Welcome to Living Pianos. The subject today is about what college piano sales are all about. You’ve probably seen them at your local college or university, and then the next year they have them again. And you wonder how they have so many pianos to sell! Also, you wonder, if these are college pianos, what kind of condition could they possibly be in. (We’ve all seen school pianos!) Well, I’m going to tell you what these sales are all about so you can determine if it’s something of interest to you so you can decide if you’d like to investigate them for yourself.
This is a very common practice. They are events held at colleges, universities and also in conjunction with arts organizations. The way they work is with an arrangement among a piano dealer, a piano manufacturer, a finance company, and an institution, typically a school. The arrangement is made to loan several new pianos (perhaps 6-8 pianos) for a year at no charge. In exchange, the institution agrees to open up their facility (and more importantly their mailing list) to have a limited time piano sale which is marketed with tens of thousands of dollars of advertising. The piano store then engages piano movers to move dozens of other pianos from the piano store into the school, performance venue, or other facility for the sale.
If you research this online, “What is a College Piano Sale”, you will find a lot of opinions on this practice.
These sales are generally held in conjunction with Yamaha, Steinway, or Kawai. If it is a Yamaha event, there will be mostly Yamaha pianos there. If there is a specific model of Yamaha piano you are after, it can be a good place to get a decent price on the piano without the hassle of negotiation which is typical in new piano stores. However, the expense of moving the pianos in and out, along with the heavy promotional costs precludes spectacular deals at these events. It is also not a place where you have much time to try out instruments. They try to create a buying frenzy by limiting time, and fostering an urgency for a buying decision before the pianos are sold (even though most of them go back to the store after the sale is over).
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. Today I’m going to share my personal story about how I became a pianist. You might think that it would be obvious. Many of you know that my father, Morton Estrin, was a concert pianist. My sister is also a pianist. I’ve been surrounded with pianists and pianos my whole life! So you might think it’s the most natural thing in the world that I ended up being a pianist. Far from it!
I’ve always loved music.
I had the opportunity to start piano studying with my father when I was seven years old. Shortly thereafter, in fourth grade, I was given a French horn at school to play in the band. I was very taken with the instrument. I loved the tone! The French horn is everything the piano isn’t, and vice versa. On the piano, there’s only so much you can do with tone. Some pianists create a much more beautiful sound than other pianists. There’s something to that. But on the French horn, you can hear just one note and identify the player! What you can do with just one note is extraordinarily limited on the piano. But on the French horn, there is so much you can do with each note. It’s unbelievable! Plus I loved playing in the orchestra and the band. I was very serious about French horn. I divided my time between French horn and piano all through school.
In junior high I had a great French horn teacher, Hugh Cowden.
He was such an inspiration to me. I learned so much from that man that it was unbelievable! He used to come over to my house for lessons. We would go downstairs in the playroom and he would spend all afternoon there with me. We would play duets together, we would play recordings, he would have me do excerpts as well as etudes and concertos and sonatas. I learned all the Mozart Horn Concertos, the Strauss Concertos, the Glière Concerto, the Hindemith Sonata, and more. I really learned a tremendous amount. I loved the French horn. I played in several very good orchestras in high school. I even had the opportunity to play lead French horn with Chuck Mangione, and had a bunch of solos! I also played principal 1st horn on Mahler’s 1st Symphony under Seiji Ozawa on ABC Television at Tanglewood, as well as at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. I was extremely serious about the horn.
In middle school I remember saying to my parents, “How am I going to decide between French horn and piano when it’s time for college?”
My parents told me, “Oh, you’ll know.” And I said, “No, I won’t.” And sure enough, I didn’t! I couldn’t make up my mind between French horn and piano. To some extent, there were many mitigating factors to this. One was, my father had so many brilliant students, many of whom were far more accomplished technically than I was. I have small hands. Growing up, I struggled to develop enough strength to be able to play the literature I wanted to play on the piano. It was really hard for me. I overcame it, but it took much more work. I realized as a teacher, years later, how much easier piano was for so many of my students than it was for me! I’ve had students who could just leap from one level to another because their hands could handle it once they could intellectualize the music. I didn’t have that luxury. I had to work and work to develop the muscles, and to figure out how to break chords I couldn’t reach in order to be able to play advanced piano literature.
I loved playing in orchestra. And furthermore, I enjoyed practicing the French horn more than I enjoyed practicing the piano!
Playing the French horn is a visceral experience. It was just fun going through all the musical excerpts of the famous horn solos, whereas piano was almost drudgery. It takes so much work to memorize music on the piano! I loved refining the music once I had it memorized. That was the part I’ve always loved. But that initial memorization is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if any of you memorize piano music, you understand. It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Memorizing music is really hard! And it’s an essential part of piano practice (which I have come to enjoy!)
I decided that I would only audition at schools that offered double majors with horn and piano.
That’s why I didn’t apply to Juilliard, because they didn’t offer a double major. But the Manhattan School of Music and the Cleveland Institute of Music did. I applied at those schools and got into both schools on both instruments! I decided to go to the Manhattan School of Music to get to study with the principal horn of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. The piano faculty was tremendous there as well.
When I went to my counselor to put my schedule together, it became obvious that doing a double major would never leave me enough time to practice.
It wasn’t just the private lessons. It was the entire course load that would be doubled up just about. Finding enough time to practice even with just a music performance degree on one instrument is a great challenge since you’re working towards a bachelor of music degree. It’s an academic degree. So you have a substantial course load. You have music theory, history, on and on as well. I decided to be a French horn major, because I could continue to study piano with my father. I wanted to be able to play in the ensembles. Playing with an orchestra is an integral part of playing the French horn. Piano, you can play all by yourself, or you can do collaborative work with four hand piano, accompanying, or chamber music. But you certainly have a lot to keep you busy just with solo repertoire. Whereas with the French horn, almost everything involves other instruments. Even solo music, you’re playing with a piano. But playing in an orchestra, that’s the end goal for a French hornist generally. There are very few people who only play solo French horn.
Well, I had an experience that I won’t go into and I won’t mention the name of the teacher. But it was a miserable experience that maybe I’ll write in a book someday. I’m not going to share it with you because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But a really horrific thing happened and I had to stop studying with the horn teacher who I had. At that point I figured I might as well study with a piano teacher. I was accepted by all the piano teachers at the Manhattan School of Music, which was very thrilling. I chose to study with Constance Keene. I decided to go back to my previous horn teacher, Hugh Cowden. He was such a great horn teacher, so it made sense. So I went and studied with Constance Keene on piano and continued doing horn outside of school.
When did I finally just go for piano?
I haven’t played the horn in quite a number of years. The last time I played the French horn, I played concerts in both New York and California with my father and my daughter! We did the Brahms Horn Trio, which is a magnificent work. You should listen to it if you’ve never heard it. I also performed the Benjamin Britten Serenade for Horn, Strings, and Tenor with an orchestra in Orange County. I was in top shape! This was in the early 2000s. But it was at the same time that I had just put together the concept of my Living Piano: Journey Through Time: Historic Concert Experience.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldMu-RHXfec&list=PLC9F55F8E11E5FBDE I was really gung-ho about this. This ended up being something I performed dozens of times in universities, art centers, and convention halls all over California. I performed this show for the annual conventions of the Music Teachers’ Association, as well as the Piano Technicians Guild. I even did a Living Piano cruise!
I divided my time between French horn and piano up until the early 2000s.
I was in the formative stages of the Living Piano show. My mind was completely wrapped up in it! Yet I had these important performances on the horn. I was practicing the horn incessantly! I had almost no time for the piano. So once those performances were over, I just completely left the horn in the case ever since, which is kind of a shame. I do have some recordings. One of these days maybe I’ll post the Brahms horn trio performance. Naturally, I played the horn part of that. My father, Morton Estrin, played the piano. My daughter, Jenny Estrin, played the violin part. She is an incredibly accomplished violinist!
That’s my personal piano story! I bet many of you are surprised to hear this. Have any of you had experiences with multiple instruments? Have any of you taken as long as me to make up your mind about what instrument would be your primary instrument? I’d love to hear from you! Let me know in the comments here at 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. 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. 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:
