Myth: A Crack in the Soundboard Means my Piano is Ruined.

Fact: While a crack in the soundboard can be a problem such as when the panel comes unglued from the ribs. Most soundboards have cracks within a few years after manufacture… you just don’t see them yet.

A single crack or gap is usually nothing to worry about, even several can pretty meaningless. If however you start getting more than 5 or 6 your soundboard is probably also losing its crown which will adversely affect the sustain and volume your piano will have.

The only pianos which don’t develop cracks in their soundboards are those with very flimsy frames which allow the soundboard to expand and contract without cracking and laminate soundboard (plywood).

A crack in the pin block is a much more serious matter. Now the piano will not stay in tune. Can you tell if there is a potential problem in the pin block?

Andrew Remillard
President
ANRPiano.com



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Myth #1: Moving a Piano Causes it to Go Out of Tune

Fact: If moving caused your piano to go out of tune, you have some very serious problems. Climate change is the primary cause for a piano to need tuning. If you moved your piano from the shadows of a room to the southern window, your piano will promptly go out of tune. It wasn’t because you moved it per se, but because you moved it into the sun! The sun is rumored to have some impact on temperature and humidity.

Back in the days when I did a lot of event rentals it was our common practice to tune a piano before it is sent out. This gave us a chance to make sure the pitch was still close to where it belonged and since the pianos were often tuned weekly this was rarely a concern. After the piano was delivered and set up, myself or one of my staff tuners would tune the piano again after the piano was given a chance to warm up or cool off depending on the temperature of the truck. We rarely did more than touch up a few strings, we did this on site tuning more for the sake of the customer than the needs of the piano.

More later on why a piano goes out of tune and why you can still need to tune it every day.

Andrew Remillard
President
ANRPiano.com



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Commandment #3 Thou Shalt Not Look at Thy Hands

Cognitive scientists will tell us that interrupting the visual flow if information is a significant determent to learning. Looking from the score to your hands and back to the score breaks up the information flow into your memory, creating a garbled mess. It is critical for the mastery of playing, that the fingers and arms learn to judge distances without the aid of the eyes. Make the mistakes and learn from them, but do not let the eyes become the crutch of the hands.

Andrew Remillard
President
ANRPiano.com



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Practice Rule #2 Limited Material

As someone whose eyes have always been larger than my ability or time available, I have had to learn the value of limiting the amount of material I work on at a time. I also discovered through my cognitive psychological research that there are some pretty strong scientific reasons for limiting the amount of material one studies at a time.

There are no hard rules as to how much material can be handled but there are a number of principles which impact this. To start with there is the size of our short term memory (STM), when the STM is full (usually 5 – 7 “chunks” of material it will begin to dump information and unless it is immediately rehearsed it will be lost. The amount of material, or number of notes which can be put into a chunk (the technical term BTW) is influenced by our ability to recognize patterns and group notes by these patterns. Theoretically you could hundreds of notes into a chunk. I would imagine the stories of prodigies such as Mozart reflect his ability to quickly recognize note patterns and identify and store them quickly and efficiently.

I have toyed with writing a book about this whole process, but seem to need to limit my material at this time. This is a long and complex subject, but the key point would be to try working on shorter segments at a time and see if your learning rate doesn’t improve.

Andrew Remillard
President
ANRPiano.com



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Commandment #2 Thou Shalt Know and Love They Beat

The most important thing in music is rhythm, the most important thing to rhythm is the beat, and the most important thing to the beat is its steadiness.

I can play a familiar melody such as “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and make it completely unrecognizable by radically changing the rhythm. However, it is still easily recognizable if it is played in a serial tone row, (maintaining the melodic shape while using large leaps and wild chromaticism) but keep the original rhythmic patterns.

There are two components to a secure sense of rhythm. First you must KNOW where in the score the beat falls. The beat can be any note value assigned the primary rhythmic motive function. You must understand where in the score these beats occur.

The next part is the “Loving”. You must have a physical sense of the beat. There is no guessing allowed in the beat. Clap your hands, stomp your feet, jump up and down, tap a foot, tap a toe, count out loud; do something to physically feel the presence of the beat or pulse.

Now put these together. Know where you belong in the score as these beats you feel come by. No matter what, you must be where you belong! If your playing is controlled by a steady, known beat, with a thorough understanding as to where you belong in the score with the beat, you will have a secure rhythm. Failure will make your playing rhythmically unintelligible.

Andrew Remillard
President
ANRPiano.com



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Rule #1 Limited Time Frame

We have all heard the axiom “A job expands to fill the time allowed.” This can be expressed differently: “Limit the time to do the work and the work may still get done.” One of the inherent flaws in the weekly lesson template we all use and grew up with is the lack of tight time limitation. If something is not mastered this week, there is always next week, or next month or even next year. This can be mitigated with recitals, festivals, and competitions. However, even with these, we still can put off our work until most of the available time is gone.

In my own playing, once I took my first church job which required me to have hymns, preludes, postludes, etc. ready every week without fail, I found my ability to learn a significant amount of music quickly an absolute necessity for survival. At first, I was not terribly successful and relied upon the art of “fake” more than I should have. But through the years there has been more “play” and less “fake”.

Andrew Remillard
President
ANRPiano.com



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The 10 Commandments, OK, my 10 Commandments #1

1) THOU SHALT NOT KID THY SELF.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Polonius gives his son Laertes the advice to above all else to be true to himself. Honesty with one’s self is a lifelong process. In the world of music practice it can begin with the simple step of writing down how much you practice. Even if you never total the time or even give it a second look, you have established a measure from which to judge your efforts.

Goal setting is critical for any endeavor. If the requirement is to have a piece up to tempo by a certain date, you can break down the steps necessary for the accomplishment. If these intermediary steps are not met, you must be honest with yourself that the larger goal is in danger and likely not to be met unless additional effort is made. If a secure memory is the goal and little has been committed to memory a week before the deadline, don’t kid yourself, a secure memory is not likely to be the outcome.

We will bear the complete responsibility for our success or failure for the vast majority of our life. While as a student, it is easy to be dependent upon your teachers to order and plan your work and goals. However, you are a student for only a short time and will have to order and plan your work for decades after your student years.

Andrew Remillard
President
ANRPiano.com



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Journey Through Bach and Beethoven

I had always wanted to immerse myself into the study of large amounts of piano literature. A few years ago I quit waiting for an opportunity and committed to the opportunities I already had. I “subjected” my church to all of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues of book one and all of Beethoven’s sonatas.

One of the inspirations for doing this came from years ago watching Steve Vaught, aka Fat Man Walking, walk across the USA. Steve had a number of personal demons, the least of which was his diet. He set out to walk across the country from San Diego to New York as a means to regain a sense of purpose and direction for his life.

For myself, I had always been a poor sight reader and very slow learner (among countless other deficiencies). I had been nibbling around the edges of these problems for years, but had never really committed to solving them. (I don’t know if they can be solved, because you can always be a better reader and faster learner). After reading about Mr. Vaught’s journey I decided to set out on my own.

I had read through Book One of the Well Tempered Clavier while in college, and like everybody else, learned a handful. My teacher William Phemister had played the complete cycle of Book One the year before I had entered Wheaton College and people were still talking about it the next year. I had also listened to some complete recordings and had lost myself in the beauty and uniqueness of this work. What a great addition to one’s repertory than the complete Preludes and Fugues, so I decided to give it a try.

I interspersed the Preludes and Fugues with movements of Beethoven’s Sonatas and began to work my way through both collections. I finished the Bach first. I started the second book but lost interest and moved over to his piano toccatas. (I have since returned to both sets and am once more doing the complete cycle, this time doing both P&F’s in each key at the same time)

The sense of completing such a large project is enormously satisfying. It would have been easy to give up anywhere along the way and just do something different… no one would have known… except myself. I could live with everybody else, but living with myself is a completely different matter all together.

The setting of an immediate deadline; I had to have something new to play every Sunday, kept my mind very focused on being productive with every minute I practiced.

Learning from my failures along the way taught me more than my successes. There were some Sundays I would have preferred to crawl into a hole behind the piano with embarrassment over how I had just played. I learned more about what it would take to be successful the next time after these failures. I learned to better judge the amount of work I would need to do to get difficult technical passages under control quickly.

I also learned about staying within my abilities. The difference between a good clean performance and one filled with stubbles is often only a notch or two on the metronome. The audience is less aware of a slow tempo than they are a mistake filled performance. (I told that to my students all of time, I should listen to myself!)

My sight reading and absorption rates did improve significantly through all of this, and for that I am glad. However, more importantly, I have a much deeper understanding of these two giants of keyboard literature. Immersion study is the best method for mastering a language and immersing yourself in a composer’s total output, I have found, is the best way to come to understand the totality of their output. I now understand how superficial my knowledge of other is composers even if I know a dozen of their works.

There are still many journeys yet to come. Some I will chose, and some will chose me. I am rounding the corner on this one, coming into the home stretch, and I can see that I am returning to where I began and knowing it for the first time.

Andrew Remillard
President
ANRPiano.com



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