In the category of pianos that have improved there overall touch & tone, I was particularly impressed with the newest Mason & Hamlins and Knabes. The new Wm. Knabes have achieved one of the fastest actions I’ve played on any grand piano, and I spoke with their head action designer, who talked of better counter-weighting in the keys and a super-fast upward return of each key. If you are an accomplished pianist and you live somewhere where Wm. Knabes are sold, you gotta check these out.

Kawai demonstrated there super-light-but-strong graphite-core action parts, and showcased their top-of-the-line Shigeru Kawai grands, that played and sounded delicious. For those with unlimited pockets, there was a stunningly beautiful Shigeru Kawai in Bubinga, Burl and Rosewood that retailed for $200,000. The same piano was available in plain black for a mere $80,000.

The Schimmels were, once again, all uniformly excellent, a must-try for any serious piano player, and if you’ve got the coin, the larger Fazioli grands were heavenly, as impressive as any grand I’ve ever played. If you want to see a cool 360 degree view of Fazioli’s concert grand, click here to go to Fazioli’s site, then click Products, their Model 308, and then choose 360-view.

One of my greatest surprises on the piano floor was a grand and an upright made by Ritmuller, which is the high end line of China’s largest piano manufacturer, Pearl River. Now, I’ve serviced a lot of the inexpensive, low-end Pearl Rivers because one of my dealers carried them as his bottom line piano. To say they are crap is being generous. So I wasn’t expecting much from the “higher-end” models of a truly awful PSO (piano-shaped object.) But the Renner-hammered Ritmullers were surprisingly well-mannered in both touch and tone, and their impressive upright retails for under $4,000, unheard of for a piano that sounds like this.

Perhaps my favorite piano at the show was, surprise, a Yamaha. Now don’t get me wrong, Yamahas are uniformly solid in tone and touch, and consistent from piano to piano in the way that only a production line instrument can be. As I said in an earlier post, they are the best production piano available, with a price that still maked them one of the most affordable fine pianos. But normally I would never expect even their top of the line concert grand to approach the touch and tone of a more expensive hand-crafted instrument like a Fazioli, Schimmel, Steinway or Bosendorfer.

But this year Yamaha debuted it’s CF series, to replace it’s former upper-end S-series grands, and several of us crowded around their new flagship, the top-secretly researched, fully hand-crafted, Bavarian soundboarded CFX. We each took turns playing and listening, and I’ve got to tell you, we simply couldn’t pull away. Although other great instruments were beckoning from other rooms, we kept coming back to the CFX, absolutely stunned by it’s rich, monstrous bass, it’s singing middle register, and a top two octaves where each note sounded like a bell ringing, right up to the highest C! For piano fanatics, it was pure piano bliss! I played it as long as I could before I was literally pulled off. The action was superb, though I still preferred the even-more-buttery actions in the Bosendorfer and Fazioli, but it was damn close. And the sound, that sound, I’ve just never heard a piano sound like that. Goose bumps!

Want to see this amazing instrument explained & demoed at the 2010 NAMM ? Click here to see videos on Yamahas own website. Just open the menu called Keyboard Division Product Demos, in the left sidebar, and choose the first & last video pictured.

Naturally, I want one. But when they are finally released this summer, I think there going to retail for well over $100,000, and I’m a bit short this year. Well we’ll see. If you get a chance to demo one of these later this year (only in top Yamaha dealerships like Keyboard Concepts in L.A.), be prepared. You may never want to play any other piano again.

For more check out these related posts

• New Pianos At The 2010 NAMM Show, Part 1!

As you wander this humongous space the size of 4 football fields, you jostle & bump into straight-looking dudes in suits and sweaters, and mopped-top, studded-vest rock relics who look a lot like Steve Vai, Eddie Van Halen, Flea, and other rock legends…because they are Steve Vai, Eddie Van Halen, Flea, and other rock legends. Yep, I’ve seem all of them there, as well as rubbing shoulders with Elton John, Carlos Santana, Jay-Z, and so many others. All of them seem to make it to the NAMM show at one point or another.

The show is only open to people in the “music trades,” although I’d swear every year I see more and more people who have nothing to do with selling or servicing music equipment, but still manage to cop an entrance badge. Because I am a musician, recording engineer & producer, as well as a piano technician and fanatic, I always walk the noisy main floor, checking out the latest cool guitars, keyboards, drums and microphones, but lately I find myself spending more and more time on the much quieter second and third floors (I’m gettin’ older, folks) where all the piano manufacturers trot out their latest wood, felt and metal beasts.

So what’s new in the world of fine pianos?

Well, one thing you immediately notice is the piano brand names that were noticeable for their absence. Steinway doesn’t show at NAMM, because they consider themselves the “standard piano of the world,” so venerable that people will come to them even if they don’t show anything new at NAMM every year. But many other well-known companies were missing, either because they couldn’t afford to ship in a bunch of their pianos (Germany’s Bechstein, Bluthner and others) or because they’ve gone completely out of business (like the huge Asian piano conglomerate, Dong Bay.) 2009 was tough for everybody, man, and pianos are mucho expensivoso to manufacture. Esteemed and minor brand names are dropping like flies. That’s the bad news.

The good news is, those companies that are still around definitely had some wonderful instruments to debut. After watching the cool NAMM 2010 video below, click here to go right to my next post, where I share some of the highlights.

NAMM 2010

For more check out these related posts

• New Pianos At The 2010 NAMM Show, Part 2

Wilhelm Backhaus - Haydn , Beethoven & Chopin (CD 1990) $34.76

CHOPIN MONUMENT IN THE JARDIN DU LUXEMBOURG Rousseau , new $17.94

FRANCE POSTCARD CHOPIN FREDRIE COMPOSITEAR MASQUE MONUMENT CLESINGER $16.38

SLENCZYNSKA etudes op 25 CHOPIN brunswick AXTL 1085 $39.99

HOROWITZ The Last Recording CHOPIN HAYDN...1990 SONY MINT $61.65

As the  months of Piano Passion have accumulated, many who trust my piano judgment have written, asking me to tell them what’s the best baby grand, which electronic piano sounds most realistic, and where they could find the best recorded and sheet music of their favorite pieces. So I have decided to add just a few choice, point-you-in-the-right-direction connections from eBay, Amazon and others, on only of few pages of this site, and to erect another website, passionforpiano.com, which will focus more on providing you with various vendors to help you procure pianos, keyboards, music and all the piano accessories you could need. Thanks for your continued visits and comments at both sites!

TELEFUNKEN 10" ST LISZT & TCHAIKOVSKY FRANZ ANDRE NM $9.99

TURNABOUT VOX QUADRAPHONIC LISZT LES PRELUDES LANDAU NM $9.99

COLUMBIA Wh/g STEREO 10" SMETANA LISZT PRELUDES KARAJAN $7.99

SLS 5094 4LP SOLOMON The Great concertos Brahms Grieg Tchaikovsky Liszt $39.52

PHILIPS PTC 900000 LISZT CTO 1&2 RICHTER KONDRASHIN 35MM REEL TAPE 7½ 4 TRACK NM $14.99

Chopin Photo Mugs Portrait of composer Frederic Chopin. Photogravure of a 19th century portrait....

Chopin Photo Mugs Composer and pianist Frederic Chopin. Digitally tinted photograph of a 19th-century portrait....

Chopin profile Photo Mugs Frederic Chopin in 1847. Digitally colored halftone reproduction of a Winterhalter drawing from life....

Franz Liszt Photo Mugs Portrait of Franz Liszt. Photogravure reproduction of a 19th-century photograph....

Liszt conducting in Budapest Photo Mugs Franzi Liszt conducting his new Oratorio at Budapest, Hungary, 1860s. Hand-colored woodcut of a 19th-century illustration....

Liszt Photo Mugs Hungarian composer and conductor Franz Liszt. Digitally tinted 19th-century photograph....

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It’s times like these when we look back at our experiences of the past year, and all we’ve experienced throughout our entire life. Like everyone else, I’ve had good times & tough times, much to be grateful for, and some things to regret. Throughout it all, one constant source of joy and upliftment has been beautiful music played on the piano (hence, the site’s name, PIano Passion.)

If you are a regular visitor to this site, that means you love piano music too, and everyone has their favorite genres & pieces. In the classical catalog, two pianists/composers are often seen as embodying the peak of both playing and composing for the instrument, Fryderk Chopin and Franz Liszt. What glorious music! Many is the time I’ve not merely listened, but been totally transported by their melodies and flourishes, and no matter what happens to me in this world, I’m so grateful I’ve had the songs of Chopin and Liszt at my side.

Both Chopin & Liszt were proponents of the shorter expositions, and as a result their under 5-minute songs are revered much more than their irregular ventures into the long, concerto form. Liszt was, of course, Hungarian, and wrote 20 beautiful  Hungarian rhaphsodies. I love all of his "Consolations" and his "Liebestraum", but I think my favorite shorter Liszt piece would have to be one of his dreamy etudes, "Un Sospiro." Although Liszt has many, many modern interpreters like Georges Cziffra and Horowitz, I really like this version by Earl Wild on YouTube below:

Chopin has been covered by everyone from Paderewski in the 1930s to Martha Argerich just a few years ago. In between there have been marvelous interpretations by Pollini, Michelangeli, and a state-of-the-art, comprehensive boxed set of almost everything Chopin wrote by Arthur Rubenstein. All are technically proficient, and your personal preference tends to depend on whether you lean toward a more clnical and straightforward reading of his work (Rubenstein) or a more passionate, flourishing reading (Claudio Arrau and others.)

I’ll go out on a limb and say, if you want to hear Chopin’s wonderful Waltzes played with the most beautiful tone and maximum joyful expression you’ll ever hear, you MUST pick up a copy of the EMI recording by Dinu Lipatti, it’s incredible!

My own ardor to play beautiful pieces and improve my technique is very much owed to Chopin. I was a new piano student of 7 when I first heard one of his most dazzling pieces, "Fantasie Imprompru," and I quickly vowed that I must learn how to play that piece. Playing it well represents a significant task of technique, so the desire to command it forced me to really work on my finger skills. It is, today, still one of my most favorite pieces of music from any era.

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If you enjoy visiting my pianotreasure.com site for piano lovers, there’s probably at least one piano player in you life for whom you’d love to find an appropriate musical or piano-based gift. It could be you! Or any of your piano-playing friends.

If I were Santa, with unlimited cash-flow, I’d come down the chimney in every piano players home in the world, and plop a big hand-made, high-quality grand piano in each living room. Now there’s an amazing visual – to have every family wake up to find a new top-name grand dominating their parlor! Actually, in spite of loving pianos & piano music, many of these families would be quite ticked with me! Not the kids, probably, but the adults would be like, "Now where in the heck are we gonna put THIS!" Times are tight and living spaces have grown smaller.

But alas, I’m not Santa, and grand pianos don’t fit down chimneys. Some of you, who have not been totally crushed by our economic downturn, might actually be getting a new or used piano this Christmas. The piano dealers are hurting, too, and so they’re dealin’ hard. And you can often find great pianos online. For those who already have their dream piano, or simply cannot justify that much largess this winter of ‘09, there’s a slew of fabulous gift ideas for the piano players in your life.

- Every piano and piano player needs accessories:

• Get them a shiny new lamp to sit on, or clamp to, their music desk, so they can read their music more easily

• In our earlier posts on sight-reading we mentioned the need for a metronome. Get them a cool electronic modern beeper or an old-style wooden triangle with the rocking pendulum.

• Many grand pianos could be kept looking newer, with less dust and furniture scratches, if they had a nice cover. There are custom made canvas covers that fit over the whole grand like a glove, or if your a crocheter or quilter, you can make a heartfelt throw to keep their piano top safe.

• How about some player rolls for those piano owners on your list with old-style paper-roll player pianos? There are people unloading these by the box-full, at a fraction of their cost, on the online auctions, and of course the largest player-roll maker, QRS, is still in business, so you can even get brand spanking new rolls.

• For the piano student who has many music books to carry back-&-forth to the teacher’s studio, get them a great carrying bag or case.

- One of the best gifts is music itself:

• Find out who their favorite piano players are and get them some CDs (or an iTunes gift-card) of great recordings. For the Classical pianist, anything by Polini will amaze them, and if they haven’t already heard Van Cliburn’s 1958 interpretation of Rachmaninoff’s Concerto #2 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, get it, it will rock their world!

• Good piano players love sheet music and songbooks. Go to your local sheet music dealer and get a $50 gift card, then let them pick out just what they’d love to play. Better still, for adult players, hunt down some rare, old and sometimes beautifully tattered song sheets from the early 20th century.

People give stacks of these away, and sometimes, there’s some amazing gems tucked in the pile. I once found an original 1930s version of Jerome Kern’s "All The Things You Are" that I still treasure.

As the gift giver, a nice touch is to pull out one of the old pieces and frame it for the wall of their music room. Old sheet music can be readily found at local garage sales and, better yet, on online auctions. A wonderful gift!

• And don’t forget beautiful piano music boxes as featured in out earlier post The Art Of Piano Music Boxes

- And of course, my heavily-biased favorite gift:

• Give them a gift certificate to have their piano tuned & serviced by an expert technician. Of all the gifts you can give a piano player, to have a top technician come in and go through their piano top to bottom, leaving it playing and sounding at peak performance, at no cost to them, is a perfect gift! Imagine their delight, next time they sit down to play, and their formerly squeaky, tinny, hard-to-play instrument now sounds rich and responds beautifully to their touch. Goose bumps and long fond memories for sure, of the person who did this for them!

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Maybe you’ve found that you’ve hit a wall in your piano playing ability, beyond which you just can’t seem to get. Everybody hits this wall, even the eventual great players.The following are some helpful tips for taking your piano playing to next level.

* Learn song pattern recognition as we discussed in the post on playing by ear. Every song ever written follows a pattern, a structure of sections and chord progressions. You need only listen to a handful of songs by The Beatles to hear what we mean. To expand your repertoire and build versatility in your ability to pick up nearly any song you hear quickly and easily, learn the patterns with which all songs are composed.

* In that same "Playing By Ear" post, we started looking at the number system for chord-cuilding; that is, in any key, the chord built on that key’s first note is the 1 chord, on the next note is the 2, chord, and so on. Every song is written in a particular key – one of but 12, to be precise – and every key has it’s scales, series’ of notes in specific intervals, any of which will sound natural and pleasing to the ear when played in it’s respective key. Every scale in every key has its 1-chord, its 2-chord, etc. Instead of straining yourself to memorize how to play various piano chords by rote, learn instead the keys that chords are played in and the scales they’re built upon. Then you can quickly and easily figure out how to play any chord in any key on the spot, whether you’ve memorized that specific chord or not.

* The secret to learning to play by ear is simple – just learn the aforementioned 12 musical keys. By doing so, you can easily transpose any song you hear into any key you like. Learning to transpose, then, will take you to the next level of playing piano, which is knowing how to improvise. Many piano players can read and follow piano sheet music, but far fewer can sit down and start playing along spontaneously with any song they hear – and have it sound pleasing to the ear. Of course, if you don’t yet know how to read piano sheet music, then you may also want to begin studying that skill as well. But not at the expense of learning the fundamentals of music, which is not in writing but in listening. In musical terms, this is called "ear-training". Learn to recognize the sounds of harmonic and melodic intervals and you’re more than halfway to playing them.

* Expose yourself: Spend time surrounded by musicians of exceptional quality, professionals and amateurs alike in whose presence you can hear what it sounds like to play how you want to play. The body’s muscles have memory far superior to than our brain’s conscious recall ability. By simply immersing yourself in an environment where your ear is exposed to the sort of piano playing you aspire to, your body has a far easier time reproducing those sounds on the piano yourself.

Most importantly in your piano playing adventure is to remember to give it a little attention every day. You don’t have to practice for hours and hours a day to get good at the piano. You need only devote a small amount of time daily to keep the skills you’re learning present in your mind and body. Even just 15 minutes a day keeps your piano playing ability in tune.

For more check out these related posts

• Playing By Ear 3
• Playing By Ear 1

"Would you like to feel more motivated to practice the piano?
Are you struggling to make practicing the piano a priority?
Have you lost your desire to "go for the gold"?

Recently, the mother of a young student told me that she was concerned about her daughter’s lack of motivation to practice the piano.

When I questioned Katy about this issue, she told me that she needed inspiration… and that it was my job as her teacher to inspire her.

You may feel the same way.
But what happens when your goal to improve your piano playing needs daily inspiration?
How will you get it?

Maurice Ravel said that inspiration comes as a result of daily work (practice).
Business guru Michael Gerber, in his book E-Myth Mastery, sheds more light on this subject:
"Organization… is the fountainhead for inspiration….people have a container within which to be their most creative."

But how can you get inspiration and use it to succeed?

Three Building Blocks for Successful Piano Playing:

1. Organization: look at each of the parts of your musical program

• Your Music: Are the books and/or the sheet music for the pieces you want to learn all together in one place as well as clear and easy to read with any necessary place marks in the books? See my article about organizing your music. Your Practice Spot: Do you have good lighting, a comfortable seat or bench, an area free from noise and distractions? How is your energy level? Will you be able to concentrate? Here are some ideas to help you use your practice spot to succeed.

• Your Schedule: Have you set aside times during the week when you plan to practice? This could be at different times on certain days, but you need to have blocks of time (even 15 minute spots) scheduled for each day.

• Your Goals & Priorities: Have you selected the songs you really want to play? Are you practicing difficult sections several times so that you can master them? Do you have a target date for learning each of your pieces? Take a look at these tips for success.

2. Inspiration: Once you have put each of the elements of organization into your practicing routine, you will have a plan to follow. As soon as you start using this success building structure on a regular basis, you will notice an increase of inspiration.

You will start noticing that you are more focused, more confident and more energized.

3 Motivation: When you start seeing results and hearing improvement, you’ll become much more enthusiastic. Organization plus inspiration will give you the motivation to practice more often, more effectively and more successfully. You will amaze yourself which how much better you can play, and as a result you’ll want to practice.

Action Exercises:

Here are three things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, create your success structure by putting the organization of your music, your practice spot, your schedule and your goals & priorities into place.

Second, start following your plan and commit to making this new way of practicing a success habit. The longer you maintain this discipline, the more enthusiastic you will become. Inspiration will increase and energize your daily work.

Third, remember that the way to keep the motivation to persevere on your journey to successful piano playing is to create and apply organization to your practicing routine. The more consistent you become with this, the more you will experience inspiration.

If you want to get great results from all of your piano lessons and really succeed, combine the Three Building Blocks: Organization + Inspiration + Motivation.

You’ll be amazed at how quickly your piano playing will sound super! Before you know it, you’ll have plenty of motivation to succeed because you started with organization which gave you inspiration!"

Copyright © 2007 by Ed Mascari ed@edmascari.com

For more check out these related posts

• Remember To Ask “Why” You Study Piano
• Learning To Play The Piano 2
• Learning To Play The Piano 1

"Are you wondering when you’ll be able to play the piano with ease?
Do you wish you could improve your piano playing more quickly?
Are you struggling to stay motivated to practice each day?

Is so, read on…..

There’s a lot of talk these days about setting goals.
Unfortunately, even if you do set a goal, you may not achieve it.

Perhaps it’s because your reason for accomplishing the goal isn’t important enough to you.

Have you ever prepared to perform at your spring piano recital and put everything else aside during the few days before? Perhaps this is because you wanted to play well. Or you may simply have been motivated by the fear of embarrassment.

In his famous book, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill said "The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat."

Think about the day before you go on vacation. Won’t you work like crazy to accomplish all of your tasks so that you can pack your suitcase, change into your casual clothes and get going?

If you want to stay motivated, improve your piano playing more rapidly and get to the point where you can play the piano with ease, you will need to discover your deepest reasons for accomplishing these goals. In other words, you will need a very strong desire to achieve your piano playing success.

Desire is the powerful fuel in your goal setting process.

But how can you access desire and use it to succeed?
You need to keep asking yourself WHY?

"Why?": The Key Question to Ask and Answer for Your Keyboard Success

1. Ask yourself WHY you chose to play the piano in the first place.

• Were you inspired after watching Horowitz performing on television?
• Do you remember hearing your grandmother tinkling the ivories?
• Did you become energized after experiencing the excitement of a Billy Joel concert?
• Is it because you inherited a piano, and it’s now sitting in your living room?
• Were you forced to take piano lessons as a child? (Hardly your choice)

2.  Ask yourself WHY you now want to play the piano-this is your long term goal.

 Do you want to play for relaxation? o

• Do you want to be able to entertain friends at parties?
• Do you want to play in a band?
• Do you want to play piano on cruise ship or in a piano bar?
• Do you want to compose and record your own music?

3. Ask yourself WHY you are making your piano playing a priority at this time of your life- this is your medium term goal.

• Are you anxious to finally focus on playing the piano now that your children have grown up and moved out?
• Do you really want to be able to play the Moonlight Sonata or memorize five Gershwin tunes?
• Are you eager to learn to improvise or play the blues?
• Do you want to open a fake book and play any song you choose?
• Are you anxious to develop your technique, sight-reading skills or knowledge of music theory?

4. Ask yourself WHY you want to practice the piano today-this is your short term goal.

• Do want to have a good lesson on Thursday?
• Have you had a stressful day today and need to unwind?
• Do you want to feel the satisfaction of playing 4 measures of Misty from memory?
• Are you excited about jamming with your Band-in-a-Box computer music program?
• Do you wish you could master the last 8 measures of Chopin’s Nocturne in Eb?

Action Exercises

Here are three things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, ask yourself WHY you really want to play the piano, WHY you want to reach a certain musical level, WHY you want to achieve your specific goals and WHY you want to practice today.

Second, answer each of your WHY questions and write these responses on index cards, in your notebook or in a computer program. The act of writing will reinforce your reasons for staying motivated and focused.

Third, remember that the way to keep fueling your desire to persevere on your keyboard success journey is to continue to ask WHY and then regularly answer your specific questions. The more consistent you become with this process, the more motivated you will feel.

If you want to get great results from all of your piano playing and really achieve your keyboard success, keep asking the key question: WHY?

You’ll be amazed at how quickly your piano playing will sound super!

Before you know it, you’ll have fueled your desire to succeed because you asked and answered the Key Question for Your Keyboard Success: WHY?"

© 2007 by Ed Mascari All Rights Reserved. ed@edmascari.com

For more check out these related posts

• Combining Motivaion, Organization and Inspiration
• Learning To Play The Piano 2
• Learning To Play The Piano 1

Worse is how it tries to do it. You see, when you push the left pedal down on a grand, the whole keyboard shifts to the right a bit, allowing the hammers to move over and only strike 1 or 2 of the strings where they wold normally strike 2 or 3. It can do this because in a grand the keyboard floats loosely in the piano, and is not bolted down. In an upright, the keyboard is bolted down and immovable, so all the hammers will continue to strike all 2 or 3 strings they always strike. So what did these misguided makers do instead, to try to achieve a softer tone? They put in a wooden rod, worked up & down by the left pedal, that pushes all the hammers about half-way closer to the strings than their normal rest position.

Usually, when you strike an upright key, the hammer travel about 1^3/4" from rest position to the string. Pressing down the left pedal shortens this distance by about half, so the hammer need only go forward about 7/8" before making contact with the string. Less travel or "blow" equals a softer contact and sound, right? Not really. Try it. Hit any key without the left pedal and listen to the volume you get from that note. Now press down the left pedal, and hit the key again with exactly the same amount of force. Pretty much the same volume, right? I defy you to hear much difference. That alone would render it a useless pedal.

But the real problem is that, in lifting all the hammers closer to the strings, the left pedal has effectively thrown all the keys’ touch completely out of regulation, and introduced a gaping empty air-space of lost motion between your finger and making contact with the hammer. Slowly press down any key without the left pedal; feel the firm weight & contact against your finger. Now press the left pedal down, and slowly push down the same key. But wait…whoa! there’s nothing there, no weight, no contact until, ahh, there it is! Only after you’ve pushed the key about 1/4"-1/2" down, can you finally feel the weight of the hammer against your finger. Introducing this severe amount of "lost motion," or no contact between your finger and the hammer (and thus no dynamic control,) all for a pedal that barely achieves its function anyway (softening the volume) was the stupidest invention ever on any size piano. Aaarrggh!

There were a few manufacturers in the early 20th century who added an expensive extra mechanism and set of wooden flanges called a "lost-motion regulator" – A.B. Chase and Vose & Sons pianos had them – but they’re hard to find on any upright piano now, and remember, this upright soft pedal doesn’t really make the notes softer anyway, so once again, aaarrggh…why bother? Just leave one pedal off upright pianos…no big deal! People will still buy ‘em. They have to (see the reasons listed in our last post)

So stare at the 3 shiny pedals on your upright piano and enjoy their attractive three-ness, just like a grand. Then sit down and play, and know that the only one your ever gonna use is the far right damper pedal, period.

For more check out these related posts

• Why 3 Pedals Are “2 Much” On An Upright – Part 1
• Why 3 Pedals On A Grand Piano?
• Soundboard Racks and Cracks
• The All-Important Soundboard
• It Plays, It Vibrates, It Sings!

Still, upright pianos are a necessity in the modern home and school room, because of their compact fit, their easier transportability, and their considerably reduced cost. The majority of home pianos are still uprights, with a 75% to 25% margin over grands. And studio uprights fill the classrooms and practice rooms of even the more prestigious musical institutions. This is a good thing, overall, because it’s forced all piano manufacturers to make the sound and touch of their uprights as "grand" as possible, and has resulted in some significant improvements on the finer uprights.

One of the early attempts to make people think they were getting the full "grand piano" experience from an upright purchase was the sales-pitchy use of a highly misleading misnomer – calling the taller verticals "Upright Grands" in the early 20th century. Upright Grand?? Now there’s an oxymoron if there ever was one, quite like "jumbo shrimp." No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus, and an upright is an upright, and a grand is a grand, and never the twain shall meet. I still get calls weekly from people asking if I’ll come tune their "upright grand." I ask, "Is it a grand or an upright?" They reply, "It’s an upright grand." I patiently say, "No, that’s just a sales tactic. If it’s a vertical piano against the wall, it’s an upright…if it stands free on three legs, it’s a grand." Sometimes I can feel their spirit sinking over the phone, like, "Damn you for telling me that, it was so much cooler to call it a grand turned upward!" Sorry, it’s not a grand, even though the strings may be as long as some shorter grands. Refer to the link above for more clarity about this.

The other way makers tried to seduce you into thinking the upright was just as "complete" as the grand was to include 3 full pedals, "just like on a grand," even when only one of them performed the same function as it’s grand counterpart, and the other two either feigned similar functions or often did nothing at all! That’s right, on many upright pianos, the middle and far left pedal are just for show!

But on most uprights, all 3 are indeed functional, and here’s how they work:

The damper pedal (far right pedal) works just the same as on a grand, pulling all the dampers off the strings, so they can all sustain freely until letting up on the pedal.

The middle pedal performs a sort of faux-sostenuto function. It lifts only the bass section dampers off the bass strings, allowing the player to hit a big octave or chord in the bass, and have it keep sustaining, whilst they plink short or staccato notes in the upper sections. Not nearly as selective as the grand version, but as we said, there are very few pieces of music written for true Sostenuto pedaling, so it’s adequate.

Modern piano manufacturers, especially the Oriental  pianos, realized this next-to-never usage of the middle pedal for Sostenuto, and decided to assign it a completely different function: pulling a thin strip of felt down between the hammers and the strings (sometimes called a "mute bar") to make your playing extremely soft and muffled, so you can practice late at night, or whenever, without disturbing anyone else in the home. Thanks to the inventiveness of companies like Yamaha, this has now become the more common function of the middle pedal on all uprights.

Next, in "Why 3 Pedals Are ‘2 Much’ On An Upright – Part 2," we’ll take apart (and throw away!) the dreaded left pedal on uprights…

For more check out these related posts

• Why 3 Pedals Are “2 Much” On An Upright – Part 2
• Why 3 Pedals On A Grand Piano?
• Soundboard Racks and Cracks
• The All-Important Soundboard
• It Plays, It Vibrates, It Sings!

Most modern grand and upright pianos come with 3 foot pedals. Many people are confused or outright mistaken about what they are for and how to use them properly. Let’s start with the pedals on a grand piano, since they are the most "real" and set the standard for what these pedals should do:

Standing in front of a grand piano, looking at the pedals from right-to-left, the far right pedal is called the Damper Pedal. It’s sometimes mistakenly called the sustain pedal, because the end result of pushing it down is that all the notes sustain for as long as you hold down the pedal. Of course, any individual notes that you play will also keep on ringing as long as you hold down those specific keys, but pressing the Damper Pedal lets the notes keep ringing even if you come off the keys.

It does this by lifting all the dampers (hence the name) off the strings. If you remove the music desk from your grand piano and look down over the strings, a few inches back from the tuning pins, you will see a row of curve-shaped wooden blocks with squares or wedges of felt hanging from their undersides, sitting on top of the strings. Now while still staring at these, press down on the far right pedal and you will see them all lift off the strings, allowing the strings to vibrate freely. Let go of the pedal and the dampers fall back onto the strings, effectively muting out any sound.

The dampers are all connected by wires to individual wooden levers inside the piano. You cannot see these levers with the piano all closed up, but if you slide the action out of the piano and look to the back of the cavity where the action usually fits, you’ll see these levers, and a wooden tray that lifts all of them off the strings when you press down the pedal. You’ll see a wooden dowel coming up from under the piano, that attaches to this tray and pumps it up and down. That dowel is in turn connected to your foot by means of a rod and lever under the piano.

The area where the tray and damper levers are secured is referred to as the piano’s "back action," the levers under the piano are referred to as the "trapwork," and the wooden frame holding the pedals and pedal rods is called the "lyre."

Now here’s an important point: In most cases, the damper pedal is the only one you need. As we go on to describe the other pedals, you’ll understand why.

The middle pedal on a grand piano is called the Sostenuto Pedal. You can think of it as a "selective" sustain pedal. The way it works is that you press it down after you hold down certain keys, and it lifts the dampers off (or allows to sustain) just those notes, while allowing you to play the other notes as short, non-sustaining notes, even staccato. So the only time you would need the Sostenuto Pedal is in the rare instance that you want to have 2-8 notes keep ringing, in the bass section for instance, while you play short notes in the treble. There are only about 30 or so pieces in all of piano music that call for that odd pairing of sound – mostly from the more impressionistic and 20th-century composers – so a pianist could go through his whole piano-playing life without ever using this pedal. This is made all the more amazing when you realize that installing this pedal and it’s connecting mechanisms inside a grand piano adds a significant cost to building the instrument, well over a thousand dollars! All that for a pedal you may step on five time in the 50+ plus years you own the piano!

The far left pedal is probably the most misnamed and misunderstood one. It is NOT the "Soft Pedal!" It’s proper name is the Una Corda Pedal; una corda means one string. That’s because when you press it down, the whole key action shifts to the right, just enough to make the piano’s hammers line up and strike just two of the three stings for each note that has a three-string unison, and just one of the two bass strings that have two strings per note. The early 18th century pianos just had two strings per note, and this pedal made the hammers hit just one of the two, hence the the name "una corda."

Now it may be natural to think that hitting only one or two strings for each note, when the piano usually strikes two or three, would make the notes a bit softer, when struck with the same key force, and it does. A bit. A very little bit. Because that’s not the purpose of this pedal. Any good piano instructor will tell you, "If you want softer notes, play softer! Don’t use the left pedal."

No, the original purpose the inventors of the Una Corda Pedal had in mind, was an ethereal sound created by striking only two of the three strings, but having the third string vibrate sympathetically, which it will if properly tuned. This dreamlike sound was their intention, not just a softening of the volume.

Still, you’d be amazed at how many pianists, including accomplished concert artists, use the Una Corda as a "soft pedal," a volume softener, probably because it does make it easier to play at pianissimo levels than simply playing with a more delicate touch…that actually takes technique

In our next post we’ll look at why you should never, ever use the far left pedal on an upright piano, and why it’s even there in the first place!

For more check out these related posts

• Why 3 Pedals Are “2 Much” On An Upright – Part 2
• Why 3 Pedals Are “2 Much” On An Upright – Part 1
• Soundboard Racks and Cracks
• The All-Important Soundboard
• It Plays, It Vibrates, It Sings!

If you have not yet  experienced the joy of improvising in your piano playing, you are missing out on a great experience. Imagine an artist who does not know how to draw or paint without tracing or copying another’s work, and you get the idea.

Yet, many piano players lack the ability to improvise on the piano! This is caused by years of rigid piano lesson/structure and a lack of proper guidance.

Many piano players rely on sheet music to be able to play, which would be like an artist only copying another’s art work and never creating something unique. Improvisation is a fun process. It enables the pianist to bring out the latent potential of creativity and expression inside them.

One thing that will help any piano player to improve on the art of improvisation is to allow unstructured creative time during one’s piano practice hours.

Time to just sit down and make up music on the piano is crucial. No agenda, no structure, no goals to accomplish. This process is extremely important in the world of piano playing.

In order to allow the inner expression to come out, one needs to let it reveal itself. A good example of this is in how young children play piano. If you can observe a child learning the piano do so. Very often, young children are able to reach a creative and fun play "scheme" without any guidance at all. Similarly, any piano player should allow 15-30 minutes of "free play" without worrying about hitting the wrong notes.

Traditional piano lessons emphasize the ability to read notes. Reading ability is no doubt one of the most important skills any piano player can possess. This emphasis, however, has created some "lopsided" players who can only play piano by reading. Eventually this type of player will lose their interest and passion for music.

Many young children drop out of piano lessons as a result of struggling with music reading. Children who are younger than 5 or 6 are discouraged from traditional piano lessons due to the fact that they cannot yet read musical notes properly.

Music is commonly referred to as a "language." There are many ways of learning language. Young children master the language skill by frequently talking and interacting with their peers and care-takers as well as imitating other people. The ability to read comes a little later in their life. A similar approach needs to be taken to foster the love of piano music among young children. Sometimes by just allowing young children to make up music on the piano without placing emphasis on playing the correct notes can be just as important.

For more check out these related posts

• Ancient Music to Modern Improvisation

2. You are rebuilding a piano, grand or upright, that will NOT be worth a lot of money after rebuilding, perhaps even a bit less than what it costs to rebuild it, but the piano has sentimental value for you – a family heirloom perhaps – and you have no intention of replacing it with another piano, so you must restore your treasured instrument as best you can.

3. You have a “special” instrument – a rare antique or highly ornate piece of furniture – with worn-out parts and sound, which, due to its age and old design, won’t sound that great even AFTER it’s rebuilt. But you have the wherewithal, and want to restore it as a special piece of furniture or conversation piece, for your mansion:) That may seem frivolous, but you’d be surprised how many rich customers have hired me to do just that. Restore some weird, off-brand antique piano, one that, even after restoral, will produce thin, poor tone quality when compared to any modern grand. This is especially true of the dreaded “square grand,” a long, rectangular box of a grand with strings running side-to-side instead of front-to-back, sitting on four legs instead of three. It looks a bit like a coffin, and sounds just as dead, due to the tiny soundboard and bridges and an amazingly poor action design. Major piano makers, even Steinway, produced these from about 1840 to 1900, and blessedly stopped after that. I rebuilt two of these, and that cured me of it…never again!

So there are definitely times and reasons for investing in full restoration of your piano. But here’s a caveat and an admission you may not expect from someone who can make tens of thousands of dollars every year, restoring pianos:

Rebuilt pianos, even ones restored by master rebuilders, rarely sound and play as great as they did originally, and almost never as good as a new one.

I’ve been a tuner-rebuilder for over 35 years. I’ve played many, many older Steinways, Baldwins, Bosedorfers, Bechsteins and Bluthners, restored by the finest rebuilders in the country, including pre-1940s Steinways rebuilt by Steinway themselves, at their factory. Truth be told, even though they all sound and play ten times better than when they still had their old parts, and get “close” to how they sounded new, they fall short of the level of touch & tone excellence available in a well-built, well-prepped new instrument. I’ve simply never played a finely rebuilt Steinway or Bosendorfer, then gone to the dealer and played well-regulated-and-voiced new Steinway or Bosendorfer, and felt the rebuilts were nearly as resonant and wonderful. That’s just the way it is with new parts in an older piano. Even if you replace everything but the plate and cabinet, it’s still older, and something is still missing, still falls short, when compared to the new ones. So I will contnue to rebuild fine pianos for all customers citing any of the reasons above, but these days, I tend to recommend, “Get a new one” a lot more often than, “You should rebuild the one you have.”

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• Should Your Rebuild Your Piano

Should You Rebuild Your Piano, or Purchase A Refurbished Piano?

When families, piano students and players need a good-sounding, well functioning piano for their home or studio, they actually have 4 choices:

1. Buy a new piano with full warranty
2. Buy a used piano in its present condition
3. Buy an older used piano that’s already been completely rebuilt
4. Buy an older used piano in poor or run-down condition and pay to have it rebuilt yourself.
And of course, if you already own a piano that is older, and most of the parts are wearing out, causing poor sound & touch, you can add a fifth possibility to our list of choices
5. Rebuild your existing piano

Obviously, the first two choice are the easiest to undertake. Choice 3 can also be easy enough as long as you can verify the competence and quality of the rebuilder and his work.
Here, as in our earlier post about buying a used piano, one caveat cannot be overstressed: Take an expert technician with you who has the experience to accurately gauge to rebuilders skill level and qulaity of their work.

But choices 4 and 5 are tricky, and require deep assessment to determine whether or not any given piano warrants rebuilding.

First, let’s clarify what is meant by rebuilding a piano. Rebuilding a used piano, also reffered to as piano restoration or refurbishing, is the process of gutting the instrument of all it’s worn out parts, and replacing them with fresh new parts.

There are different levels of rebuilding. In some cases, simply replacing the hammers, dampers, key & action felts, and all the strings, is enough. In the restoration of much older instruments, it may also be necessary to replace many wooden action parts like the hammershanks, wippens, springs, damper levers, and even the wooden keys or keyframe, as well as cutting, fitting and drilling a new tuning pin block.

So rebuilding often may start with gutting the piano all the way down to the bare cabinet, iron plate, soundboard and bridges. As mentioned in the earlier post, full soundboard/bridge replacement is rare for most “piano shop rebuilders,” usually a factory job.

Rebuilding usually takes place in the piano technicains shop, for considerations of space, noise, messiness, and the tech’s access to all his heavy and technical tools. But, if it’s strictly an easier-level rebuilding job (just restringing and action-parts replacement) with no refinishing of the cabinet included, some rebuilders will offer to bring their tools and parts to the home and carry out the work there, saving the owner back-and-forth cartage fees.

Obviously, this is a LOT of work, usually consuming 4-8 weeks and costing from $3,000 to $10,000, depending on the type of instrument (old upright or fine grand) and depth of restoral needed. And that’s just for the inner restoral; we haven’t added the thousands for professional refinishing of the case.

With those kind of figures, it’s obvious that full piano rebuilding only make senses in a few instances. In our next post, let’s take a look at when rebuilding is warranted.
 

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• Should You Rebuild Your PIano 2?

Action Regulation:
A good grand piano has approximately 9,000 parts, most of them moving parts!

When you strike any piano key, you send between 15-20 parts into motion, just to make sure the hammer strikes the string properly, falls away properly, and the key goes down smoothly and to the right depth under your finger. All these parts are adjusted to exact measurements and specifications to insure that every note strikes correctly, and that the touch of every key feels precisely like every other key up and down the piano.

After many hours of play and practice, these settings start to go out of adjustment, little by little. Depending on how much you play, after several years, the settings will need to be rest across the whole piano action. This process is called “action regulation.” It is a precise skill, to be performed only by a well-experienced techinician. He will need several hours to do the work, and will charge approx. $250-$350

Voicing or Tone Regulating:
The srings are struck by egg shaped felts called the hammers. The tonal color and beauty of any piano is extremely dependent on the condition of these felts. If they are too hard, either from being “packed down” after years of hard use, or from old age and drying out, they will produce a very strident, unpleasant sound. If too soft, the piano will sound dull and lifeless.  A fine techinician can immediately detect the condition of any piano hammers and their effect on the tone. At some point, so much of the original hammer felt may be worn away that the only remedy is replace them all with a fresh set of quality hammers.

But if there’s still plenty of original felt left, and the hammers have just gotten hard or deeply grooved, a skilled piano technician trained in proper tone regulating will know how to “voice” the hammers back to a beautiful tone. Often this requires shaving off some of the old top layer of felt (a very precise process, as hammer’s striking point must stay properly shaped to strike all the strings at an exact point) and using a needle to soften or release tension on specific areas of each hammer. How often your piano’s hammers need this will be determined by how often and hard you play, and the quality level of the original hammer set. Professionals who practice many hours every day will need some hammer voicing every month or two. “Average” home players, practicing 45-60min. a day may find they can go several years in between hammer vocings. Voicing is not a job for newbies; if your piano needs voicing, get the best tech you can find, period.

Some parts that may need replacing:

Aside from the aforementioned hammers, which may need replacing in anywhere from 10-35 years depending on playing frequency, another felt component that commonly needs replacing are the key bushings. Each key has two holes that straddle two guide pins as they go up and down. The pins are metal and the key is wood, so there wood be constant knocking if not for 4 little pieces of felt separating and cushioning the metal pins from the wood. These are called the key bushings. The constant up & down motion of each key rubs against the metal pins, eventually wearing away the felt, causing the keys to fell very loose and noisy. When this occurs (somewhere between 5-25 years, depending on quality of the piano and playing frequency) a good technician will rebush your keys for about $250.

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First, never, ever, choose a tuner on price alone. In every technical field, you get what you pay for, and that’s especially true of piano technicians. And it’s just not that much more expensive to choose a reputable expert over a cut-price hack. Maybe you’ll spend an extra $20-30. Is your instrument worht it?

Second, don’t skimp on frequency, don’t choose to wait a couple years in between tunings. I’m assuming you are one of those piano owners who really cares about your instrument, no matter how fine or humble, or you wouldn’t have read this far. Whether your piano cost $1000 or $100,000, spending a couple hundred bucks every year to keep it maintained should feel like a very modest, no-brainer investment to keep it functioning properly. Obviously, if your family is going through a period where no one plays the piano anymore, you’ll be tempted to let it slide. But it will go out of tune and adjustment on its own, just sitting there, and when piano-playing interest is renewed, you’ll find yourself spending much, much more to tweak it back into shape. It’s less expensive just to keep it up each year.

With those first two points in mind, choosing the right tuner-tehchnician is simple. Just find the best, most highly-recommended and reputed tuner in your area, have him come to your piano, trust him when he describes its current condition and what it needs, and pay him whatever he asks. That’s it!
If he’s that highly reputed, he’s not going to gouge you or take advantage of your lack of techincal piano knowledge by recommending work your piano doesn’t need. Believe me, it takes a long time to build up that kind of fine reputation, he cherishes it, and he’s not going to risk losing all that just to make a few extra bucks off you. Plus, if he’s that good, most likely he has plenty of work and doesn’t need to gouge any of his customers.

There are two ways to discover the best tuner in your area. One way is to use a tuner who is a member of the Piano Technicians Guild, a non-profit organization that puts each applicant through stringent testing to determine their level of skill. So if the tuner has a Piano Technicians Guild card, or the PTG insignia on their business card, you can usually rest assured they are a competent tuner-technician. Usually, but not always.

An even better way is to simply ask the fine pianists and piano owners in your area, who they use. Don’t be shy, call the top piano teachers, local concert artists, or anyone you know who owns an expensive Steinway or Bosendorfer, and find out who they use. Better still, if you live in a city that has major recording studios, where important music is recorded, ask them. Recording studios are perhaps the most finnicky about perfectly tuned pianos, because their pianos are often played by major artists, and the notes played are going to be presevered for posterity and heard by many thousands or millions, so it has to be perfect.

In my early years as a tuner, I got called into a major recording session (for the brass-rock group Chicago) simply because their normal tuner was out with the flu, and I was the first tuner who answered the phone as they went down the list in the Yellow Pages. I tried to do my best tuning, got payed, and went home thinking, “Well that was a lucky fluke.” Three months later, I got a call from Elton John’s road manager saying, “We need Elton’s piano tuned for 2 concerts at the Cow Palace, and we hear you’re the best tuner in Chicago.” Wow! Someone from the band Chicago had recommended me, and that was the start of a career tuning for many fine artists, concert halls and recoirding studios. Tuners: always do your best wok, and piano owners: simply find and hire the best available!

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But taking care of the outside of your piano is your job, and it’s relatively simple.

Most pianos need only dry dusting, no polishes, to keep the furniture looking just fine. Occasionally, there will be oily fingerprints and other dirt tat won’t come off with dry dusting. In that case, just take two gentle-fabric wiping cloths (the best is those micro-fibre cloths), dip one in a little water with a few drops of gentle soap, and wring it out almost dry. Use the damp soapy one to rub off the offending spots, then immediately wipe away the dampness with the dry cloth and you’re done.

Pianos have two types of outer finishes. The original finish-of-choice was lacquer, and most good pianos were sprayed at the factory with several coats of high-quality lacquer, which was then hand-rubbed to the desired sheen. This is still the common choice in American pianos.

In the last few decades, Japanese and European piano manufacturers switched over to a much harder finish called polyester. You can spot these finishes on Japanese and European pianos right away, as they are ultra-glossy, wet-look finishes. They are difintely shinier and more durable then lacquer, but much harder to both apply and rub out. Polyester is so toxic, the finishers applyng it must wear full haz-mat suits.

However, polyster will not check and crack into that “alligator skin” look, the way lacquer will after a few decades or after exposed to a lot of sun and dryness. And the finish is hard enough that if you can even use a little Windex on a cloth to rub off stubborn spots.

You can clean dirty keys (they will definitely get oily and dirty after hours of play) with a dry cloth, or for a deeper clean, with an all-purpose spray cleanser. My favorite is Formula 409. It’s important to spray the cleaner on the cloth and wipe, NOT spray directly on the keys. Formula 409 will work on both plastic (after 1960) and ivory (pre-1955) keys, and harm neither.

That’s really all you have to do to care for your piano. Your tuner will do everything else, including inner cleaning. Especially in grand pianos with the lids raised, the piano will definitely collect a layer of dust on the soundboard. DO NOT try to vaccum this up yourself, you could damage the strings and dampers. Your tuner has special tools to clean under your strings, leave that to him/her.

Finally, avoid alowing direct sunlight to hit your piano for any extended period of time. Even an hour a day is too much. Appraise the position of your piano and the windows of that room, to see how much sunlight hits your piano directly, throughout the various seasons. If your piano is in a spot where it would be subject to direct sunlight for any extended period of time, either hang window coverings tha will block oout the sun during those hours, or keep your piano covered with one of the many form-fitting canvas or quilted covers available from piano dealers or your technician.

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Singing a pleasant string of single notes was as natural as breathing, and probably dated back to pre-history. But when humans started singing or playing instruments in harmony, things got a little more complicated. In order to understand why, we need to take a look at the "mathematics" of the musical scale. Enter our old buddy, Pythagoras.

History teaches us that up until the great Greek philosopher, mathematician and scientist, Pythagoras of Samos, conceived and wrote down his mathematical formula for musical note frequencies, no one had any idea of the mathematical relationships of notes on a scale. But Pythagoras noticed that a note exactly one octave above another note was created by trimming a sounding device, either human vocal chords or a string, to exactly half it’s current length.

This set him off developing the mathematical relationships of the entire musical scale. He was the first to declare a scale made up of 12 equally-spaced semi-tones, pre-defining the 12 tones we now see on a piano, going from any note to the note exactly one octave higher (like C3 to C4.)

As harmonic and chordal music evolved, including the singing & playing of pieces many various keys, an interesting mathematical rule presented itself. If you wanted to sing or play instruments in any potential key, and have all the 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, etc. sound in proper relationship to each other, mathematically you needed 26 "semi-tones" to each octave. The G# in a major E chord (E-G#-B) needed to be a totally different note than the Ab in an Ab major chord (Ab-C-Eb).

This was no problem for singers and other instruments, like the violin or wind instruments, that only played one or two notes at a time. Whenever switching through various songs in various keys, the singers or players compensated by slightly shifting their voice or finger-position or wind pressure to hit the proper frequency for that key. A violin player in an orchestra unwittingly move their finger position just slightly to make a G# or an Ab, respectively.

But then some silly dudes started inventing keyboard instruments that could play whole chords and melody with two hands. Based on Pythagoras’ 12-tone scale, they invented the modern-shaped octave, with twelve white-and-black keys. Trouble is, music was evolving and concerts were now featuring pieces in several different keys, instead of playing every song in the key of C or G (which got boooooring!) but as we discovered, if you were going to play in multiple keys, you needed up to 26 notes to hit every note at it’s pure frequency. And that was just too many keys to an octave. You would have t build a piano twice as wide, or with just 3 octaves instead of 7, to hold all those keys, and no one, not even the biggest-handed pianist, would be able to stretch to play an octave.

So, instead a compromise was reached. The keyboard would remain just 12 notes to an octave, but the piano strings would be tuned just slightly off of "pure" pitch for any interval except the octave, to compensate for moving around through many keys in a concert. That compromise was called "tempering" the musical scale, and over the centuries, many different temperaments were tried, falling in and out of favor. By the modern era, the compromise called the "equal temperament" was settled on, and became the temperament of choice for all modern orchestras and players. Thus, our 20th and 21st Century ears have gotten used to the "equal temperament", and that’s the amount of space between the notes that sounds "right" to our brains.

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• Why, and How Often, Must You Tune A Piano

First, every piano has about 240 strings that must be tightened or loosened to the exact pitch, then fixed in position so their pitch holds. This requires turning tuning pins so tight that the tuner must use a long-handled wrench and adjust each pin to a precise point. This is further complicated by the fact that most of the piano’s 88 notes are sounded by striking two or three strings together to form just one note, so those three strings must be in perfect unison with each other.

Finally there is the necessity to tune all the 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths etc. – everything but the octaves – a pre-determined amount sharp or flat, to give the piano the proper “temperament.” This is because the piano is on of the only instruments capable of playing full chords in all keys, and if this temperament, or compromise, was not applied, if every note was instead tuned to it’s pure frequency, many intervals and chords would sound wildly out of tune. We’ll go into detail about why the piano has a tempered scale in a later post.

The bottom line is, tuning a piano correctly is a very special skill set, and takes a long time to learn and get good at, and a fair amount of time spent tuning each piano. Most pianists don’t want to bother learning and perfecting those skills; they’re busy enough just mastering playing the thing! So for somewhere around $100 a pop, they call in the tuner.

Pianos also hold a tremendous amount of tension when tuned up to concert pitch. A fully tuned grand piano carries about 2 tons of tension across its scale. If you’ve ever wondered why pianos are all have that massive heavy plate – cast iron, and usually sprayed gold – inside them, holding the strings, there’s your answer. With 4000 pounds of tension constantly pulling, if there were no iron plate, just a wooden frame, it would be reduced to splinters in a flash.

That same constant 4000 pounds of tension, coupled with fluctuations in the humidity and temperature of whatever room the piano sits in, is the reason why they can rapidly go out of tune. Many piano owners balk at the necessity to tune their piano 2 or even 4 times a year just to keep it in perfect tune. That’s $200-$400 in maintenance costs every year, and that’s without added costs of mechanical adjustments and replacement of worn-out parts, so I can understand their hesitation.

Still, it comes with ownership of any fine piano. It’s sometimes useful to remember that the expensive concert pianos on evey concert stage like Carnegie Hall, are tuned before every performance, not just 3 or 4 times a year. Knowing that these pianos are the finest quality, attended to by only the best piano technicians available, should be a hint that no piano, no matter how expensive or well-tuned, holds a perfect tuning for more than a short time, sometimes as little as several hours of hard play. So having you own instrument tuned once every 4 or 6 months is really no big deal. If your piano is subject to many daily hours of hard practice, or you live in a region where there are big constant changes in the climate and humidity, you will need to tune it even more often.

Next we’ll look at how to choose a tuner, and some of the other tasks, beyond simple tuning, he or she must perform on a semi-regular basis to maintain you piano in top form.
 

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• Why Do Pianos Have A “Tempered” Scale?

After hundreds of years of this ever-widening musical evolution, a true American art form was born in Jazz, in the early 20th Century. Jazz gave rise to many subset musical forms throughout the 1900s – New Orleans jazz, jazz standards, swing, be-bop, straight-ahead and avant-garde – each one ever more free-form in its definition of what music could be. We’ll look at some of the great eras and types of jazz, and their gifted exponents, in a later post.

But one of the main freedoms and styles jazz gave ultimate permission for, was improvisation. Improvisation simply means you use the written melody and chords as a starting point, but then play other notes and chords not in the original written composition. On piano, you may keep the same chords in your left hand, and simply add extra notes, runs and flourishes to the melody in the right hand. Or, in more experimental jazz forms, you may take license with the whole structure – melody, chords, even meter and tempo, ending up with something that most listeners would be hard-pressed to say still resembles the original.
 

In a lot of swing and straight-ahead jazz, it’s common for the band to play once through the main structure of the song’s chords & melody, as it was originally written, then take off for anywhere from a couple verses to 20 minutes worth of improvisation on that structure. Most of the improvisation is built on the basic blues structures – the 1, 4, 5, 6 chords with lots of added 7ths – that jazz grew out of. But it doesn’t sound anything like the simple blues of Muddy Waters or B. B. King. That’s because it’s only based on those blues structures. Then the improvisers go wild, adding a lot of diminished, augmented and modal sounding chords, with lots of extra 9ths, 11ths and 13ths (both major and minor.) The resulting chords and melody, often with both the natural and sharped-or-flatted form of a note in the same chord, can have a very angular sound, and for some, it’s an acquired taste.

But even straight-ahead blues players like B.B. King and Eric Clapton do a lot of melodic improvising, as do so many accomplished piano players like Errol Garner or Oscar Peterson. The accompanying chords stay close to the original chords, but numerous solos are taken on top of that basic structure, with slow or rapid, leaping or crying strings of notes and flourishes, until these solos become the more interesting and dominant aspects of their versions, over just the plain melody.

Coming off of the recent post about learning to play by ear, improvisation is the obvious next step. Once you can play any modern song, fully knowing its original chord and melodic structure, you are invited to take off on flights of fancy and enter an entirely new musical world. Try keeping the left hand chords the same, but experimenting with "riffs" above the normal melody. Try an upward or downward run of chromatic and other scales, or playing some cool "licks," quick or long combinations of bluesy notes that sound good as a nice flourish.

How do you know which riffs and improvisational choices are good or bad? Well, there are many books available that cover entire libraries of commonly used riffs, licks and solos. And there’s my favorite source, listening to other well-known piano players, either live or on CD, over & over, savoring and learning their improvisational choices, and adding my favorites to my own memory bank.

But in the end, it’s about just experimenting yourself, to your heart’s delight! That’s why it’s called improvisation! Because you are experimenting, technically, you can’t make a "mistake." So don’t be shy, just try tons of different things – different chords, different runs of notes – and see what sounds best to your ear. You might even discover a whole new music form. Either way, you’ll definitely have fun! Set aside some time in every piano practice session for some improvisation. Your playing will grow by leaps & bounds!

For more check out these related posts

• Improvisation 2

So as our first example, we’ll listen to "Silent Night." A very simple song, and a great place to start.

Hopefully, you’ve followed the previous instructions for picking out the melody notes. If not, revisit the last post and use your ear’s memory of all the notes and small or large spaces between the notes (intervals) to hunt down and pick out the correct notes to "Silent Night’s" melody.

The first accompanying chord is the 1 chord, built on the first note of the scale. For this example we’ll say the song is in the key of "C". It fits perfectly under the repeated melody of "Silent Night…holy night". But then when the melody jumps to "all is calm…" you can hear that the accompanying chord also jumps to another chord, the "C" chord no longer matches. Can you tell what chord it jumps to? It jumps to 5 chord, built on the fifth note of the scale, or G, as in G, B, D. It comes back to the "C" or 1 chord for "all is bright…" But then it jumps away from C chord again to accompany the next part, "round young virgin…", but not to the 5 chord, which if you try it, will not fit. Try some of the other chords in the scale to see which one does fit. Eventually you’ll hear that the best match is the 4 chord, built on "F" as F, A and C. It goes back and forth between the 4 chord and the 1 chord a couple times, under "mother &child…holy infant so…tender and mild," then jumps back to the 5 chord on G under "sleep in heavenly…" and the 1 chord for "peace…" Then it ends with one more quick turn-around of the 1-5-1 chords under the repetition of "sleep in heavenly peace."

So "Silent Night" can be played with just 3 accompanying chords, the 1, the 5, and the 4 chords…that’s it!

But what’s really amazing, as you’ll discover, is that that simple structure underpins many modern songs, and the ones it’ not sufficient for need only a few extra chords, and you’re done!

Let’s check that out by looking at the chord structures to a few other popular songs:

"The Music Of The Night"  from Phantom Of The Opera                                                                                                           

    1          5       1                         5

Slowly, gently, night unfurls it’s splendour,

    1          5               4                   5

Grasp it sense it, tremulous and tender

   4                       1                   4                    1

Turn your face away from the garish light of day, turn your

      4                                                  1

Thoughts away from cold unfeeling light

          5                                      1

And listen to the music of the night

"Daniel" by Elton John

    1                                              4

Daniel is travelling tonight on a plane

 5                                           3 maj.       6 min.

I can see the red tail lights heading for Spain

   4              5                          6                  4

I can see Daniel waving goodbye, God it looks like Daniel

    5                                     1

Must be the clouds in my eyes

As you can see, a song as grand as "Music Of The Night" is built primarily on these 1, 4 and 5 chords. Elton John’s "Daniel" adds just two others, the 3 and 6 chords, both which are very common extras in popular 1,4,5 -patterned songs.

Start now, listening to all your favorite songs with a keen ear for picking out the chord patterns you hear. And regularly practice picking out these patterns on your piano. In short order, you will get quite good at finding he correct melody notes and accompanying chords for any popular song…and you’ll be able to declare, "Yes, I can play by ear!"

For more check out these related posts

• Taking Your Playing To The Next Level
• Playing By Ear 1

Obviously, most piano players would not try to pick out and play classical pieces by ear, as that requires properly reading the exact notes written by the composer. Once you’ve become very good at picking out songs by ear, you probably could also pick out a simple Chopin Waltz, playing some chords in the left hand, and his basic melody in the right. But it wouldn’t sound nearly as beautiful as reading the precise changes he wrote.

But for modern songs, playing by ear is fine. Anything from the 1800s "Oh, Susanna" through the standards, show tunes and popular songs of the 20th Century will sound fine as long as you pick out the correct melody and accompany it with the simple, correct chords. Remember the 3 critical things you must learn in order to do this:

• Learn basic music theory: rhythms & tempos, the cycle of fifths, and the notes in every scale

• Learn the chords built on each note of a scale: The major and minor triads (three-note chords), and the sevenths

• Learn how to hear the patterns of those chords in any song your listening to

Mastering the first of these allows you to master picking out the song’s melody.  Once you’ve learned the notes that make up every scale, you will notice you can hear which notes are used in the melody. You may have to hunt & peck through a lot of trial & error your first few melodies you pick out, but soon you will hear when the melody moves to a note very close to the last note, or when it jumps a larger interval, and you’ll start to find the right notes.

Next, learn the chords built on each note of a scale. So in a song in the key of C major, the first, or 1 chord is made up of C, E and G, the second or 2 chord is D, F and A, the fourth (sub-dominant) chord is F, A and C, the fifth (dominant) chord is G, B and D, and so on. As a beginner, just build each chord on the note that corresponds to its number in the scale. Later, you can invert these chords, that is, use the same three notes, but in different orders as to which is on the top or bottom.

Now play all the chords in the key of C: the 1 chord, the 2 chord, the 3 chord and so on, over and over again, and listen to how they sound. You will begin to form a memory of what each of these chords sound like, and then you are well on your way to picking them out of an actual song.

Start by listening to some simple songs with fairly basic chord structures. Christmas carols are great. So are many of the songs by Elton John, or show tunes like "Memory" and "Music Of The Night" from Andrew Lloyd Weber. Play these songs on any device – CD player, iPod – that allows you to keep pausing. While siting at your piano, listen to just the first few measures of a song, pause it, and try to find the right melody of just that section. Through trial & error, you will find the repetitive melody to the whole song.

Now start the process over, listening to just a few chord changes at a time, trying out one of the only seven chords available by building on each note of the scale. That’s right, if you learned the chords built on each note of any scale, you discovered there’s only seven possibilities. Keeps it simple. Now try those chords, one at a time, with the melody you picked out, until you find the chords that sound exactly like those on the recorded version.

In our next post. we’ll look at the basic chord patterns in a few songs. You’ll see how basic they are, and how you can later embellish on them to add more variety and musical richness.

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• No Related Post

But many decent sight-readers also yearn for the ability to pickout, by ear, any song they recently heard on the radio, their iPod, or anywhere else…somehow “hear it” again in their head, go over to the piano, and find the right melody notes and matching chords, without need to go out and buy the sheet music. In my travels, I find this skill to be the more rare of the two. Many piano players and students can read music fairly well, but it seems the ability to “play by ear” is granted to only a select few.

I was one of those few. At seven, I heard a song on the radio, “The Look Of Love” by Burt Bacharach, and really liked it. So I went over to my piano and traced the melody with my right hand. I found the correct notes fairly easily. Then I searched through various chords in the left hand till I found ones that sounded like those on the record. There were some odd chord changes (It was Bacharach, after all) but no wierd demolished 5ths or perverted 7ths:), mostly major and minor triads. So I found that I could, by trial and error, find the same chords he used, and voila, I could play a simple version of “The Look Of Love!”

The next day I heard another cherished song, “Going Out Of My Head” by Little Anthony and The Imperials, and repeated the same trial and error note-and-chord finding till I was able to play it fairly well (I later met its songwriter, Teddy Randazzo, who told me he lived entirely off that song’s royalties for a decade!) My Dad was astounded. My mother declared me a gifted prodigy (sorry, Mom.) But the truth is, I was simply clear about three musical basics – basic music theory, basic chords, and common chord patterns – and that’s what enabled me to do it.

The bad news is that I can’t walk around claiming to be musically gifted or prodigious. That’s tough. Perhaps my only gift was “getting” these three connections at a very early age. The good news is, anybody can master these three elements and learn to play songs by ear, just like me.

You see, Western music, especially the simple, short and repetitive motifs of popular songs, aren’t very complcated. Almost all popular songs written since the late 1800s follow very similar simple patterns, in both their structure and their chord progressions.

If you are already a piano player, even a relative beginner, you already have some training in basic music theory. You need to understand all the notes of any scale in any key, all the basic types of chords – major, minor, 7th, diminshed, etc.- that can be built on each note of the scale, and their relative relationships to each other. Learn the cycle of fifths if you haven’t already.

Next, understand that all popular songs are built around  the root, dominant and subdominant chords, or the 3-note chords built on the 1st, 5th and 4th note of any scale, respectively. Many songs have just these three chords in them – “Silent Night” for example -  while most add just a few others – the 7th, and minor chords built on the 3rd and 6th note of the scale.

In our next post, we’ll go through this more thoroughly.

For more check out these related posts

• Taking Your Playing To The Next Level
• Playing By Ear 3

As a player, tuner and technician, I talk to people everywhere, every day, about their own piano playing…what genre of music they like to play, what level they can play at, what types of playing they cannot currently do well, but hope to eventually acheive. By far, the biggest topic that comes up is not whether they can improve their playing skills overall – they all know that with more practice they’ll play much better – but how to effectively improve either their sight-reading or their ability to “play by ear.” We’ll discuss these in the next two posts

Sight-reading, just like it sounds, is the ability to read the music notation on the page with the same quickness & fluidity one could read the words of any book. Specifically, sight-reading refers to being able to read a formerly-unseen piece of music so fluidly that you never need to stop the flow of your playing in order to “figure out what note that is” or “what these symbols mean,” you just keep playing without pause. Many players can do this with very elementary-level songs (like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,) but fall apart when a piece with lots of quick-succeeding notes for both hands is placed before them (like a Chopin Waltz or a Bach Invention.) They feel they must pick the piece apart, one note at a time, so they get bored, frustrated, and give up.

But the solution to painlessly increasing anyone’s sight-reading ability is fairly simple.

When you were young, there was a point where reading the words in a book was just as tedious. You had to sound-out each letter, put it together with the other sylables, and make an intelligible word and sentence out of each line. Now you don’t even pause for a second when reading. How did that transformation happen? Simple – you built your reading level S-L-O-W-L-Y.

The problem is, many are enamored with certain lovely but difficult pieces of music and want to be able to play them NOW. It’s only natural. I wanted to be able to read through and play Chopin’s “Fantasie Impromptu” since I first heard it, at age 8. It’s stunningly beautiful (hear it soon if you haven’t) but quite challenging – lots of fast moving notes and long stretches in both hands, lots of “accidentals” (extra shaprs & flats.) The first few times I tried it, well, I just flat out gave up.

Here’s what I had to do, and what you must also do. Get a metronome that will keep any speed of timing you set. Now get some books of pieces you’ve never seen or played before, from really easy-to-play levels (Grade 1 – 3) up to the more difficult pieces. Start playing the easiest pieces, at the indicated metronome speed, without looking down at your hands…just keep your eyes on the music. If you find you pause or drop out of playing at that speed, because you can’t recognize the notes fast enough, that’s your current highest level of sightreading. Important: if you do recognize the notes but simply made a few mistakes in playing, don’t stop, keep playing; that’s still acceptable sight-reading.

The trick is pick pieces at just the level where you can keep your eyes on the music, not look down at your hands, and keep going without pause, at a speed close to the piece’s recommended speed. Once you can do that fairly well with Level 1 pieces, try Level 2, set the metronome a little slower, and keep going even when you make a mistake or even drop out on of your hands for a full measure or two.

So let’s say you can read through Grade 2 pieces at full speed,  with no pause or glance at your fingers, but you start to pause and stumble with Grade 3 pieces. Simply spend 20-30 minutes a day playing only Grade 3 pieces, slowing the metronome down just to the point where you won’t pause or drop out. Soon you’ll be able to read all Grade 3 pieces at full speed. Now go onto the next grade level and repeat the process. It will take several months, perhaps more than a year, but soon you will find you read through even the most densley-packed, full of 8th and 16th note two handed pieces, that you’ve never seen before, at speed or nearly up to speed, with virtually no drop outs or mistakes. Now you are a very good sightreader, which vastly increases your music choices and level of enoyment!

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This will be a shorter post just to settle this question that is a nagging quandry for many people.

It’s the Big Acoustic Piano – Digital Piano Face-Off

Which should you buy??

Some people have the money and space for both a fine grand piano and a digital studio piano. For them I’d say, especially if you want to use piano in recordings, or want to practice after everyone’s asleep, get ‘em both.

The real acoustic grand will give you the richness of tone and subtlety of touch only a fine grand can deliver. But recording an acoustic piano can be tricky – expensive microphones, special mic placement and EQing – and a good digital imitation can sound just fine in a mix, plugged straight into your board with no micing.

But most people can only have one or the other. They have limited space and can only spend around $1500 to $3000 (you won’t get much of a piano for less than that…we’ll cover this in our “Buying New & Used Pianos” posts.) So they go to the piano store, and find that, for that amount, they can come home with either a real vertical (upright) piano or a digital piano, and they get all flustered wondering which is the right choice.

But the answer is pretty simple. It all depends on how the piano will be used.

If the piano will be played by someone who’s taking real classical and jazz piano lessons, and who will therefore need the sound and touch real keys throwing real felt hammers against real metal strings, buy a real, quality acoustic piano.

Even if the players and listeners in the family are just banging out pop music chords and melodies, not much classical or jazz, if their ears know and love the full-bodied resonance of a real piano, they’re going to notice the difference in a digital piano sound, and eventually be underwhelmed by it. So if your piano ears are very good or cultured, even if your piano skills are limited, buy a real piano

If the piano will be used mostly to learn music theory and popular songs, with less concern for classically-trained touch and fingering, by someone who doesn’t mind the somewhat “boxed-in” electronicky sound of even the best digitals, than a digital piano will be a fine choice

Especially if that same player wants more portability, less expense, and the chance to play and record lots of different orchestral and pop instruments beyond piano sounds, than digiatl is the way to go.

Simple enough? Happy music-making!

For more check out these related posts

• Electronic & Digital Pianos 1
• Electronic & Digital Pianos 3
• Electronic & Digital Pianos 2

As mentioned in the last post, electronic pianos and keyboards reproduce the sound of a real piano (and other orchestral instruments) by recording the real thing digitally, and then letting the keys trigger the corresponding recorded note.

In the digital world, they call recording “sampling,” because the original digital chips couldn’t hold long recordings, just a snippet or “sample” of each note. The piano is such a complex instrument, with completely different waveforms coming from each octave of the piano, as well as differences caused by how hard you strike the key and how long you hold it, that a realistic reproduction can only come from “multi-sampling.” What that means is that the best piano imitations will come from sampling (recording) each of the 88 notes separately, with each one being sampled multiple times to record a soft, medium and hard strike, and a long-held, medium-length, and staccato-played note.

Now storing all that digital data take a ferocious amount of memory. Earlier chips simply couldn’t hold it, so piano simulators of the 80s & 90s sounded pretty funky compared to the real thing. But now, with tiny chips able to store massive data, they’re starting to sound pretty awesome.

So one way to judge electronic pianos is to say, whichever one stores the most data of each individual note, striking force and length held, wins the “most realistic piano sound” battle.
And since chips and data storage are expensive, the more realistic sounding digital pianos carry the higher price tags.

There are many brands and models of digital pianos to choose from, with price tags from as little as a couple hundred bucks all the way up to several thousand dollars. The cheaper ones usually have shorter keyboards (63 or 77 keys, instead of 88) and keys that are “organ-like”, that is, spring-tension keys that don’t allow the true range of expression you can get from real weighted piano keys. Touch sensitivity is important, especially if you’re used to playing a real piano. You need that weight pressing back against your finger to produce all the subtle differences between the softest pianissimo to the loudest triple-forte.

Fortunately, it’s very easy to compare lots of digital pianos, especially if you live near a metropolitan area. Your local piano store or music gear shop (like the national chain Guitar Center) will have a whole room devoted to the latest digital models, all lined up side-by-side for your head-to-head, finger-to-ear comparison.

If you can spend around $1200 – $2200, you can come away with a keyboard that produces a very reasonable facsimile of a piano and other instruments, with weighted keys (often made of real wood like those in a piano) that make you feel llike your playing a real grand.

Common quality brands include Yamaha, Roland, Korg and Kurzweil, and all have several models that are great contenders for best digital piano. One of my favorites is the Yamaha Motif. I’ve recorded songs using the Motif’s piano sound, and had many listeners say they thought it was a real 9’ concert grand Steinway, listening to the playback. Yamaha is the inventor of the Clavinova, one of the first and best lines of digital electronic home pianos. And since the best always uses the best, I should mention that Stevie Wonder’s digital piano of choice is the Yamaha Motif…and you know he’s got ears.
 

For more check out these related posts

• Electronic & Digital Pianos 4
• Electronic & Digital Pianos 1

But it posed an interesting problem for the band. How could they take this sound on the road? They could not afford to lug the whole London Festival Orchestra around with them all over England and America.

Fortunately the problem was solved before it began by the “dreaming into being” of an “electronic orchestral instrument simulator,” that someone had recently invented…the mighty Mellotron. A completely different approach to simulating orchestra instruments using a keyboard, instead of filtering and blending frequencies electronically, the Mellotron was simply a tape-playback machine. Inside every Mellotron was a bank of 8-second tape loops, one for each key on the keyboard. Each loop of tape contained a recording of a violin, or a flute, or even a choral vocalist singing “ooh” or “aah”. Press down a key, and, depending on which instrument you chose, you got a tape playback of the corresponding note being played on that instrument. Smaller versions had just three instrument choices, but larger Mellotrons had many more instruments. And the Moody Blues had one! Indeed, their keyboardist, Mike Pinder, had worked at the Mellotron factory as his day job!

The Mellotron represented one of the first real orchestra instrument simulators that actually sounded like the real thing…because it was the real thing, just on tape! That instantly identifiable run you hear on the Moodies’  “Nights In White Satin,” that lovely D-E-F#-G-F#-D-E passage in between each line sung by Justin Hayward? That’s not real violins, that’s Mike playing those notes on the keys of his Mellotron.

Of course, if you listen closely, it doesn’t quite sound like actual violins. It sounds wavy and thin, like violins being played underwater. That’s the best a box full of triggered tape loops could reproduce in the pre-digital era. Now look how far we’ve come in just a few decades!

Early electronic (non-tape) synthesizers only allowed one note at a time, no chords, and their simulations of other orchestral instruments were weird and clearly unrealistic. Then came polyphonic (multi-note) sytheseizers and somewhat better instrument imitations.

The advent of the digital age and the ability to store more and more information on smaller chips allowed for the first true rendering of the sounds we hear from the real instruments.  Even now, the discriminating listener can tell the difference. Some instruments, like a flute or trumpet, produce relatively simple and stable soundwaves, and so their imitated versions on modern keyboards can sound pretty real. Other instruments, like strings and guitars, have very complex waveforms, and are harder to reproduce realistically.

Of all the instruments in  the orchestra, the piano has the most complex waveform, so even the finest digitally-recorded imitations, multi-sampled across many octaves and striking forces, still sounds like a “recorded piano” to an ear very accustomed to hearing the real thing.  See my next post…
 

For more check out these related posts

• Electronic & Digital Pianos 4
• Electronic & Digital Pianos 1

The Native American Indians and other aboriginal tribes have a belief that everything in existence was “dreamed into being” by either a living or departed person or god. That is, when something that never existed before, all of the sudden comes into existence, it’s because somebody dreamed about it, and their dreams brought it into being. It’s not clear whether they thought up a new invention first, and then started dreaming about it, or the new thing was “ready” to be born, and snuck into people’s dreams to plant the seeds…it probably can go either way.

Like many children, I had an experience, several tmes, of dreaming about something unique that didn’t quite exist, and then “discovering” it when later it did come into being. And naturally I felt my dreams had something to do with that.

The great psychologist Carl Jung, had a field day with this. He believed all our minds were inter-connected as one unconscious mind. So the concept of thousands of people dreaming about something that has yet to be invented, then having those dreams contribute to it’s coming into being, was quite natural to him.
 
Certainly the greatest thing I “dreamed into being” would have to be the “electronic musical instrument simulator on a piano keyboard,“ or for short, the synthesizer. As early as 1960,  a-decade-and-a-half before Bob Moog and the advent of the first monophonic, dials-and-wires everywhere synthesizers (see below,) I envisioned a full piano keyboard that was, somehow,  electronically connected to ultra-realistic sound simulators that allowed a piano player to simulate every instrument in the orchestra. I even envisioned the multi-track layering that allowed him to play a full orchestra’s worth of music using just his two hands. I could see it all clearly, in my dreams.

Being merely a piano player and not a sound engineer, my only contribution to this was dreaming. Somebody else had to actually invent the electronic frequency filters and benders, and later, the digital-chip sampling, that would make this dream a reality.

At seventeen, I was in a rock-’n’-roll band (my fourth one already!) playing piano and organ, and singing. We couldn’t afford to bring a real piano around to gigs, and the organ I had was awful. At that time, the “cool” organ du jour every band had to have was a portable model made by Farfisa (Rick Huxley of The Dave Clark Five played one of these on the Ed Sullivan Show.)

I lusted after the Farfisa everytime I demoed it in my local music shop, but they cost about $1000, and back then that was like what $8000 is now. So I never got one. But the mock flute and trumpet stops on big theatre organs reminded me of my dream of a “keyboard orchestra”, and fed the notion that this would eventually be possible.

A few years later, I was drafted into a financially-well-backed band which had already purchased several choice keyboards for their original player (who broke his hands in a drunken car accident.) There was a Fender Rhodes Electric Piano (a very cool sound of its own, but nothing like a real piano) and the marvelous Hammond B3 organ – the king of rock-’n’-roll organs. But the keyboard they had that made me think I was dreaming awake to find all my orchestral keyboard visions a reality was…the Mellotron. They had a Mellotron! Oh my God!

Why was this so way cool? I’ll continue in my next post…

For more check out these related posts

• Electronic & Digital Pianos 4
• Electronic & Digital Pianos 3
• Electronic & Digital Pianos 2

Learning Piano Withour A Teacher From an Online-Purchased Course

As mentioned in past posts, in this fabulous era of electronic communication and everything available on the web, it’s only natural that a whole new crop of piano teaching programs would show up online.

There are many reasons why someone would choose to learn piano at home, without a teacher, from one of these boxed sets. Many adult piano learners have schedules and business obligations that simply don’t allow for consistent weekly lessons with a teacher. Or perhaps, they simply desire to learn at home, practicing and progressing at their own pace,
without any teachers’ expectations hanging over them.

Since the shift, now more than ever, is towards learning to play only at the pace, and to the level, you desire, just enough for your own piano-playing enjoyment, this trend towards online book-and-video-based courses is a great thing.

As we covered in previous posts, very few students of the piano will go on to be full-time musicians and professional piano players, either in the classical or popular genres. Those who have the talent and drive to desire, and possibly reach, that goal, should definitely work a live teacher, actually several of them over the course of their training.
 

But for someone who just wants to learn to play for their enjoyment and the enjoyment of their family and friends, one of these online courses could be quite sufficient.

The important thing is to purchase one that is well-reputed, successful in its design and approach, and easy to follow. I’ve checked out some of these online piano learning courses, and found many that offer a comprehensive course of note & rhythm training, music theory,  sightreading, finger training and sometimes even ear/pitch training. Here’s five of my most worthy contenders:

Learn and Master Piano
Rocket Piano
Piano Wizard For Children   
Piano By Pattern
Piano For All

Virtually all of these feature hundreds of hours of audio lessons, video lessons (some featuring excellent filmed shots of the teacher’s fingerwork) and books, enough to take any piano student from rank beginner to competent mid-level (at least) player in contemporary styles and even many classical pieces.  Some even give you a fair introduction to the world of jazz voicings and runs.

I suggest you take a few hours to research these five and other online piano programs, read unbiased reviews, and view samples of their materials. Most are very reasonably priced (costing hundreds or thousands less than comparable live-teacher lessons,) and many offer a money-back guarantee…if the course is not a good fit for you, you can return it and lose nothing.

Happy hunting, and learning at home!

For more check out these related posts

• What To Look For In A Piano Teacher
• Learning To Play The Piano 2

A piano music box is exactly that; a music box shaped like a piano. But its appeal extends well beyond its familiar shape and the songs it plays. Some piano music boxes are simple enough; the least expensive models are often just a standard music box inside a case that resembles a piano. And like many other music boxes, they often have room to hold trinkets and jewelry. But it is the expensive, hand crafted models that are so unique and interesting, they have to be seen to be believed.

Often imported from Europe, a hand crafted piano music box is a work of art. Hand carved, hand-painted, and inlaid with rare stones, piano music boxes can often cost hundreds of dollars or more. The lids of these miniature grand pianos lift and reveal the musical movement, which is the heart of the musical instrument, just like a real baby grand. The musical movement on a piano music box is just as impressive as the case in which it sits.

A high quality piano music box can be custom ordered with a musical movement that fits your needs. A basic musical movement might be capable of playing eighteen notes, and that would allow a piano music box that is outfitted with that movement to play simple songs that are short in duration. As you progress in price in sophistication, the musical possibilities become greater and greater. The most expensive musical movements are capable of up to one-hundred and forty-four notes. This allows a piano music box to play intricate songs that last much longer than the more basic movements allow. Naturally, the list of available songs becomes quite long when your piano music box is outfitted with the finest musical movements.

A piano music box is something that is sure to bring joy to its owner, and it is equally likely to be passed down as a family heirloom. Its ultimate appeal lies in the fact that it is so much like its full sized counterpart. Its beautiful woodwork and beautiful sound make a piano music box more than just a music box; it is a work of art.

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Teaching is a very special skill set, reuiring a excellent balance of clear communication, encouragement, experienced discrimination of how much to ask of each student, and that special ability to transfer knowledge. Few people have all that.

Therefore it’s essential that you use two barometers to test whether this or that teacher will be best for you.

The first is to get recommendations from others you trust. Don’t just pick a name out of the yellow pages. Find out if they have a shining and long-established track record, and then find others who have taken lessons from them and ask their honest opinion of that teacher’s strengths and weaknesses.

The second gauge is your own personal compatability. We’re all so unique in our personalities, the way we think and the way we learn. You may find a teacher who’s crystal clear in their directions and explanations, but for some reason, you just don’t get their languaging style, and you have trouble following them. Or maybe the personalities don’t line up. And of course, some of us are more visual learners while others are auditory, kinetic or informational learners.

So what do you do. Simple. Tell any teacher, up front, that you want to try them out for a while and see if your styles & personalities match up. Don’t be afraid to state this right up front, and don’t be afraid to “divorce” them if the marriage just ain’t working out. If they’re a long-experienced, high-quality teacher, they know all this already, and won’t be offended in the slightest if you need to move on and try someone else.

To be sure, give it a fair amount of time to see if the match is good. As long as the teacher is quality and relatively kind and clear, 3 or 4 lessons just isn’t going to be enough to gauge it. Commit to at least 3 months – about 12 lessons, and then assess.

Once again, as in our earlier discussions, the key is enjoyment. You don’t have to take piano lessons. You want to enjoy learning and playing piano, in your own time, at your own pace. So find a teacher with whom you so thoroughly enjoy the learning process that you really look forward to meeting with them each lesson, and even look forward to diving into the work they give you each week. And if it takes a few hit-or-misses to find that, don’t feel any concern. Get what you need; it’s your  piano-playing “career” at stake, and if you force yourself to stck with someone you don’t enjoy, eventually you’ll quit altogether and miss out on the joy of actually being a piano player.

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• Learning Piano Without A Teacher
• Learning To Play The Piano 2

I’m old enough to remember those days, and that’s precisely how I got my start. I had an endearing teacher I nicknamed Aunt Alice (even though she was not related to me,) and those were the materials she used, along with finger-exercise books and occasinal separate sheet music pieces. Since it was the 60s, the era of pop’s explosion with the Beatles and the Stones, Aunt Alice was patronizing enough to occasionally throw in a “pop” song or standard from a Broadway musical, to sweeten the deal. Not all teachers of the day were that kind. Some insisted on a strictly classical approach, and rapped their students fingers with a stick if they didn’t come prepared with an excellent performance every week.

Today (thank God) the list of methods to study piano are almost endless, and while having a real teacher can be invaluable, there are many excellent courses in books and on DVD that you can tackle at home, and still turn out quite competent.

Personally I would say, if you wish to play Carnegie Hall, you’ll need a top-notch human teacher who will refine your skills and help keep you on track. But if you’re self-disciplined enough, and can make sure you get to your piano with your choice of home-study course in front of you, at least a few times a week, you’ll see steady progress. This home teaching advancement will be further enhanced if you keep an accurate journal of your weekly progress, with honest notes about where you’re good, where you’re stuck, what you need to work on, and so forth.

The good news is, the pressure’s off. And since I’m a firm believer that everyone who wants to play, should play the piano, at any level, then this is a good thing. The truth is, the number of serious students who are going to wind up as virtuosos who actually play professionally (and make any kind of living at it,) are few and far between. Even within the hopefuls working their poor little fingers off at fine conservatories like Juliard and Peabody, or at contemporary-playing institutions like The Berklee School, those who will actually graduate to any level of renown in the music business isnunder 15%.

So, driving yourself crazy trying to be the next Rubenstein or Horowitz or Art Tatum (who was blind and self-taught) is only for the over-serious. Start with the goal off just wanting to play nicely enough to really enjoy yourself and entertain some of your friends and family. If you find you have an extraordinary gift and really want to go “all the way,” find a master mentor and give it everything you’ve got.

Otherwise, the choice between a live teacher and a home study approach is totally up to your taste and temperament. In either setting, you will have to practice with some regularity and application, to make any progress. But there’s no timeline except the one you place on yourself, so make progress but make it enjoyable

In our next post, we’ll break down some of the actual methods and approaches out there.

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• Learning To Play The Piano 1

How many people adore the sound of the piano?  And yet, how many shy away from the thought of ever learning to play the piano themselves. Much of their reticence comes from an unneccessary concern about being perfect, and a certainty that, without that “born-with-it” gift of talent, they could never approach the level of fluidity they hear so often on their favorite recordings. “I’ll never play like that,” they conclude, and give up before starting.

I’m well aware of this attitude. I have been a victim myself of this addiction to perfection, this paralysis by analysis. Even as a naturally gifted player from childhood, I always compared my playing to those even better (there’s always someone better, no matter what your field,) and consequently, I never felt I was good enough. Depending on your temperament, this neurotic, constant comparison to your “competition” either makes you practice harder than ever, or just give up. Many times I fell victim to the latter attitude, and said, “The hell with it.” Bad idea, and really silly.

You see, the piano produces such lovely tones that even a beginner level student playing a very elementary piece can pour out something quite beautiful and touching. Many times, the simplest pieces I’ve played brought much more adoration from my audiences than those highly-accomplished expositions featuring a complex flurry of notes.

But perhaps the even more important lesson I learned – and believe me, it’s taken me most of my life to learn it – is that the joy of playing the piano isn’t just about being able to play a piece perfectly. It’s about the process. The learning and discovery of all the little nuances of the piece. The rewarding growth in your skills and abilities that each piece demands of you, just so you can play it. It’s as much about the journey as the journey’s end.

If your left-hand fluidity, and coordination between your two hands, is still somewhat stiff, and you decide you are so in love with Chopin’s “Revolutionary” etude that you just have to able to play it yourself, you’re either in for a descent into hell, or the treat of your lifetime…depending on your attitude. That piece requires the fingers of your left hand to be quite nimble, flying like the wind up and down the scale, and precise unison of both hands in the fiery intro.

But set aside any concerns of time or worries about perfection, and with no pressure or agenda, just work at a small portion of the piece at a time. You’ll unfold an entire world of discovery about how to best finger each run, as well as which finger exercises (those of your own invention or the perfected studies of Hanon and Czerny) grant you the fluidity you need.

Take a year or two just to master one beautiful piece – there really is no hurry, and you’ll discover just how satisfying the learning and practicing parts of your piano playing journey can be. There’s a great book that perfectly portrays this no-push attitude to your growth as a pianist. It’s called, “Piano Lessons,” a true chronicle written by the soft-voiced All Things Considered radio announcer, Noah Adams. He beautifully describes his choice of an upright Steinway for his New York townhome, and his timeless but pleasing blossoming from a beginner to a very fair interpreter of one piece for his wife, Debussy’s “Claire De Lune.”  If you ever catch yourself stuck in pefectionism, give-up-ism, or frustration with your piano-playing journey, reading this book will turn you around.

In future posts, we’ll look at some of the best current methods out there for learning piano at any age. There really is a method for anybody, and “pre-born talent” is not a requirement.

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• Learning To Play The Piano 2

Age & Quality:
Rule # 1 – buy the newest, most reputable used piano you can afford. When you start your search, you’ll see advertised pianos as old as 120 years, with obscure brand names on the fallboard and very questionable condition. You’ll also see pianos from well-reputed manufacturers that are less than 40 years old, and everything in between. Try to hone in on the newer better quality instruments, and skip over any old clunker built prior to WWII (even if the wood-carving is ornate & gorgeous…I know it’s tempting!)

The simple fact is, while the structure of a piano (the cabinet and plate) may still be intact after 60 years, the inner parts won’t be. They have a given “shelf-life.” Even if not played that much, most of the critical inner parts – the hammers, dampers, bass strings, and various key & action felts – will certainly be worn out and need replacing. So even if they’re selling a 1915 upright from a reputable manufacturer for just a couple hundred bucks, or even giving it away, you’ll be into it for $1200 to $2000 once you replace all the defunct & decrepit components.

Better to stick with one that’s used, but not that used. Say, a Baldwin or Yamaha or other well-known brand, built no earlier than 1960. Any piano this young will, most likely, have hammers, dampers and strings that are still intact, a soundboard that hasn’t started to flatten out yet (see our earlier posts, "The All-Important Soundboard" and "Soundboard Racks & Cracks") and most important, a tight pin-block.

WIll It Hold A Tune?
A piano is useless if it can’t hold a tune. The tremendous tension on each string is held in place by a tuning pin driven into a multi-laminated wooden block called the pin-block or pin-plank. If the tuning pins have worked loose in the wood, or worse, if the pin-block, due to age and dryness, has started to form cracks running through the tuning pin holes, that piano is toast. Well not entirely toast; you could restring the entire instrument with a fresh new wooden pin-block, but that’s a major undertaking, and usually cost-prohibitive for any used instrument except finer old grands that will be worth tens of thousands once rebuilt.

Unless it was left outdoors or subject to huge abuse, it’s rare to find any piano only 50-years-old or less, with seriously worn out parts or a loose or cracked pin-block. So play it safe…find a “newer” used piano built by a well-known company. The seller may ask as much as $700 to $1500 for, say, a well-cared-for Baldwin or Yamaha built in 1973, but you’ll save tons of money and aggravation in the end, over that bargain-basement $150 old clunker at the thrift store. Just say pia-”no”

Of course, sometimes people see some beautiful hand-carved full upright built in 1901, and, in spite of the warnings about pianos this old, they just gotta have it. Which brings us to the single most important rule in purchasing ANY used piano. Take a fine piano technician with you to appraise it’s condition and value. I cannot stress this too much. There are too many critical factors you won’t know to look for, and won’t have the proper tools to test even if you did find them, and, just to save the technician’s small service fee, you’ll end up buying trouble. I can’t tell you the number of sad clients calling me AFTER they bought a used piano, to say it’s full of problems, sometimes thousands of dollars worth, when they should have called me BEFORE buying. Pay a tech to come with you and check it out, period.

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• Buying A Used Piano 1

I have one piano service client who purchased a $125,000 Bosendorfer, with cash. We’ll call him Mr. Johnson. When I made the appointment to do the initial in-home tuning, I found, not surprisingly, that he lived in one of the most opulent ranch-land areas of Southern California, a hidden valley filled with posh mansions overlooking acres of gorgeous horse country. I was let in by his housekeeper, and spent almost 2 hours nursing that Bosendorfer to perfection. When I was done, I asked the housekeeper where was Mr. Johnson, so he could come play it and approve my work. She said he was in his office at the other end of the house (which was practically a bus-ride away!) She called him and handed me the phone, and I said, “Hello Mr. Johnson, I’ve just completed work on your new Bosendorfer. Would you like to come up and check it out, make sure you’re happy with my tuning, etc?” He replied, “Oh, I don’t play.” I said, “Oh, well then who’s the player in the family?” He said “No one, none of us play.” My jaw dropped and I went white, but I said no more, just thanked him and left. I knew from experience that if I had asked the obvious question of, “Then why the hell did you by a $125K piano?’ his answer would have been, “Because I can!” Sheesh! What a waste of a perfect instrument.

But I digress. The point is, as much as we piano purists would like to match up every player with a truly superb new instrument, there’s always going to be lots of piano buyers purchasing inexepensive old and used instruments, because that’s all they can afford or all they want to invest in a piano at this time. Some used pianos are in such bad condition, or were of such poor quality to start with, that they virtually guarantee the fledgling player will lose all interest in piano playing shortly after commencing. Still, it can be argued that even an old clunker with poor sound and cumbersome touch is better than no piano at all.

So how should a person of limited means, who really wants a piano, find the right one? Where should they look, what brands should they covet or avoid, and how should they test the beast to see if it’s worthy to bring home? Let’s list a few basic factors:

Where to look: Most used pianos in your general vicinity will be advertised in your newspaper’s classified section, and online on Craig’s List. There are other online sources for used pianos, like PianoWorld.com and even eBay, but then you’re looking at pianos that may be a country away, or at least several states. And you can purchase a used instrument from a reputable local piano store – indeed I recommend it, because they will guarantee it and take it back if it’s defective -  but you’ll pay a premium over what you’d pay if you bought it directly from the past owner.

As far as brands, it would be optimal if you could only search through the well-established, highly-reputed names like Steinway, Baldwin, Yamaha, Chickering, Knabe, Mason & Hamlin, etc. However, a good used version of one of those can be hard to find, and certianly more money if you do find one. It’s more likely, as you skim the classifieds, that you’ll be browsing off-brand pianos with names you may never have heard of. At one point in the early twentieth century there were over 300 piano manufacturers – it seemed like everybody and his brother said, “Let’s go build some pianos.” Much of what you’ll be seeing in the used market could be one of these more obscure makes.

But that doesn’t mean you cannot still find a good serviceable used instrument. In the next post , we’ll go through a checklist of what you must look for to insure a decent used piano.

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• Buying A Used Piano 2

Steinway of New York, in particular, has gone to great lengths to insure that there will be no franchises or dealers in the USA for the German Steinway, which they see as a source of serious competition. Although many players and technicians feel the Hamburg Steinway is superior to the New York version in quality and touch (myself included,) they really needn’t worry. The tone color and feel of the two are so different that any serious pianist will simply pick the one they like the sound and touch of best, not the one that comes from this or that country.

Pianos from Bechstein, Grotrian, Forster and Bluthner (all German) and Pleyel (French) are all excellent, and readily available all over Europe (the piano you here on The Beatles “Let It Be” is a Bluthner grand at Abbey Road Studios in London), but hard to audition and purchase in the USA, so aside from saying, if you can find them, they are well worthy of your consideration, we won’t expound much on them here. Deeper information on each of these brands is available through Larry Fine’s superb “The Piano Book”, a book any serious piano lover should own.

Bosendorfer, from Austria, makes incredible, and incredibly expensive, grand pianos. Like Steinways and Schimmels, they are made almost entirely by hand, and they are a sight to behold. They play like butter and many sound wonderful, but you’ll need at least $50K for their smaller, starter model, and they go up to over $150,000. Not for those who live by a weekly paycheck. Yamaha recently acquired Bosendorfer Piano in a prestige move (for Yamaha) and a financial solvency move (for Bosendorfer.)

Schimmel makes gorgeous grands with a sound and liquid action comparable to Bosendorfer, but at much more reasonable prices ($25K – $75K.) I love them as much or more than Bosendorfers, and as a technician who works on them regularly, I was proud to discuss this with Nikolaus Schimmel himself a few years back. He was grateful and very humble.

Fazioli Pianos of Italy have only been around since 1978, but their dedication to sheer piano perfection has quickly caught the attention of some of the best players in the world. If you can play one of their six grand models in the USA (big cities only) and have the cash (they are as expensive as Bosendorfer) you may never be able to settle for anything less in a piano again. They even make the world’s largest grand piano, at 10’2”, over a foot longer than other concert grands.
 

Their is also a rise of recent entries from Eastern Europe like Petrof and Estonia, which started out as poor-quality imitators of their Western European counterparts, but which many techs claim are rising in quality, with a very acceptable European sound and good prices.
 

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Both of these instruments were “production line” pianos, taking advantage of ever-improving Japanese technology and machinery, and being built to repeatable tolerances by machine, rather than by hand. This made them cheaper to manufacture, and inexpensive for the vast drove of “average” piano players who couldn’t tell too much difference between these machine-made pianos and handmade instruments. Whereas Steinway and other handmade brands could barely produce 100 grand pianos each year, Yamaha could roll out that many pianos in a couple months.

The result was that they infiltrated homes, schools and other institutions and soon became the largest selling pianos in America, and eventually, the world.

Not satisfied simply to produce the best selling piano, Yamaha dreamed of producing pianos equal to the finest instruments, ones that would be welcomed on major concert hall stages. As a result, they worked hard to constantly improve their instruments, and it shows. Currently, Yamaha makes a great grand and upright piano, endorsed by many celebrities like Elton John, Paul McCarteny and David Foster (all “pop” artists…you won’t see many top classical pianists endorsing Yamaha over Steinway or Bosendorfer.) Their U1, U3 and U5 uprights are among the best you can find, and all their grands over 6’ (models C3 – C7 and SF concert grand) are fine sounding, easy playing pianos.

Kawai of Japan has produced a very similar line of instruments, and followed Yamaha in both their approach and their infiltration of America. They still lag way behind Yamaha in sales, stage and recording studio installations, and celebrity endorsements, but some of their larger grands are very nice to hear and play. As a technician, I find Kawai’s to be a little more shrill sounding in the upper half of their high-tension scale, with significantly more “false beats” (errant vibrations) than Yamaha, whose overall sound is much purer.

To the accomplished concert pianist, the finest European and American handmade pianos are still preferable to production pianos; they have that extra finesse to the touch and clear bell-like purity to the tone that production pianos simply cannot match. But it’s safe to say that of all the production line instruments, Yamaha pianos are the best.

Korean Pianos:
If you ‘ve watched a Samsung flat-screen TV or seen Hyundai cars on the road, you know that Korea has been making huge inroads into heavy-industry products sold in the West, and pianos are no exception. Currently, Young Chang & Samick make pianos bearing their own names and dozens of “stencil” names, for the US market. A stencil piano is a now-defunct famous brand name, like Knabe or Chickering, that was licensed by someone rich for it’s well-known reputation, then affixed to the front of the cheap-labor insruments out of Korea or China, to capitalize on the name and make lots of money. Once you own the name, you can do what you want with it, and many oriental piano factories are only too happy to build you a knock-off of the original brand’s design, cheaply enough to fetch a nice profit from unwary buyers stateside. But keep in mind, these “famous name” pianos are by no means up the quality or sound level of their earlier incarnations. Many are really poor. One exception is the Wm. Knabe grand pianos currently being made by Samick, a vast improvement over Samick’s former poor quality instruments, and worthy of consideration.
 

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• The Grandest Pianos: American Makers
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Naturally, every great and small piano maker would love to have several famous pianists endorse their instruments for both stage play and home use. In the mid 19th century, many of the fine piano makers tried to secure these endorsements by literally giving a large grand piano, free of charge, to one or more renowned artists of the day. Franz Liszt, Frederic Chopin, and many other superb composers and players received such largess.

Instead, William Steinway entreated upon the great Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein to play Steinway pianos during his American concert tour of 1872, and later convinced one of the greatest pianists ever, Paderewski, to tour America in a railroad car, playing over 100 concerts in under 4 months, all on a Steinway-furnished concert grand.

The result was sheer perfection for the marketing of the Steinway piano. When every piano player from the most beginning student to the world’s most accomplished artists saw these greats playing Steinway and nothing but Steinway, they all declared "I must own a Steinway piano!"

This was the beginnings of the lauded Steinway Artist Program, which provides a fine Steinway grand, delivered and tuned free of charge, to any Steinway Artist currently on their roster, in any major city where Steinways are available.

And to make sure there are many, many Steinways to choose from for major concerts in metropolitan areas, Steinway maintains at least 3 "piano banks" in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. These are acoustically accurate storerooms housing as many as 30 Steinway "D" and "B" models (their two larger concert grands) from which the Steinway artist can audition and choose their favorite for their impending concert, knowing it will be onstage and properly serviced prior to the show’s start. A brilliant concept.

The one downside is that if Steinway catches you performing on a competitors instrument in any American or European city where you could have procured a Steinway for the show, they can drop you from their Steinway Artists roster, a policy which has met with significant controversy over the years.

If you really want to learn an immense amount about the slow, exacting and methodical process of building a fine piano, or just enjoy a fascinating field trip for any pianist, you should plan a trip to the Astoria district of Queens in New York City to tour the Steinway factory. They do have an online virtual tour, and there are documentaries available on DVD that show many parts of the process and factory, but trust me, there’s nothing like watching it done in  person.

You’ll see several strong men bend the outer rim of a new grand piano case around a huge press, the making of soundboards, the precise chiseling of bridges, and so much more. I’ve spent quite a bit of time at the Steinway factory, and believe me, it’s a trip to be treasured.

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The finest grand pianos are being made in America, Europe (paticularly Germany and Austria) and Japan.

Keep in mind as we go through this list, that there is no “best piano.” This is because no two piano brands sound alike. They each have their own unique tonal quality from brand to brand, and even from model to model within the same brand. This happens as a result of each company’s use of different designs and stringing scales, and different woods and felts for sound production. Even the choice of from which particular forest, in which particular region, the spruce originated for each piano’s soundboard, can make a major difference in the character of it’s sound.

And “best sound” is completely subjective. In stores featuring several brands of fine grands, I’ve seen customers pick the piano I thought I had the tinniest, least attractive sound, even when it was sitting right next to a piano of better quality, richer sound and lesser price! Go figure. It’s because it was the best sound to their ears.

So is a Steinway the best piano? Yamaha? Bosendorfer? None of them are. As long as it’s a quality-built instrument, the best piano is the best one to your ears alone.

American Pianos: Once the home to over 300 piano manufacturers, the USA is no longer a major hub for piano building, with less than 5 brands still manufactured here.

Steinway is still the standard bearer of the finest American grand pianos, and their concert grands (Model “D” – 9 feet long) are still the dominant instrument in residence and onstage for most of the concert halls and orchestras in the country. This is as much due to over 100 years of superb marketing and the securing of important virtuoso endorsements as their wonderfully brilliant sound. Some say their quality control is not up to its early-20th century standards (there was definitely a quality dip during the 1970s, when the Steinway company was owned by the CBS corporation,) but recently they have been backed by investors who gave them carte blanche to return to their original parts and labor quality levels, and I personally feel some of Steinway’s new grands approach the magnificence of their "golden age."

There are also Steinway grands built in Hamburg, Germany, but they sound and feel quite different than the New York version, with a German-made Renner action and a darker tone. Many Americans who grew up on recordings by Rubenstein and Van Cliburn, and concerts at the famous American symphony auditoriums like Carnegie Hall, feel that a New York Steinway is “what a piano should sound like.”

Another legendary American brand, Baldwin, has existed under the shadow of bankruptcy for decades. Recently, they were bought out by the Gibson Guitar Co., and their current pianos are of questionable quality, with many of the steps in manufacture being outsourced to countries outside the USA

Prior to World War II there were many fine American piano manufacturers, with well-known names like Knabe, Mason & Hamlin, and Chickering – an original Boston brand that preceded Steinway in New York by two decades. Financial strains caused many of these fine brands to be conglomerated under the Aeolian Piano Corporation in the 1950s, and then fail altogether a few decades later. Mason & Hamlin was a superior piano, on level with early Steinway and Baldwin instruments, and they are currently back in limited production. Knabe is now being made by Samick in Korea, and Chickering became a second line for Baldwin. None of these brands quite equal the quality of their past.
 

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1. They are indeed boxed-in, with the sound needing to emanate mainly from the soundboard in the backframe, which is often right up against your wall. On grand pianos, the soundboard is more free-floating, to send vibrations both upward and downward, with sound resonating through the entire space around the piano.

You can keep the top lid lifted open on an upright, which will create more rich tone emanating from it, but eliminate the possibility of using the top of the piano as a knick-knack shelf or lamp stand. Some of the more ornate uprights available, like the Schimmel pictured on the previous post, have lids that hinge at one side instead of the back of the piano, and raise up like the lid of a grand piano, with a miniature prop stick to hold it aloft.

2. When the hammer strikes the strings in to vibration, it’s knocking them into plate & bridges, not away from them like in a grand action. Many people, even piano technicians, forget about this critical point, but it definitely results in a different, less open sound when knocking a string into its contact points instead of “lifting” it off them.

As for the difference in upright vs. grand touch, if you view a model of each one’s action, it’s easy to see why the grand’s action is more responsive. In a grand, each hammer lays on it’s back, and has gravity to help it fall back to re-play position. Plus, each grand mechanism has an extra spring-loaded lever caled the repitition that lifts the hammer high after play, so the jack (the stick of wood that actually pushes the hammer to the string) can get back under sooner. To refresh our memory of how this works on a grand, heres a re-post of that animated grand action model from our "It Plays, It Vibrates, It Sings!" post:

Now here’s a model of an upright piano action, where you can clearly see the vertical, non-horizontal, gravity-aided positioning of the hammer, mechanisms and string:

As you can see, the vertically-positioned hammer gets no help from gravity or grand repetition levers, requiring an extra spring and "bridle tape" to pull it back into replay position.

This is not to say that an upright piano cannot make a fine musical instrument in the home. For most players, including those with good ears and young students practicing their fingering and control, both the sound and the touch of a good upright is similar enough to a grand to be a non-issue. To many, the difference is not that huge, and indeed there have been more than a few pop albums recorded on upright pianos, in studios where no grand was available.

A well-built and well-regulated upright can be excellent for students in the early and intermediate levels of study. But at the point where a good student of piano is working on advanced concert pieces, preparing for conservatory or the concert stage, or just working to refine their key touch control of the keys to deftly reproduce the softest triple-pianissimo, the loudest fortissimo, and the rapidest trills and flourishes, they must own or practice on a grand action.

For more check out these related posts

• Reliable Upright (Vertical) Pianos

First you must decide if you are buying an vertical upright piano (the kind that fits against the wall) or a grand (the kind that stands on three legs.) Obviously, space & price considerations will come into play, but remember the #1 rule from our last post…buy the biggest piano you can afford and have space for. If you really don’t have the space for even a baby grand, there are tall uprights – 48” to 54” – who strings are as long or longer than some petite grands, and they sound wonderful, though they don’t have the repitition-action of a grand (covered later)

Of course, as a piano fanatic, I’m partial to grand pianos, and space considerations simply don’t apply. I once lived in a single-wide trailer with my wife and son, and when it came to the question of whether we could fit my 6’ grand in the “living room”, well, there simply was no question…in it came. Sure, we had to eat on it sometimes…

But for those who are fully satisfied with the sound of an upright piano, or simply cannot squeeze in a grand, here’s some of your best choices:

Yamaha – any of their taller uprights, like the U1, U3 or U5 models, are fine pianos
Schimmel – the uprights by this great German piano-maker are exceptionally beautiful and superb quality!
Steinway – their full size upright is legendary, and expensive, but well worth it if you appreciate their quality and sound
Kawai also makes good uprights, though their sound quality is a bit below Yamaha
Knabe, a grand American piano name, is back in business, and even though they are now being made in Korea, their larger uprights are well-made and stunningly beautiful
Charles Walter is an American company that makes fine uprights

Here’s what some of them look like:

For more check out these related posts

• Upright Piano Pros & Cons

They all produce a pretty big sound, and they all can cost a pretty penny. Cheap Chinese-made uprights can be as little as $3000, long Austrian concert grands can set you back over $150,000 (yes, that’s the right amount of zeros,) and everything in between.

Buying a piano isn’t like buying a new flat-screen TV or your next pair of designer jeans – it’s a beeg deel! You have to plan your space considerations and sound levels (throughout your house, and your neighbors if you live in a condo or apartment,) and be prepared to fork over a sizable amount of cash. And there’s soooo many models and sizes to choose from.

So how do you make this considerbale purchase a little less daunting and a little more pleasurable? There are a few simple rules when it comes to comparing and purchasing a piano. Stick to these formulas below, and you’ll do fine…you’ll even really enjoy the experience.

1. Always purchase the biggest, newest piano you can afford and have space for. Why? Because it’s a fact that the sound gets noticeably richer with each foot of string length you add (piano tuners joke that the defintion of a piano is "anything over six feet",) and new, because it’s pristine and comes with a full warranty in case anything isn’t quite right.
 
2. If buying a new piano, buy only from a reputable dealer. Avoid the grey market or “outlets”, deal only with long-established piano stores that have been granted the franchise for a least two top-name brands. They have too much at stake not to treat you right.

3. There are only a handful of really good piano brand names left (there used to be scores of them in the U.S. alone.)  Which is sad, but if makes your choices a lot easier. My next post will cover some of the better brands. Stick to those fine instruments, and don’t be tempted to lay down good money for some new-fashioned or “off” brand.

4. Set aside a least one full day, or more, to visit many stores and try out many instruments. Which means that…

5. The piano player (not just grandma & grandpa) must be present. Whether it’s the lesson-taking kids, or an experienced adult player, you are the one that’s going to have to listen to and love the sound of it every day. So the actual players(s) need to be present to compare piano after piano. If you’re just the parent or the "money", don’t even think of picking it out for them, let them try and listen to many pianos!

6. Never pay MSRP retail price. Good dealers compete for your business, and there’s room to wiggle. Don’t ask for “cost +10%,” you won’t get it, but haggle a bit, and insist on a matching bench, a free first tuning, and maybe even free moving or no sales tax.

7. Buy the piano you like the best! Once you’ve played a bunch of them, you’ll know which one it is, I guarantee you. It’s too large an important a purchase to compromise – you have to absolutely love it! Buy the one you want and don’t spend days vacillating or rationalizing about the others.

For more check out these related posts

• The Grandest Pianos: European Makers
• The Grandest Pianos: Oriental Makers
• The Grandest Pianos: American Makers

      
We also emphasized the importance of the ribs glued to the back of the soundboard, critical because they hold the soundboard in a slightly convex bowed shape, or "crown." The soundboard isn’t really flat as it may appear, it’s raised slightly towards its middle.  If the soundbaord flattens out and loses its “crown” (which it most certainly will in time – anywhere from 50-100+ years,) the string pressure against the bridge and soundboard will become loose and the tone will suffer greatly.

So the better piano manufacturers use the best quality wood they can find for the soundboard and ribs, and cut & glue the ribs with precision to insure the longest possible life for the soundboard’s crowned shape.

Almost exclusively, the wood of choice for soundboards is spruce. And not just any spruce, but spruce carefully chosen for close grain (for better sound conducting) and that perect balance between strength and suppleness. It must be strong enough to withstand the immense pressure from the strings, but supple enough to vibrate freely with resonant tone.

Piano makers since the 18th century have scoured the world’s finest spruce forests, looking for spruce that would make the most resonant soundboards. An overwhelming majority of this soundboard spruce for American pianos has come from the Sitka region of Alaska. European and Japanese pianos have also used Sitka spruce, and have found great stands of spruce in European forests also.

Because of the immense pressure of the soundboard, as well as wide humidity fluctuations wherever you live, it is not uncommon for soundboards to develop lengthwise cracks in them, often running right along the glued seam between any of the quarter-sawn spans. Henry Steinway once said he’d be surprised to see any of his soundboards over 15 years old that didn’t have a least a crack or two running through them. Although these cracks can look ugly, curiously, they often have little or no effect on the piano’s sound. The overall area of resonating wood is so large, the string vibrations still get evenly distributed over the soundboard despite the cracks.

One condition where soundboard cracks do effect the sound negatively is when the split is not only side-to-side, but where the wood one or both sides of the crack lifts upward, coming loose from the rib below it. Not only can this result in a dead resonance in that spot, but a nasty buzz can occur where the now-unglued rib just barely contacts the soundboard. Often, if you hear a buzz when playing an older piano, most prominent in one section of your keyboard, this loose rib is the cause. Fortunately, it is often a straightforward repair to work some glue between rib and soundboard and draw the two of them together with a screw, which can later be removed

Below we can see some  examples of cracks running through a grand piano soundboard, then across the back of an upright soundboard:

In later posts, we will talk about completely rebuilding older top-name grand pianos, what’s involved and whether it’s truly worth it. It cetainly involves installing all new hammers and damper and other felts, and competely restringing the piano, often with a fresh new pinblock. Many fine technicians know how to do these replacements, and consequently offer their services as a piano rebuilder. But almost none of these have the skill and heavy equipment necessary to replace the entire soundboard of a piano…it’s really a factory job. So it’s critical that each technician measures how much crown is left in the current soundboard, because restoring all the rest of a piano that has a flat or soon-to-be-flat soundboard is certainly a waste of much time and money.

For more check out these related posts

• The All-Important Soundboard
• It Plays, It Vibrates, It Sings!
• Your Piano’s Innards, Outards and Major Components
• Why 3 Pedals Are “2 Much” On An Upright – Part 2
• Why 3 Pedals Are “2 Much” On An Upright – Part 1

If you stretch a strand of wire, fabric or even gut, to a tight tension, and then pluck it, it will make a sound. Children often explore this by stretching a string between two cans and then trying to talk over the "wire’, or even by just stretching and plucking the rubber band that was wrapped around the Sunday paper.

But the sound created by a wire stretched across thin air, no matter how thick or tight the wire, is pretty thin and soft. Once you stretch the wire across an amplifying body, like a slab of wood, the sound can grow exponentially in richness and volume. This is the theory behind all soundboards – the wooden top of a violin, a guitar, and the large wooden diaphragm spanning every piano.

As in the violin and guitar, the strings don’t actually touch the soundboard, but are suspended just above it, laying across a one or two bridges, themselves made of wood or some other efficient sound-conducting material. When the strings are set into motion, the vibrations pass down through the bridge into the larger wooden slab, the soundboard, which then itself vibrates across the whole breadth of wood grains, producing a deep, rich tone. Piano manufacturers scour the earth for the most close-grained, sound-resonant woods they can find, of which spruce has been the favorite.

Here’s a photo of a full grand soundboard, with the short bass bridge and longer snaking treble bridge already glued into place on top, before it gets installed or strung in the piano:

In order for the soundboard to hold it’s slightly bowed shape (for better resonance and resistance to the pressure of the strings,) angled ribs are glued on to its back:

On a grand piano, you can see these ribs by looking up from underneath the piano. The strings then cross over the bridges, themselves made of a very resonant wood, and the strings’ vibrations are conducted down into the soundboard. As you can see in this photo, the strings arre then wrapped around "hitch pins" on the iron plate to hold them at the back end. On the front end, as we have seen, they are coiled around the tuning pins.

The bridges are just slightly higher than the plane of the string running front to back, meaning that they lift the strings a tiny bit higher than perfectly parallel to the soundboard. This insures the massive downward pressure of the strings. The true contact between the strings and the bridge is further secured by forcing the strings to jag to a slight angle, accomplished by a set of angled "bridge pins" for each note, here seen across the treble bridge…

  And the bass bridge:

For more check out these related posts

• Soundboard Racks and Cracks
• It Plays, It Vibrates, It Sings!
• Your Piano’s Innards, Outards and Major Components
• Why 3 Pedals Are “2 Much” On An Upright – Part 2
• Why 3 Pedals Are “2 Much” On An Upright – Part 1

Over the course of 2008, we looked at this marvelous instrument, the piano, from its original invention, it’s history & evolution, and its pre-eminence as it flourished in the 20th century. Just before the New Year, we beagn exploring all the components of a modern day grand piano in exploded views and cut-aways, so you can see all the piano’s parts from the hugest to the tiniest, and how they all work together. Now that we have a sense of the major structural parts like the case, pin block and cast iron frame (refer back to the exploded view of a grand in our last post by clicking here,) let’s take a look at how this beautiful contraption actually produces sound. What exactly happens when you strike the keys?

Here’s a great animated cut-away view of one key and its connected action parts in a grand piano. Watch closely and you’ll see all the essential movements and connection that take place when you press down any key.

The key rocks on a central fulcrum called the "center rail," and as you press the down on the front end, the back end of the long wooden key lifts upward. This in turn lifts the complicated triangle shaped (sort of) wooden mechanism with all the sticks of wood and springs, called the "wippen." Towards the front end of the wippen, you’ll notice a stick of wood that pushes the hammer up toward the string, called the "jack," by pushing against the bottom of the hammer shank (the stick of wood the hammer is at the end of.) If you look closely you’ll see the top of the jack isn’t actually pushing directly against the hammer shank, but against a little orange-&-white ball hanging under the shank, called the "knuckle." You’ll also notice how the "L"-shaped jack snaps out from under the knuckle at the last moment, just before the hammer hits the string. That’s called "escapement," as we covered in our piano history posts, and that’s what allows the hammer to fall back away from the string, freely, instead of blocking against the string, which would effectively stop the sound.

Finally, you’ll notice that although the hammer bounces back away from the string, it doesn’t fall all the way back down, being caught momentarily at about half-way down by the "backcheck." the red, white and orange cushion sticking up from the back of the key. The orange color is actually a layer of buckskin covering, which grabs the hammer’s tail and holds it in check. This, plus the spring-loaded repetition lever (the top-most stick of the wippen’s "triangle") lift and hold the hammer aloft just enough to allow the jack to sneak back under the knuckle, fully ready for another play of the key, even though the hammer has only fallen back about half-way and the piano player has only allowed the key to raise back up about half way. In other words, even though when playing, the key is pressed down a full 3/8 of an inch before hitting bottom, this marvelous mechanism allows the player to play that note again when the key has only come back up about 3/16", instead of having to let the key all the way back up before replaying the note (as in the earliest pianos.)

Of course, all the springs, sticks and buttons of this mechanism need to be in perfect adjustment (or "regulation") in order for this to work correctly, and that’s where your expert technician comes in. There’s about 15-20 adjustments to be made on each key action! But a good technician knows exactly how to do this. It takes a few hours if the piano is completely out of "regulation," or just a short routine service call if just to keep every part in perfect adjustment. Here’s another detailed view of all the parts in a grand piano action, also showing the damper and it’s respective levers. The damper lifts off the string when you press the key, allowing it to vibrate freely, then comes back onto the string to mute it as you let the key up.

So now we’ve set the string in motion, free to vibrate until either the sounds dies out, or we let up on the key, letting the damper fall back down on the string. Next, we’ll look at the acoustics of how that string’s vibration gets amplified into the room and your ears, through the bridges and soundboard.

For more check out these related posts

• Soundboard Racks and Cracks
• The All-Important Soundboard
• Your Piano’s Innards, Outards and Major Components
• Why 3 Pedals Are “2 Much” On An Upright – Part 2
• Why 3 Pedals Are “2 Much” On An Upright – Part 1

But a modern-day grand piano is made up of some 9000 individual parts, many of them moving parts, and many people are fascinated by how it all fits together and "ticks." These next posts are for you!

First lets take a look at an exploded view of a modern-day grand piano, and talk about the function of each component.

This shows the basic large components of any grand piano, minus the strings and tuning pins (which can be seen in the open-top view on the grand in our last post, The Modern Piano Emerges.)

The S-shaped outards of every grand are referred to as the piano’s case or rim. The straight bar of wood that across the front of the piano, directly over the keys, is called the "stretcher." The wood that closes over your keys is called the "fallboard," and there’s a couple blocks of wood on either side of the keys called "cheek blocks" and a long thin strip of wood just in front of your keys called the "key slip," which round out the main furniture parts of the piano’s case. The stretcher is mortised into the piano’s rim, but the fallboard, key slip and cheek blocks are all easily removable, and you’ll see your technician quickly setting these furniture parts aside if he needs to access the action & hammers. As you can see by the photos above and below, on a grand piano, the keys & action just slide out of the front of the piano like a works-in-a-drawer. That’s important, because although tuning does not require action removal, virtually every other adjustment to the action and hammers does, so the technician has to be able to slide it out often and fast.

We’ll take a look at the works of the piano’s action in our next entry. The soundboard and iron plate that seem to be floating above the piano in the top photo, are glued and bolted down inside the piano’s rim. After the strings are installed, they will pass over the treble and bass bridges and send their vibrations down through the bridges to the soundboard, which is the main sound-amplifying body of the piano. The heavy cast iron plate bears the tremendous tension of these strings (up to 20 tons) so the wooden case doesn’t need to.

If you look close at the front end of the iron plate in the top photo, you’ll see lots of little holes just in front of the red felt strips. You’ll see similar holes in the shelf of wood just behind the stretcher, called the "pin block." These holes line up when the iron plate is bolted down into the piano, and the metal tuning pins are driven through the holes in the plate, down into the wooden pin block, to hold the tension and tuning of each string, as illustrated below.

 As you can see, the inch-and-a-half thick pin block is multi-laminated and cross-grained for a super-firm hold on the tuning pin. That’s a good thing, as the tuning pins don’t "screw" into threads in the wood, but are held just by friction. How? The tuning pins have a very fine thread, giving them a "rough" surface, and they are precisely .010 (ten-thousandths) of an inch thicker than the hole they are being pounded into, when the piano is initially strung at the factory. That’s it! The pin’s just a little thicker than the hole, so it’s tight in there…but they can & do come loose after the pin block has been subject to either significant age (50-100 years) or significant dryness in low-humidity climates.

The top diagram shows how they pass through the holes in the iron plate (the greyish cutaway,) then down through the pin block holes, at about a 7º backward-leaning angle, to further support the immense pull of the string. The string is coiled about 3 full turn around the pin, with the tip of the string inserted into the tiny hole drilled through the pin (see above) called the "becket."

To see how it all fits together, check back to that open-top view of a grand piano in the last post by clicking here. In our next entry, after the Holidays (hope you have a "Grand" season!), we’ll take a deeper look at the soundboard, bridges and action works.

For more check out these related posts

• Soundboard Racks and Cracks
• The All-Important Soundboard
• It Plays, It Vibrates, It Sings!
• Why 3 Pedals Are “2 Much” On An Upright – Part 2
• Why 3 Pedals Are “2 Much” On An Upright – Part 1

Jonas Chickering established his piano company in Boston in 1823, and industriously set out making many important improvements to the plate, bearing and tension of the stringing scale. Other famous makers sprung up in Baltimore (William Knabe and Charles M. Stieff) Boston (Mason & Hamlin) Ohio (Baldwin) and the countless piano manufacturing companies that sprung up in New York. Of these, the most prominent and legendary is Steinway.

In 1846, after years of building pianos in his kitchen and workshop in Germany, cabinet-maker Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg decided to move his family to the New World. One of his sons, Theodor, stayed back to continue the family’s German piano business, and eventually sold the business to three other piano builders to form the Grotrian-Steinweg company, still in business today in Braunshweig. Theodor then left to join his family in New York, which, had since changed its last name to Steinway, to demonstrate their full embracing of the American way.

Stacks of books have been written about the incredible rise of the Steinway Company, their inventive genius, their bold marketing by securing the endorsements of the top pianists of the day, their full employee "village" campus, complete with schools for the employee’s children, their foundries and three world-spanning manufacturing outlets in New York, London and Hamburg. Thick tomes and coffee-table books like Ronald Ratcliffe’s "Steinway", D. W.Fostle’s "The Steinway Saga", and Chapin’s "The Making Of A Steinway Piano" are all readily available in both new and used editions, and make fascinating reads for anyone interested in delving deeply into the making of both the piano and the company.

Steinway had held over 100 patents for inventions pertaining to virtually every component of the piano. They invented a special quarter-round fulcrum under the keys to speed play, calling it the Accelerated Action; the Duplex scale for extra harmonic string resonance; the middle pedal on grands, the Sostenuto, which allows for selective sustaining of individual notes; and wooden dowels to allow the iron plate to hover slightly over the soundboard. One significant improvement to the piano which Steinway is credited for, stands out above the rest: the "overstrung" stringing scale.

In the photo below, you can see how the copper-wound bass strings go over the treble strings at an angle, whereas prior pianos like Broadwood had bass strings going straight to the back on the same plane as the trebles. This overstrung designed allowed for increasing the length of the bass strings by several inches, and repositioning the bass bridge more to the center of the soundboard, both resulting in a deeper, richer tone in the bass section.

 My passion for sharing the piano with everybody has made it fun for me erect this piano lover’s website, and to spend these last several posts giving a quick overview of the piano’s history and evolution. If you’re crazy about the piano like me, and would love to learn even more about the piano’s "grand" history, there are many books devoted to a thorough coverage of the subject. Here I’ll just mention a couple favorites: "Pianos And Their Makers" by Alfred Dolge, and Arthur Loesser’s "Men, Women and Pianos – A Social History." And for an up-to-date overview about the current state of the piano industry and all the brands still in production today, every piano fanatic will want to own a copy of Larry Fine’s "The Piano Book", kept current with Annual Supplements.

In our next post we’ll take time out to view some exploded perspectives of the inside and outside of both grand & upright pianos, for those who wish to understand how their beloved instrument works.

For more check out these related posts

• John Broadwood Battles Increasing Tension!
• The Evolution Of The Piano Action
• The Piano: An Amazing Feat Of Engineering
• Music And The Birth Of The Piano

But as Western music left behind the delicacy of the Baroque and light Classical eras for the more florid & forceful pieces of the Romantic Era, and as composers like Beethoven and Franz Liszt performed in larger halls, requiring richer, louder broadcast from the piano, the next era of pianoforte development was entered in earnest.

Composers and pianists wanted pianos that would reach large audiences with full and rich tone. In order to achieve this, several evolutions had t take place in the pianos components. Hammers, originally pea-sized leather, had to grow in girth and be made of other, more resonant materials (which would, of course, make them heavier, resulting in a harder key pressure.)The strings they struck had to grow from 2 to 3-string unisons across much of the scale, and be made thicker and heavier for more resonant vibration. The thicker the string, the greater the tension pulling on the frame of the piano, so something had to be done to keep the whole instrument from buckling to splinters under the increased tension.

In England, John Broadwood attacked many of these engineering feats, and virtually re-invented the "grand" piano.

First he added a screw-regulator for the repetition, quickening the piano’s touch. He displaced the bass and treble wires across two separate bridges, as seen in modern-day pianos, allowing for more individual tension control over the ever-thickening bass-wires. This layout also allowed for more strings across a smaller area, and by 1794, Broadwood’s pianos boasted a range of over 6 octaves. He also invented a foot pedal to lift the dampers off the strings to provide long sustain, a process formerly activated by pushing a lever with the knee…ouch! These improvements alone allowed Broadwood pianos and England to dominate the new piano industry,  and become the piano of choice for expressive composers like Beethoven.

But Broadwood’s most important contribution lie in the strengthening of the piano’s frame. All these increases in hammer-weight, number of strings, string weight and tension, etc. conspired to put frightening demands on the perimeter of the piano.

Like it’s keyboard predecessor, the harpsichord, the early pianos were all strung against a wooden frame. This was fully sufficient to bear the tension and tuning stability of the light string load found in these instruments. But as the string number and tension grew, it threatened to ruin all attempts at stable tuning, at least, and pull apart the entire piano at worst. Throughout the late 1700s, attempts to bolster to frame were made with wooden struts and beams. But by the beginning of the 19th century, the emergence of the industrial revolution brought forth the age of working in iron, and by 1821, the Broadwood Company’s pianos featured 5 iron bars reinforcing the piano’s frame across it’s full stinging scale. France’s Sebastian Erard added the invention of brass string-length terminators called "agraffes" to keep the string properly bearing against the bridges, and from that point onward, the partial or full iron-frame, or "plate" was a fixture in every evolving piano.

For more check out these related posts

• The Modern Piano Emerges
• The Evolution Of The Piano Action
• The Piano: An Amazing Feat Of Engineering
• Music And The Birth Of The Piano

By the 1720’s Cristofori had made some twenty "gravicembali col piano e forte" ("harpsichord with soft & loud") and had added a padded "backcheck" to catch the hammer on the rebound. A sketch of Cristofori’s early piano action is shown below

 This original design was little changed over the next fifty years, as keyboard players of the day just began to explore the potential of this new "soft-loud" instrument. One of the key limitations (no pun intended) in Cristofori’s early design was the necessity to allow each key to raise all the way back up, before being able to play the key & hammer again for another strike of the note. You had to lift fully off the key because that’s what it took to bring all components back to their ready-to-play positions. This made it impossible to repeat notes quickly, and as new composers for this wonderful instrument entered the field, they demanded faster repetition for their more allegro, presto and vivace compositions. Cristofori began work on the early versions of an extra stick of wood, a "repetition lever," that would hold the hammer aloft only half-way back to rest position, allowing it to  be replayed without allowing the key to raise fully back up.

This repetition action was improved further by the great Parisian piano maker Sebastian Erard, who invented a "double escapement" around 1821 (Erard pianos are still made today!) Indeed, this ability to repeat any note more and more rapidly, with less and less raise of the key, became one of the most dominant quests in piano evolution, as great composers of the baroque, classical and romantic eras wrote more quick & lively passages and trills into their increasingly ornamental pieces. And although many would surmise that we have come as far as we can, and achieved maximum key-repeat velocity in the modern era of piano design, a visit to the Steinway factory in New York (a field trip I highly recommend!) will reveal that their action technicians still work on ways to improve this even further, introducing new experimental action designs every few years.

But increasing the rapid repetition of keys and notes proved to be only one of many problems that would rear their head in the evolution of the modern piano.  A discussion of these issues, and one man who made huge improvements in these areas, John Broadwood, follows next

For more check out these related posts

• The Modern Piano Emerges
• John Broadwood Battles Increasing Tension!
• The Piano: An Amazing Feat Of Engineering
• Music And The Birth Of The Piano

But truly, the Italians have produced some of the greatest scientists, philosophers and inventors ever seen, and perhaps none more important for music lovers than Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua. Cristofori moved to Florence in 1688, at the behest of his Prince, de Medici, at the age of 33, to be the Prince’s own court inventor of clocks, mechanical devices and musical instruments. Cristofori was already competent at building the plucked-string kyboard instruments of the day, the spinette and the virginal.

Around 1700, Cristfori invented an instrument he named the "Arpicembalo", literally "harp-harpsichord." It was the first keyboard instrument with two strings per unison and the strings excited by a strike from a hammer instead of a quill plectrum. The fact that it could produce a wide range of volumes, from soft (piano) to very loud (forte), eventually caused everyone to substitute "pianoforte," or the soft-loud, for Cristofori’s original harp-harpsichord moniker

The amazing genius of Cristofori’s invention was the "escapement action." Configuring just a few sticks of wood and a few springs, Cristofori fashioned a mechanism that allowed the hammer to be lifted up to string by pressing down the key, but then having the stick that was pushing the hammer up, snap out, or disconnect, from the hammer at the precise moment just berore it struck the strings. Obviously, without this "escapement" ability, the hammer would hit the strings but also be held against them, therefore instantly stopping the vibrations, as long as the player held down the key. The escapement mechanism allowed player to strike the keys, set the notes vibrating, and release the key only when necessary, at any pace they desired. Thus was born the sound and playing style that allowed for the beautiful "Piano," as it came to be known for short.

The piano is now 300 years old, and so many improvements have proceeded from Cristofori’s original cabinet, frame, string, hammer and action designs (covered next post.) But as I viewed some of Cristofori’s original 1720s pianos at the Smithsonian’s heavenly "300 Years Of The Piano" exhibit in 2000, as a technician, the thing I was most struck by was how little his basic action design has been changed, how similar the functional design is to that of a grand piano built in the 21st century.

Ah, those Italians, they’ve given us so much joy! I like the shoes, too. We’ll look at some of the improvements and evolution since Cristofori’s day in our next entry.

For more check out these related posts

• The Modern Piano Emerges
• John Broadwood Battles Increasing Tension!
• The Evolution Of The Piano Action
• Music And The Birth Of The Piano