomas Edison’s piano, the one that was in his laboratory music room from 1890 when he purchased it new from Steinway until 1929. I bought the piano.
Robert Estrin:
What are your plans for this piano?
I know here it is in your living room, which is awesome. But you have so many pianos coming and going. This should be in a museum or something, shouldn’t it?
Bob Friedman:
We’re hoping to do a Smithsonian documentary, and then to try and find a home for it in a museum that would like to house the piano.
Robert Estrin:
That would be great! I understand The New York Times was here to do a write up on the piano.
Bob Friedman:
We made some discoveries about the instrument.
Thomas Edison was nearly 100% deaf, and the only way he could hear his instruments and his music boxes was to bite into them.
It just so happens that Edmund Morris, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer who did the last biography on Thomas Edison, completed in 2019, wrote in his book that Edison would bite his piano. The proof was really not out there. It was information that he’d researched over his life and he put it in his book. Well, we made that discovery! A very good associate of mine, who is a historian for Edison, found the bite marks on the piano right there. So, I called up James Barron, who’s a staff writer for The New York Times, and the minute he heard that he said, “I’d like to do a story on the piece.”
Robert Estrin:
People may be thinking, “Why would he bite his piano and his phonograph?” It seems kind of crazy. But it’s because sound travels through solid much more readily than through the air. So your teeth are a fantastic conductor of sound.
Bob Friedman:
The sound goes up into your head. Your head feels like a tuning fork. That’s how Edison heard his piano.
Robert Estrin:
Thank you so much for inviting me into your home and allowing me to play this historical piano. I appreciate it.
Bob Friedman:
And I appreciate it!
Robert Estrin:
We also have here today a wonderful historian who knows a tremendous amount about Thomas Edison. He’s a musician and he’s a piano technician. He also has an incredible collection of early phonographs going back to the 1800s! He can tell us a little bit about the technology. And because he has the unique perspective of being a piano technician and also an Edison historian, he’s going to shed a lot of light on this subject for you.
I’m really pleased to introduce to you, Charles Frommer. Charles, thanks so much for joining us today.
Charles Frommer:
Thanks for having me!
Robert Estrin:
You prepped this piano and I’m loving what you did with it. It sounds amazing for an instrument from 1890! It is pretty incredible.
Charles Frommer:
It was a pleasure to work on it. The story goes that Bob Friedman had me come in to tune Thomas Edison’s piano. I was very excited. I’ve been a fan of recording history since I was a kid.
Robert Estrin:
And you have quite a collection of phonographs. What’s the oldest recording gear you own?
Charles Frommer:
My oldest piece of recording equipment is an 1898 Berliner Gramophone, which was sort of the competitor to the cylinder phonograph at the time.
Robert Estrin:
A lot of people don’t know that the precursor to the disc was the cylinder. And the reason why discs won out is that you could store them more easily. But was there any sonic advantage to the disc initially?
Charles Frommer:
The discs were more convenient. They were easier to manufacture because you could press them like pancakes, and they were easier to store. They were also a little louder. But Edison was correct in noting that the surface speed was constant on a cylinder, whereas on a disc, as it gets towards the inside, if the rotation is steady, you have less surface per time and the quality reduces. Edison was fairly stubborn in his resistance to using disc technology. I think it was only in 1911 or thereabouts that Edison yielded and made discs. His discs were still different in that he continued his vertical cut technology.
Robert Estrin:
Another interesting thing about Edison is that he chose artists based on how well they reproduced on his technology.
He was less interested in the musical content. On many of his cylinders, he wouldn’t even put the names of the artists. He was more concerned with how they sounded. Which is why you have mentioned that he recorded a lot of banjo, because the transients could cut through.
Charles Frommer:
Banjos and woodblocks. Things with a very quick decay. There was actually a diaphragm that vibrated, much like the surface of a banjo. It was connected directly to the cutter, which would cut the wax. That made the groove. There was no electronic interface in between until about 1925. What I find interesting is that there’s a picture of Edison later in life listening to his assistant who’s playing music. He was actually somewhat controlling of the music that he had on his label. He liked to choose what bands would record and what tunes would be recorded. I think his favorite song was I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen. But he would sit and listen while somebody played.
Robert Estrin:
So a dental professional confirmed that these are indeed teeth marks. Is that right?
Charles Frommer:
Yes. I didn’t know what they were. Personally, I was just here to tune. I was halfway through tuning it and I noticed these marks on the top. Usually when a piano has been played by a professional, you will see marks on the fallboard. So I was puzzled by this. And suddenly, I remembered having read somewhere that Edison, being almost completely deaf, would sink his teeth into the wood of his phonograph to listen to records. It was then that I realized that’s what these marks are!
Robert Estrin:
What’s really remarkable is that although this piano has had some restoration along the way with a new sound board, new strings, hammers, and damper felt, that nobody got rid of these marks. And thank goodness for that! It has tremendous historic significance. It is a wonderful instrument and I just want to thank both you and Bob for sharing this instrument with everybody out there.
Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
You can find Bob Friedman’s book, The Steinway Hunter HERE!
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is, “Why do you play too fast?”. Most people try to play faster than they’re comfortable. Sometimes you will have a piece you can play just fine, but when you try to play it slower, you can’t even figure out where you are! There’s a great deal of motor memory or muscle memory that is involved in piano playing. Your fingers just seem to know where to go. So you want to go fast enough that you won’t forget where to go next. The problem with this is, unless the music is really secure, your tempo will fluctuate. You’ll make accommodations to the parts you don’t know quite as well, going a little slower. Then you’ll speed up again so you don’t forget where you are.
Motor memory on the piano is akin to touch typing.
I took a typing class in high school. I learned how to touch-type, so I don’t have to look at the keys. Little did I know, that would be probably the most important course I had in high school! In the computer age, it’s so great to be able to type without looking at your hands. But the funny thing is, if I stop and think where a letter is on the keyboard, for example, the letter “W”, I don’t even know! I have to look at the keyboard. If I have to type on a screen, where the keyboard is smaller, and you have to just touch the letters on the screen with your finger, I can’t even find them! Yet on a keyboard, I can type almost as fast as I can speak. I’m a really fast typist. I was the fastest in my class in high school. I guess all those years of piano paid off in my typing class!
Playing the piano too fast is a rampant problem among many piano students.
What you must do is take the time to slow down your playing and figure out what is there. This can be a painstaking process. I’ve talked a little bit about how sometimes when you want to start in the middle of a piece, you may have to speed up just to figure out what fingers to start with. When you’re playing slowly, you might want to play faster just a little bit at first, just to see where you are, and what fingers are on which notes as a starting point of a section.
Every fine pianist I have ever met practices slowly, incessantly.
There are three things that every accomplished pianist does: practice slowly, practice with a metronome, and practice without the pedal. I’ll also add to that, practice with the music! When you memorize a piece, that doesn’t mean you don’t use the score anymore. As a matter of fact, it’s the opposite. I like to memorize a piece first and then do all my practicing with the score, reinforcing the memory, practicing slowly with the metronome with no pedal and really solidifying.
The reason why you play too fast is because you’re not really cognizant of the score.
You play too fast because you don’t really have an intellectual understanding of the score. You’re just going through the motions. Your fingers kind of remember on their own without knowing what they’re supposed to be doing. But that’s extremely dangerous. It doesn’t have a solid foundation. Things can fall apart if you depend upon that type of playing. Thank goodness we do have motor memory! Piano would be so much more difficult if you couldn’t depend upon it at all. But you want to minimize your reliance upon the feeling of the keys and where your fingers naturally go. Slow, deliberate playing is the way to do it. Refer back to the score.
Try slow, deliberate practicing for yourself!
Take a piece that you can play fast, but you can’t play slowly with security. Take out the score and play slowly. You’re going to discover so many things! You will always find more details than you initially remembered. Your music has so many details in it! Let me know how it works for you here in the comments on LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to keep a piano piece in shape. Sometimes it’s the most difficult thing. You have a performance, and you get everything in good shape. But it can be like a ripe banana. Suddenly the whole bunch is just a disaster and you have to throw them away. Sometimes that happens with your piano music! Everything is going just fine, and then suddenly, you feel like you can’t even play! What can you do about this? It’s a tremendous challenge keeping your music on a high level. Sometimes you can peak early. Everything’s in shape, and then at the performance just two or three days later, everything disintegrates. How can you get things back into shape?
Go back to the score!
One of the most important practice techniques for a piece you have learned, whether it’s a reading piece or a memorized piece, is to go back through the score slowly with no pedal, using the metronome, exaggerating everything. Even if it’s a quiet piece of music, it really doesn’t matter what the piece is, play it with everything over articulated. If everything is fine, great! But suppose you’re playing, and little mistakes are happening. You have insecurity, and the technique isn’t clean. Go back to the score! Go slowly. Take your foot off the pedal, and play incredibly deliberately, almost like you’re practicing scales or arpeggios slowly with raised fingers. By doing this, you reprogram your hands. You also reprogram the sound into your head by playing with the metronome very deliberately with raised fingers.
Play slowly and deliberately.
You’ll instantly know if the piece has gone overly ripe, and has started to show some signs of rot. That’s because when you try to play slowly, suddenly you can’t play it! You’ll be tempted to go back to the beginning and play fast just so you can have the satisfaction of playing through it again. But make sure to take the opportunity to slow down and figure out how to play it slowly and deliberately, whatever the piece is. This is the answer: keep your eyes on the score, play with the metronome, without pedal, and play deliberately. If there are staccatos in the piece, you’ll want to articulate those with the wrist. Exaggerate all the dynamics. Exaggerate every finger that goes up and every finger that goes down so you really feel it. You still have the dynamics, but everything is raised up.
Don’t depend upon motor memory.
You’ll find that anything that’s weak, anything you really don’t know, will become obvious. Your fingers sort of have a memory all their own. But you can’t depend upon that. After a while, like making a copy of a copy of a copy, things degrade. You’ll find that the music will deteriorate over time, and your fingers don’t really know what they’re doing anymore if you just keep playing over and over and over and don’t go back to the original source: the score. Use the metronome, take your foot off the pedal so you can hear what you’re doing, and watch the score carefully. You will learn so much! It will help to revitalize your music so it stays in shape. You can get music back into shape using this same technique. Let me know how it works for you! I love to read your comments here on LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
This video was produced by my protégé, Bijan Taghavi. Bijan is a jazz artist who has performed in Los Angeles, New York City, Europe and Asia, and currently tours with Rodney Whitaker who is part of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Bijan began studying piano with me from the time he was 8 years old, until after high school when he attended the Manhattan School of Music in New York City where he earned a degree in jazz piano studies. He has a masters from Michigan State University, and currently teaches jazz piano at Hillsdale College in Michigan.
From the time Bijan started lessons with me, it was obvious that he had enormous talent. He amassed a repertoire of many of the blockbusters of the piano repertoire, and was part of my Living Piano: Journey Through Time: Historic Concert Experience which we performed together throughout the state of California:
While in high school, Bijan won the South Coast Symphony Competition and performed the Grieg Piano Concerto with the orchestra.
Throughout his studies, Bijan played a great deal of music in popular idioms which he had a natural affinity for in addition to his high level classical playing. Here he is in a performance at the age of 15 performing the Liszt 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody in a concert series we had in our live/work loft:
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you the secrets of how to play softly on the piano. Have you ever tried to play something softly, but the notes just don’t play? You try to create beautiful melodic lines with decrescendos at the end of phrases, but the notes just drop out. What’s going on? Is something wrong with you? Is your piano broken?
It takes great energy to play softly on any instrument.
In a symphony orchestra, for example, when there is a quiet woodwind solo, whether it’s a clarinet, oboe, flute, or even a French horn solo, you’d be amazed at the energy they are utilizing in order to project the sound. Even though it’s soft, it has to somehow get out to the audience through a 60 or 80 piece orchestra. Yet it doesn’t sound loud because they are not expelling their air. They’re just putting the air under tremendous pressure with diaphragm support, much like a great singer can sing with a beautiful sustained sound and achieve whatever volume they want.
What’s the analog of breath on the piano?
I’ve talked a great deal about arm weight. It takes much more energy than you may think in order to project a quiet melody on the piano. A good example of this is the second movement of the famous Mozart C Major Sonata K545. It’s all pretty much soft throughout. If you play it without much intensity, it will sound lifeless. So you have to use some intensity. First of all, you need to overcome the accompaniment in the left hand! The accompaniment is supportive. It should be like the babbling brook under a boat floating on water. It supports it, but you don’t want to call attention to it.
One secret is to play very quietly keeping your fingers close to the keys.
Stay very close to the keys, and make sure you depress the keys all the way down. As long as the keys depress all the way in one motion, all the notes will play on a well regulated piano. But to project the melody, you have to use a tremendous amount of arm weight. What do I mean by that? I mean that when you play that first note, you are actually holding up your whole arm with that single finger. That finger is holding up your arm! You’re not holding up the arm with your shoulder anymore. That way, the weight can be transferred smoothly from note to note, achieving a beautiful line.
That is the way to project a melody in a piano context so it’s above the accompaniment.
Keep your left hand light, and just push the keys to the bottom with a minimum amount of effort. The right hand supports a tremendous amount of weight that transfers smoothly from key to key giving a singing line. And yes, it will still be piano! It’s also possible to get nuance in your phrasing, the rise and the fall of the melody as it goes up to the middle of the phrase, and then descends to the end of the phrase. Just like speaking. There is a natural rise in the middle of a sentence when you speak, and the sound tapers off when you finish. Music imitates life. And when I say life, I mean literally breathing! You have to have that rise and fall. You get the analog of the breath on the piano through the use of the weight of your arm.
Don’t be afraid to use a lot of energy.
It’s just like a musician in an orchestra projecting the melody from the back of the woodwind section. You have to do the same thing by utilizing arm weight, projecting melodies in your music that are written piano and pianissimo. That is the way to achieve it.
Let me know how this works for you! If you have questions about your piano, whether it’s capable of this, you can email me Robert@LivingPianos.com. I’m very responsive to comments, particularly on LivingPianos.com. You can post your comments on YouTube as well. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
