Tag Archives: steinway

How to Keep Your Review Pieces on Performance Level

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to keep your review pieces on performance level. I talk to so many people who wonder how they can learn new pieces without forgetting old pieces. People can end up studying the piano for years and still only have one piece they can play, the piece they’re working on that week! So, how do you keep old pieces in shape? How can you possibly have time to learn new pieces when you’re reviewing all your old pieces?

Of course the answer is, you can’t keep every piece you’ve ever played in your hands and in your head all the time. It becomes impossible! Once you amass a repertoire of five or six hours of music, you can’t possibly keep everything in shape. However, it is vitally important that you keep at least the last few pieces you’ve studied in your hands and in your head. Because there’s a pleasure and an ease you gain with music you’ve played for a long time. So, how do you do that without taking up all of your practice time?

The best, easiest, and most fun way of keeping your review pieces in shape is to play them!

Play your pieces all the time! play them every day! Why not? Obviously, if you have pieces like the Hammerklavier Sonata of Beethoven or the Bach Goldberg Variations, they’re going to take a while to play through. So, there are certain limitations depending upon the level you’re on. But certainly you should keep playing the pieces that you’ve studied within the past few weeks.

Let’s say you’re working on a brand new piece, and you have the piece you did at your last lesson. Well, it’s better to have the last few pieces, at least three to five pieces. Otherwise, as I said, you could be playing the piano for years and never have anything really secure. Because there’s nothing like the security of playing a piece that you’ve known for a long time. The ease and security you gain from living with music is tremendous. If you never review those pieces, everything is kind of tentative and you never have that pleasure.

Simply playing through your pieces, is that all you have to do?

Playing through your pieces isn’t all you have to do, but most of the time that’s enough. On a daily basis or at least every other day, play through your review pieces. Play through a bunch of them. It’s fun because they’re pieces you already know. What’s the purpose of all this practicing if you’re not going to have anything you can play? You should enjoy playing the piano, not just practicing. You put in all this tedious work of learning music and working out all the technical details. The reward at the end of the line is being able to play! So of course play them, and play them for people. You’ll get better at performing simply by playing for other people.

Now, if you keep playing your pieces over and over again for weeks on end and that’s all you do, they will deteriorate over time. Because there are slight changes that happen. Which is why you must go back to the score on a periodic basis with your music if it’s something you’ve memorized. Put the score up and play with your foot off the pedal so you can hear the underlying performance without the benefit of the pedal which can obscure things. Sometimes you should use a metronome to make sure you’re playing at a constant tempo. This is a great way to reinforce your playing. Playing with the score slowly to a metronome with no pedal reinforces everything that you’ve learned before. It’s a refresher. I recommend it highly for all of your review pieces. This is particularly helpful with pieces you’ve recently learned that you’re trying to get on that ultimate level. This is a terrific way of doing that. You can actually work at different speeds. Start very slowly with the score, because it’s hard to read something you’ve memorized, particularly if it’s a piece that’s above your reading level. You undoubtedly read through it when you first got it just to see what it was about, and then you got to work and learned it. Going back trying to read it is a tough task, but it’s also vitally important if you want to keep your performance on a high level. Otherwise, it’s like a game of telephone where the message gets so garbled it ends up being a whole new message. If you play your piece over and over enough times and never refer to the score, you can end up with a whole different piece! So, it’s incredibly important to reference the score.

Choose wisely which pieces you keep in your repertoire.

Definitely keep at least the last two or three pieces you’ve learned in your repertoire so you can really solidify them and enjoy the fruits of your labor. You might also select some choice pieces that you’ve learned that you never want to forget. Play them often enough that they don’t get too far gone. If you find that they’ve deteriorated to a great extent, go back to the score. You might have to practice some sections, but don’t let them get so far gone that you have to practically start all over to learn them again. But even if you do, you’ll find if you’ve really learned a piece of music and committed it to memory, relearning it is much faster than initially learning it. So, that’s the good news for any of you out there who haven’t done this. Go ahead and relearn some of those pieces. At first it’ll seem arduous, but then you’ll quickly assimilate the score once again.

There are pieces I’ve learned and relearned multiple times. They become cemented almost as a part of my permanent repertoire. There’s a number of pieces that I just have all the time. Even if I haven’t played them in years, they’re still there. But it takes a long time to get to that point. In the meantime, play through your pieces on a regular basis and have fun with your music! Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Upright VS Grand – Can You Hear the Difference?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Can you hear the difference between an upright and a grand piano? Today I have another listening test for you! Last time we tested a Steinway versus a Chinese piano. People really enjoyed that little listening test. So today we will listen to an upright piano versus a grand piano! Can you really tell the difference? What are the preconceived notions about these pianos?

I dug through the archives of Living Pianos recordings and found an upright piano and a grand piano playing the same Chiarina movement of Schumann’s Carnaval. I took the second repeat in one of the recordings but not the other, but other than that they are the same. Both pianos were recorded in the same place with the same microphones, which is really great for this test. I’m going to reveal what those instruments are after you get a chance to listen.

Write down your answer!

As I said before on the Steinway versus Chinese piano video, I want you to write down your answer so that you don’t fool yourself. Because of course, we all want to be right and think we can tell the difference. So, write it down and commit to which one you think is the upright and which one you think is the grand. Here we go. Happy listening!

See video to hear for yourself!

Eleven years ago I made a video about uprights versus grands and you can check that out at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. I discussed the differences. There are some substantial differences, primarily in the actions. But what about these two pianos? What are they? I chose a large grand. As a matter of fact, the grand piano is a seven-foot 1998 Baldwin SF-10. It’s a semi-concert grand. The upright is also a Baldwin, to make it fair. It’s a 1987 Baldwin Hamilton, which is just a 45-inch piano. 45 inches compared to seven feet, you would think there’d be an astounding difference in sound! Yet they both sound quite beautiful, don’t they? So which one was which?

The first one was the seven-foot Baldwin SF-10! The second one was the studio Baldwin Hamilton upright.

How many of you got that right? I’m really interested! My perspective is playing these instruments and making the allowances to get the best sound out of each piano, which is the job of a pianist. Because after all, almost all instrumentalists take their instruments with them. As pianists we have to play whatever instrument is available, and instantly adjust. I’ve had the good fortune of being around many pianos. I’ve learned how to make those adjustments. So the question is, how did you feel about the sound of these two pianos? Did you choose correctly? I would love to hear from all of you! Let me know your thoughts in the comments! Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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1987 Baldwin Hamilton 45-inch Studio Upright
https://youtu.be/hfSi_p35PZk

1998 Baldwin SF-10 7-foot Semi-ConcertGrand
https://youtu.be/yb9c924YbMI

Upright pianos versus Grand pianos – Uprights Vs. Grands
https://youtu.be/ZD1QxoxabMQ

Steinway VS Chinese Piano – Can You Hear the Difference?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Do you think you can hear the difference between a Steinway and a Chinese piano? Many of you probably think it would be no problem. But it may be surprising to you what you hear. There have been studies on wines. When people think a bottle of wine is expensive, they’re always going to choose that as being a better wine. There’s a subjective nature to the taste and the bouquet of wines. Well, the same is true of pianos! Now, I’m not suggesting one is better than the other. I’m going to leave it up to you to decide. I’m going to provide you with a blind listening test!

We will be comparing a Steinway to a Chinese piano in our blind listening test!

I went through the archives of Living Pianos, because we have hundreds of piano videos, and I found two grand pianos of about the same size, both in brand new condition. One is a Steinway and one is a Chinese piano. The Chinese brand shall remain nameless for right now. At the end I will reveal which is which. But don’t cheat! Don’t go forward on this because I want you to really critically listen. If you’ve got good speakers or headphones, use them so you can really hear the instruments. Then I want you to write down your answer. Write it down on a piece of paper. I’m serious about this! Because it’s easy to change your mind once you know the answer. But if you commit it to paper, then you can’t argue that you thought something different. It’s harder to tell than you might think!

I found recordings of the beginning of the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 7 in D major, Op. 10, No. 3. It’s the same exact piece of music you’re going to hear on both of these instruments. Remember, don’t cheat! I want you to really write down which one you think is the Steinway and which one is the Chinese piano so you get the most out of this. Here we go!

See video to hear for yourself!

That was an interesting listening experience. I bet many of you have very definite ideas and some of you may be wondering which one is which. Well first of all let me tell you what these pianos are and then I’ll tell you which one was first and which one was second. The Steinway is a 2010 Model O which is right around 5′ 10″ in brand new condition. The Chinese piano is the 2017 Hailun Model 178, also 5′ 10″.

So which one was which? Have you written it down on paper? I’m serious about this because it’s easy to cheat yourself. You don’t want to be wrong here, do you? Because there’s a drastic price difference. You could buy several of those Hailuns for the price of a Steinway. So which one is which?

The first performance you heard was the Steinway and the second performance was the Hailun.

I don’t know how many of you are shocked and how many of you got it right. But there’s no right or wrong answer because every piano has something to offer. Every piano is unique. If you play several brand new Steinway model O’s in the showroom, each one will have a unique character of sound, as do the Hailuns. All pianos are made of wood and other organic materials and are highly crafted.

Now, I should tell you that there was a slight difference in these two performances. The first one was made later in my studio where I had much higher end microphones. I had a pair of Neumanns recording the Steinway and I only had a pair of Audio-Technica 4033s, which are relatively inexpensive large diaphragm condensers on the Hailun. So they were recorded in different rooms with different microphones. So this wasn’t totally scientific. The Hailun didn’t have the benefit of expensive, high-end microphones. But nevertheless you can get some idea of the different characteristics of the sound of these pianos. It was an interesting playing experience. I can hear what I went for and what came out on these performances. But I’m more interested in what you heard! Be honest in the comments. I’m very interested in how everybody responds to this! Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Steinway 2010 Model O Grand Piano – Living Pianos Online Piano Store
https://youtu.be/beWmW4C4y7U

New Hailun Model 178 Grand Piano – Living Pianos Online Piano Store
https://youtu.be/izQ-ZUSa0Jw
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How to Avoid Injury in Piano Playing: Is Pain OK?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about avoiding injury in your piano playing. Is pain ever OK? You know they say, “No pain, no gain,” but I’m going to come right out and say no, pain is not okay in piano playing. There are some exceptions, but I want to make it very clear that pain is always a warning sign that something is wrong. I’m going to bring up the exceptions, but first I want to show you ways you can mitigate pain in your piano playing. Of course if you’re having any kind of serious issues, particularly anything recurring, you should see a doctor to find out what is going on, because pain is not good.

How can you avoid pain in your piano playing?

First of all, it’s incredibly important how you sit at the piano. Take the time to make sure you’re sitting at the appropriate distance from the keyboard. Use a seat that you can adjust to exactly the right height as well. You can use an adjustable artist bench, or put books or a pillow on the bench to raise the height if necessary. Being at the right height is really critical. Generally speaking, you want your hands straight with your arms parallel to the floor. This is very comfortable because your wrists are straight. You don’t want your wrists to be bent. Imagine sitting at the piano so low that your wrists are lower than your fingers the whole time you’re practicing. That stresses the nerves and the tendons and your wrists can become swollen and sore just from being in that position. So take the time to make sure you are sitting at the right height.

How far should your bench be from the keyboard?

Sometimes you see people sitting too close to the piano. This is extraordinarily tension-inducing, particularly when playing in the extreme high and low registers of the keyboard. You want to be far enough away so there’s a wide angle to your arms. You don’t want your arms right at your sides. You also don’t want the bench to be right up against the back of your knees because you have no flexibility for getting from one end of the keyboard to the other quickly, as you have to do in a lot of different music. So sitting in the right place and having the right angle of your wrists is vitally important.

Your piano and environment also play a role.

If you feel pain and you wonder why, there’s the possibility that your piano action might need work. Maybe you’re playing on a piano that has 65 – 70 grams of down-weight and it just takes too much effort to push the keys down. Regulation, lubrication and easing of key bushings can possibly get things moving better. Another problem is if your piano has a really dead sound and you’re trying to fill a room that is too large for the instrument. You may overcompensate in your playing. There may be ambient sounds of air conditioning or some other sounds you’re constantly trying to overcome. You may be playing way harder than you think even if your action isn’t heavy. That could really be taxing to your hands. So that’s another thing to be aware of.

Is pain ever OK?

I talked in the beginning about the exceptions, about no pain, no gain. Is there any truth to that? Well, there is a little bit. Any of you who exercise know that if you’re weightlifting or running, the lactic acid naturally builds up in your muscles and you feel a soreness that can possibly be described as pain. But it’s a pain that goes away as soon as you stop. It’s a normal part of the growth of muscles. In fact, the only way muscles grow is by tearing down and rebuilding. This is the physiology of exercise. A little bit of that happens in piano playing. If you’ve ever done wrist exercises or even scales, when you finish you will feel tired. You’ll feel a certain soreness, at least temporarily, in your fingers. Now, if that persists after a few minutes of rest, then there’s something wrong. But to feel a little bit of fatigue bordering on pain in your hands after a workout on the piano, as long as it’s akin to what you feel when you’re exercising, is a normal part of building strength. Knowing that distinction is important so you make sure you don’t cross the line!

At times I’ve practiced some really treacherous sections of Liszt. I alternate between doing the really virtuosic sections and the more poetic parts of the piece, going back and forth to make sure I don’t put too much strain on my hands. This is what you must do in your practice. If you feel pain or major fatigue, that achy feeling you get when your muscles are being worked out, give it a little break and come back to it a bit later. And make sure that it’s nothing that persists!

Be sure to stretch and take rest when you need it!

Generally, you never want to experience pain in your piano playing. But when you’re doing a major workout, you may feel a sense of relief when you stop for a little bit. So give yourself rest! I like to do stretching throughout the day. It’s really helpful. Because your neck, your shoulders, all need to function properly. Your nerves are part of a system that goes all the way to your brain. If at any point the nerves become infringed upon it can cause problems in your hands, neck, or back. So you must be limber. Doing yoga or other stretching is vitally important. I highly recommend it! I don’t know what I would do without my stretching. I may make a video about the stretching I do because it’s stuff that I’ve come up with that’s based upon yoga, but it’s my own personal routine that I can do anywhere. You might enjoy that as well. Let me know in the comments! Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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The Importance of Practicing With Raised Fingers

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about the importance of practicing with raised fingers. Playing the piano with raised fingers is a completely different scenario from practicing the piano with raised fingers. I want to qualify this right out of the gate so you don’t get scared that I’m telling you to do something that could lead to injury. This is a technique used judiciously to help you solidify your technique, but certainly not something you do in performance. You may wonder why you would do something in practice that you would never do in your performance? Well, there are very good reasons for this which I will explain now.

The physiology of the hands is such that it’s much easier to push fingers down than to lift them up.

If you want to prove this to yourself, just put your hands on a flat surface anywhere, and then just try to lift only your fourth finger. It’s hard to do because the tendons and the nerves are shared among those fingers. So it makes it tough to gain independence.

Why is it a good idea to practice with raised fingers?

Well, there are actually two reasons for this. One is that it helps to strengthen the independence of your fingers so you can practice the release of notes. If you’ve ever heard somebody play sloppy scales, one aspect is the evenness of the attack. But the other aspect is the evenness of the durations of notes, the space between notes. If I played a scale with all the notes hitting evenly, but don’t release some of the notes the same length as others, it would sound sloppy because some notes overlap and some don’t. It’s haphazard. And as I mentioned, lifting fingers up is so much more difficult than pushing them down. Also, it teaches your hands and your head which fingers are down and which fingers are up. So in slow scale practice, by raising fingers, you identify which notes are down and which fingers are up. So when you go faster you have the control of releases, not just attacks of notes.

The stretch you get is akin to the warm up of an athlete.

Stretching is so important! This is a great way you can stretch your fingers while at the same time teach yourself the release of the notes in slow practice. Naturally, when you play up to tempo, you abandon this because it’s not possible or recommended to raise fingers when trying to play up to tempo. It’s not only impossible, but it would not be good for your hands to do such a thing. But it’s a tremendous technique, not just for practicing scales. You can use this technique anytime you want to identify which notes are down and which notes are up so you can achieve a clean sound. With this kind of practice everything is exaggerated. So whatever sloppiness you have is eradicated because you really get to dig into the keys and feel every key that’s down and keep other fingers up and out of the way. And this is why slow practicing with raised fingers can be incredibly valuable for you!

Always be aware of how you feel and never do anything that causes you pain!

This applies not just for raised finger practice, but everything you do on the piano. How you sit at the piano, the relaxed nature of your shoulders. You must be aware of all these things because you want your hands to last your whole life because it is the lifeblood for playing the piano!

I hope you find this practice technique to be helpful for you. Try it out and see how it works for you! And when practicing with raised fingers, you don’t want to use a lot of arm weight. You want to just use the fingers. Teach your fingers which notes are down and which notes are up and you will have a cleaner technique to show for it! Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Why Aren’t Keyboards Divided Into an Even Number of Octaves?

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.

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