So remember: if you are looking for a new piano, and know what you want, a college sale can be a good way to go. But for narrowing down what you want, you are better off shopping around first. Let us know your experiences 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

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Are there different pianos made for different types of music? Are there rock pianos, classical pianos, jazz pianos, new age pianos, or ragtime pianos? Some people say a Yamaha piano is best for rock to be able to get that bright sound that cuts through. Can you play rock music on a Steinway? It can be done!

Let me give you a parallel: Computers.

Are there computers made for business, computers made for photography, computers made for music, computers made for video? To some degree, yes. However, any high powered computer can accomplish any of those tasks. A gaming computer might have a beefier graphics card, but any computer can do any job. Some might be a little bit better suited to certain tasks, and some types of applications require more processing power of one sort or another. To a certain degree, the same is true with pianos.

A great deal depends upon the voicing and regulation of the instrument.

You could take a piano like a Steinway, which you think of as having a rich warm sound that maybe gets a little bit of growl when you really lay into it. But if you harden the hammers you’re going to have a really aggressive sounding piano. That might be appropriate for some classical pieces, but it also could be great for ragtime or rock. So there aren’t necessarily pianos that are built for different styles of music. However, the voicing of a piano has a lot to do with how appropriate a piano may be for certain styles or certain players. For example, Vladimir Horowitz played on a super bright piano. Of course, he was a classical pianist. You might wonder why he wanted a bright piano. With his unique technique of sitting low and playing very delicately, he could control that very bright piano and get all different colors from warm to bright, just from the amazing control he had. On the other hand, my father, Morton Estrin, always liked to have his piano voiced on the warm side. He liked that he could play powerfully and never overdrive the piano into a harsh sound. Yet he could still get that beautiful, warm tone when he was playing delicate pianissimo. So any piano can be voiced one way or another.

There could be some pianos that are more appropriate for certain styles.

For example, sometimes European pianos with their bell-like, clear tone can be just wonderful for Mozart. They have a nice, clear, crisp sound. Where an American piano like a Mason & Hamlin, or even a Steinway, may be a bit thick for that sort of music. If you’ve ever heard the original forte pianos from Mozart’s era, it’s a dramatically different sound from a modern piano, particularly the fat sound of a Steinway. So there is some validity to choosing pianos for certain styles of music. But the voicing, and more importantly the playing, will determine which pianos will be appropriate for your music. I’m 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 I’ll be addressing a question from a viewer. Raymond asks, “On an 88 key piano, the lowest note is A and the highest is C. Why aren’t keyboards divided into an even number of octaves starting and ending on C or A?” This is actually a very good question because it seems so logical. In fact, if you ever look at five octave synthesizers and other portable keyboards, they almost always have an even number of octaves. From C to C, typically four or five octaves. So why aren’t pianos built that way?

Before the piano was invented, there were harpsichords.

Harpsichords had different numbers of keys and even different starting and ending points on the two keyboards, which is a whole story unto itself. The earliest pianos had a limited range of keys, typically around five octaves. You might wonder why. Well, it’s because those are the sounds those early instruments were capable of producing.

If you look at all the works of Mozart and Haydn, for example, they never really exceed that approximate range. It’s remarkable to think that all of the music they wrote was confined to this number of keys, because the piano just didn’t have more keys than that!

Beethoven worked closely with instrument builders expanding the range of the piano.

Expanding the range of the piano was no easy task! As you get higher, the tension of the strings becomes cumulatively enormous. So they started reinforcing the frame of the piano with metal, which eventually led to the full cast iron plate like we have today. Beethoven never reached the full 88 keys in his lifetime. But it’s interesting to see how the evolution of his music was affected by the capabilities of the instruments. Early Beethoven compositions had a much narrower range of keys than later Beethoven works.

How did the piano end up with 88 keys?

Late in the 19th century, most pianos ended at the highest A, and yet they went down to the lowest A. So there was a symmetrical keyboard in terms of the number of octaves! Eventually the high C became more and more common until it became the standard. So why doesn’t it go higher or lower? Well, to answer that question, there are a couple of instruments out there that do explore lower notes. The famous Bosendorfer Imperial Concert Grand, for example, goes all the way to C below the low A! It’s hard to discern pitch there, which is one of the reasons most pianos don’t venture below that low A. The lowest notes on the Bosendorfer Imperial Concert Grand sound a bit unearthly because the vibrations are so slow. You start hearing the separate vibrations instead of the pitch. Our brains almost don’t perceive it as pitch anymore! There is another instrument that also goes down to that low C and that is the Stuart and Sons from Australia.

Those instruments have those low notes, not just for those rare times when you want to take advantage of a lower octave. I know there are a couple of places in the literature where it would be really nice at least to have that low G or F. But it’s also because whenever you depress the sustain pedal all the dampers are released allowing those strings to sympathetically vibrate, giving more richness to the overtones of the sound.

What about the other end of the spectrum, going higher than the highest note of the piano?

Well, Stuart and Sons actually has a piano that goes higher than the high C. It goes all the way up to the high B, almost an octave above the highest C! Naturally the big hindrance with those really high notes, even the highest notes on any piano, is that they just don’t last that long. The notes die out in a matter of a second or two. Even the second to highest C on a piano doesn’t last very long. That’s why pianos don’t even have dampers for all those high notes. Dampers end on pianos somewhere in the D sharp to G range. Yamaha’s have dampers up to G. On Baldwins and Steinways, typically the last note that has a damper is D sharp. Do you need dampers on those high notes? Well, it does ring quite a bit. And you’ll find on different pianos, the dampers end in different places. But those extremely high notes have limited value because they don’t last long enough to use them melodically. They’re really just percussive little pecks of sound.

You can hear for yourself why they’ve settled in on A to C.

It’s a musically useful range of tones for the technology brought to bear. That’s the simple answer to your question, Raymond! Thanks for that very insightful question, I hope you’ve enjoyed this! Thanks so much 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

www.LivingPianos.com
www.Facebook.com/LivingPianos
949-244-3729

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we have a piano quiz! You can take this quiz below. It should be a lot of fun! It’s not very long or very difficult. There are just five questions. I’m going to ask all five questions, then go back and give you the answers. You can see how well you’ve done on this. Also, you can email me and let me know any thoughts you have about these questions.

The first three questions are true or false.

1. If you buy a new Steinway piano, it will go up in value. True or false?

2. Concert pianists practice scales and exercises for many hours every day. True or false?

3. If you see the Yamaha name on a piano, you can be assured that it is a good quality mid-range instrument. True or false?

The next two questions are multiple choice.

4. Why are there repeat signs in music?
A.) They provide performers with flexibility of timing for programming.
B.) It saves paper!
C.) They help composers increase their output without having to do extra work.

5. Ideally, how often should your piano be tuned?
A.) Twice a year is perfect because of seasonal changes.
B.) Having your piano tuned once a month keeps it in tune best.
C.) Your piano should be tuned constantly, every time you play it.

Here are the Answers!

Now we’re going to go back and see how well you did on these questions. Here is the first question, once again:

1. If you buy a new Steinway piano, it will go up in value. True or false? This is a really tough question. If I just had a choice of true or false, I would say true. Now, you might wonder, how can this be? Let’s think about this. My grandfather bought my father a brand new Steinway baby grand in 1939. He paid $900 for it. That same model Steinway now sells for around $80,000. So yes, if you keep it long enough, it’s going to go up in value. But one thing to consider is inflation. Of course, condition is of paramount importance. I rebuilt that particular Steinway of my father’s, so it’s worth quite a bit. But if a Steinway is completely thrashed over the years, if it’s been subjected to the elements, it can have very little value. So, it’s really kind of true or false, depending on the conditions.

Here’s how it can be false. If you buy a brand new Steinway piano, and then just a few years later you want to sell it, you’re going to take a loss because it takes a long time for the yearly increases in the list prices and the sale prices of Steinway pianos to overcome the new versus used value. Like when driving a car off the dealer parking lot, you know that it’s going to lose a tremendous amount of value immediately. The same is true with pianos. But if you keep the piano long enough, the new ones keep going up, so you could be in pretty good shape, provided you take good care of it.

2. Concert pianists practice scales and exercises for many hours every day. True or false? A lot of you are going to be really surprised about this one. The answer is false. You might think concert pianists practice scales, arpeggios and exercises relentlessly. At some point in every concert pianist’s life, they have spent countless hours working on scales, arpeggios, octave exercises, thirds, trills and other technical studies. This goes on for years. But with touring concert pianists, they are so busy learning repertoire. They get such precious little time to practice. So when they’re practicing, they’re going through their programs, their concertos, their chamber music. Sure, they’re going to spend some time with scales, arpeggios and exercises, but the vast amount of the time they spend is rehearsing and practicing for upcoming performances. They don’t have vast amounts of time to practice exercises and scales every day.