Tag Archives: piano

Honesty in Musical Expression

Music expresses emotion. It can be a great challenge to bear your soul in a genuine way when performing music. It can be a challenge avoiding distractions whether it is noises from an adjacent room or a squeaky bench. Worse yet, you may find your mind wandering to concerns of daily life taking you away from your purpose as a performer – to reach the audience with a message only music can convey.

Perhaps the greatest challenge in offering true feelings in your music is when you are improvising, particularly freeform improvisations, not music based upon written scores. This is something most typically associated with jazz musicians, but not exclusively.

In the accompanying video, you will hear a performance of a freeform improvisation in which my purpose was purely to convey honest emotions.

Sometimes it can be a rewarding challenge to create musical forms such as Sonata or Theme and Variations. But in this instance, my goal was not to impress the listeners with displays of virtuosity or musical prowess, only to convey musical expression in a genuine way.

This is one of the greatest musical challenges! Fortunately, I had a great Baldwin SF-10 grand piano to inspire the performance with its beautiful sound. Please feel free to leave your thoughts about this subject.

Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store info@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729

Can Organists Play the Piano?

The organ and piano share a similar keyboard layout. So, you may wonder how easy it is for an organist to play the piano and for pianists to approach the organ. One of the first challenges pianists face playing the organ is being able to play melodies with their feet on the pedals of an organ!

Organist, Roger Chaussee is going to demonstrate playing on our 1927 Steinway model L grand piano. This model L has just been rebuilt with new strings, pinblock, hammers, and other action parts. You will hear Roger first explore the unique sonorities this instrument offers with something that is quite rare:

A Classical Improvisation!

Playing classical improvisations is almost a lost art but is something Roger and I both enjoy doing. You can see the beauty of the refinished cabinet and internals of this piano which look very much like it did nearly a century ago when it was originally manufactured.

One of the challenges of organists approaching the piano is the expressive possibilities of the touch of a piano since organs don’t respond to how hard or soft you depress the keys. Fortunately, Roger began his musical studies on the piano. So, you can enjoy his expressive playing of some original music in the accompanying video.

Pianists often times miss the aid of the sustain pedal when playing the organ.

Fortunately, pianists like myself practice the piano with no pedal a great deal making the transition to organ a bit more seamless. But the many registrations of sound possible on the organ offers a whole other level to explore!

I hope you enjoy this exploration of playing the piano and organ on this Steinway grand piano. Thanks for joining Roger and me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store info@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729

Why Don’t They Make More Pianos in the USA?

Why can’t more pianos be made in the United States? At first, you may think it’s because they are too expensive. Of course, Steinway, Mason & Hamlin and Charles Walter are top-tier pianos with premium prices. But couldn’t a mid-range piano be made in the United States which doesn’t have such a high price? You’d think that would be possible. Charles Walter may be the closest thing to that at this point, but with incredibly limited production. There are some simple answers as to why more pianos cannot be made in the United States at a lower cost.

To give you a parallel, I’m going to bring up Tesla. Tesla is in the news all the time because they’re trying to change the whole model of the automobile industry with electric cars and newer technologies. It’s been a huge challenge for the company and it’s kind of like a catch-22 because companies like General Motors and Toyota have a scale of production that enables them to offer each car at a much lower price instead of having to spend seventy or a hundred thousand dollars to get a Tesla. As great as they are, few people can afford that price point. Of course, Elon Musk has been working hard ramping up production so he can get a $35,000 car out there. He’s facing the challenge of the scale of production.

It’s exactly the same problem when it comes to starting a piano company in the United States and enabling a mid-range price point. That’s a huge stumbling block right there. The second part of this equation is, unless you created an export company; it’s tough in the United States where piano sales went from over 90,000 new pianos sold a little over ten years ago to a little over 30,000 in 2016. So, exporting could really help sales. Yet, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome with that these days. If you’re a new company, how do you get the brand recognition to do that? There are a lot of challenges and I applaud anyone who gives it a go because the piano industry could benefit from innovation. People like Elon Musk prove that if you do things in a new way, there’s a possibility that you can grow market share. So, perhaps there is a way for a new piano company to produce pianos in the United States utilizing innovative technologies and business strategies. Hope you have enjoyed this. You can contact us anytime at info@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729.

Does Temperature Affect the Tuning of Your Piano?

Growing up in New York on Long Island, it was amazing; every summer trying to mitigate the humidity with air conditioning was a losing battle. By the middle of July, my father’s pianos would just get dead. Not only that, but the actions became mushy as they absorbed moisture. Indeed, the weather can affect your piano in numerous ways.

As I mentioned, humidity can deaden the tone because the hammers absorb moisture so you get a lifeless sound. The heat comes back in September and the tone livens up along with it. Everything is bound to go out of tune with these seasonal changes as well.

There’s another thing you should be aware of. At the opposite end of the spectrum, if you have extreme dryness where you don’t have environmental control; if you have hairline cracks in the soundboard or bridges, they can open up. Maybe you’ve never had problems before and suddenly you’re hearing buzzes and other problems. They might just go away next time the humidity goes up, or possibly not.

Weather has a profound effect upon pianos and even if you do have humidification or dehumidification systems in your piano, or in the room with the piano, it’s really hard to avoid the effect of seasonal changes on the performance of your piano. However, there are many ways of making it more stable such as treating the room to create stable temperature and humidity. You could possibly use a felt string cover to allow the sound to come through but not let the moisture in your piano.

We have to live with our pianos which are like living, breathing organisms. Treat them well and they will reward you richly! Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store 949-244-3729 info@LivingPianos.com

Why are Piano Strings Different Lengths?

This may seem like an obvious question, but it is a really interesting question in a number of ways that I’ll explain. All vibrating objects produce pitches and those pitches are lower if the object is bigger and they’re higher if the object is smaller. It’s simple physics. With pianos, you notice particularly on concert grand pianos, the very highest treble strings are very short and they get longer and longer throughout the entire scale design until you have the very long bass strings on a nine foot piano. The bass strings are able to produce those low frequencies from their sheer length like the pipes on pipe organs; the large pipes produce low frequencies and the the small pipes produce high frequencies.

It’s the same reason why women and children tend to have higher voices than men because being bigger (including the vocal cords) produces lower pitched voices. Bigger things make lower sounds. Where it gets really interesting is the fact that you can have a baby grand where the strings are pretty much the same length once you get to the middle of the keyboard on down. How do they achieve the low notes out of a smaller piano? They make the strings thicker in the bass to overcome the fact that they’re not getting as long as they need to be.

In fact, even a concert grand piano doesn’t necessarily have the difference in length of strings you would need to double the length of the strings for each octave down on the keyboard. So, you would need strings going twice the length throughout the entire piano for every octave which would produce a longer piano than nine feet depending upon the starting length of the highest treble strings if it were done by the length of the strings alone. It could be difficult to excite the soundboard with such long strings. There are other aspects of piano design and acoustical science that just don’t enable that to happen. It would be an interesting experiment in the virtual world with programs like PianoTeq to create virtual pianos that don’t exist in the real world with incredibly long strings.

I hope this has been enlightening for you. Thanks for joining me, Robert@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729

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 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