Piano's Darkest Secret

ever since becoming a professional pianist one thought has always haunted me which is i wish my hands were 10 bigger just 10 percent so that i could reach more notes and play fast passages more smoothly without straining myself and it's not just me as a youtuber i see a lot of comments commenters who talk about having hands that are too small this is just a tiny percentage of the pianists who have the same problems this is the dark secret of the piano world is that over 80 percent of females and 25 percent of males have hands that are too small for the modern keyboard they spend their entire lives playing piano on hard mode and they never realized that smaller sized keyboards would solve many of their problems it's a surprisingly simple solution i don't need to get surgery to increase my hand size by 10 all i need to do is to buy a keyboard with narrower sized keys however if you try to buy one whether online or in a piano store you will fail why is this the case why don't piano and keyboard companies such as yamaha roland kauai etc whose sole purpose is to sell more pianos why don't they offer an alternate size for pianists with smaller hands this is the mystery that we're going to unravel today you see the modern piano wasn't always this current size back in chopin and beethoven's day there were pianos of all shapes and sizes here is the legendary french pianist jean-yves something playing on an original piano that chopin himself played on i would like to tell a little bit more about this particular piano it was built in 1848 for choppa and it was played by him in his resell in london in 1848. it was really a challenge for me to play all this music on this piano because it is quite different from the modern piano that i'm used to everything is kind of on a smaller scale the keys every key is shorter and even more narrower than on a modern piano which means that all my distances were kind of wrong if i would make a jump or play an octave i was always off at the beginning by just this much which means it's not wrong basically it wasn't until the late 1800s when the modern piano was standardized at its current key width 6.5 inches between an octave or about 0.93 inches per key when i found out about smaller sized keyboards i knew that i had to play on one myself let's go back a few months to october 2nd 2021 it was two days before my concert in heidelberg germany instead of spending the day practicing i drove 2.5 hours to stuttgart germany to play on serious 6.0 europe's only 6.0 inch octave keyboard it felt amazing la campanella was so much easier to play on the slightly narrower keys and with only two days to go before my concert i wanted to test the hypothesis will playing on a smaller sized keyboard caused me to play worse on a regular sized keyboard afterwards as i found out during my concert the answer is a clear no i played better than i ever had especially for the more difficult pieces of my program such as la campanella and fight for freedom playing on narrower keys taught my hands what a relaxed unstretched position feels like which carried over its benefits even to the regular sized keyboard after i tried out the smaller keyboard i realized that this would solve many of my roadblocks for practicing difficult pieces i knew that i had to buy one at all costs whether it would cost me 500 5000 or even fifty thousand dollars but of course we know that smaller sized keyboards are impossible to buy online or in any music store it turns out that there is only one place in all of america where you can get a smaller piano keyboard and that is in titusville pennsylvania a tiny rural town about two hours north of pittsburgh close to the border of canada i took my dog cooper and embarked on a six hour road trip i visited a man named david steinbueller a textile factory owner who got into making pianos as a passion project alright guys so i'm really happy to be here with david steinbuller and he is the man behind all of this incredible innovation being done with the keys being different sizes okay since the 1990s david has been the only manufacturer of reduced size keyboards in america and he does it all from a small subsection on the second floor of his titusville factory's main operations by himself he coded thousands of lines to create an automated manufacturing process for high quality ivory piano keys at a smaller width when i played on these keys the quality was indistinguishable from the usual keys you find on pianos by steinway and yamaha one man working part-time on his own was able to build a product that solves millions of pianists problems the reason i visited him was because i wanted to give my electronic keyboard the kawaii mp11se to him so that he could replace the current keys with keys of a narrower width the usual 88 keys that you find on any other digital piano in the world has been shrunken from here to here it will cost me over five thousand dollars but it's worth it after all i was willing to pay over fifty thousand dollars for this i asked him how much money have you made from all of this work over the past 30 years david how much money have you made in total from this project oh no i just put money in we don't make any money so it's like negative like five thousand negative twenty thousand oh no negative negative million oh easily really yeah that's right this kind of specialized high accuracy manufacturing is definitely not easy or cheap but still david was able to achieve this by himself [Music] piano manufacturers like yamaha and steinway have thousands of engineers working full time on countless upgrades to their pianos every year you hear about the latest improvements to sound quality hammer action the functions available for cool synth sounds and flashing screens on the keyboard etc but the one upgrade that makes a far greater impact to the customer's playing experience more than any cosmetic or technical feature is missing a keyboard that fits the pianists hands so let's try to answer the question why aren't piano manufacturers making narrower keyboards after doing much research i've consolidated my findings to four big reasons the first is tradition the piano is one of the most prestigious instruments that fundamentally transformed musical history the vast majority of composers and songwriters throughout history used the piano as their primary instrument and the layout of 88 keys at its current size dimensions is considered almost sacred and no one wants to be known as the company that breaks tradition my response is look it's 2022. there's people playing piano on virtual reality dressed as anime characters surely this idea is less revolutionary the second big reason is you guessed it money i reached out to a representative from one of the big four piano companies asking them why they're not making smaller sized keyboards and this was their response i acknowledge that some players would appreciate a smaller keyboard but the research and development resources required to design and manufacture a smaller sized keyboard would exceed the potential revenue earned in sales making it not financially viable i disagree that only a small proportion of piano players would benefit from this and i'll soon explain why but first this response shows that money is what motivates these companies not the idea that they could change someone's life oh my gosh [Music] countless pianists lives with a modification that someone like david steinbeeler was able to do by himself oh oh geez my hands look enormous wait a minute shut up shall i i'll just let you do this yeah just singing just seeing what it looks like but let's address the issue of how many pianists would actually benefit from this my hand span is eight inches from pinky to thumb as i showed earlier eighty percent of females and twenty five percent of males have hands under 8.5 inches hand span this is not a small proportion of the piano playing community why 8.5 inches 8.5 inches or 21 centimeters is in fact the distance of a 10th interval between two notes on the modern keyboard tense are not really written in most popular music but knights are found all over the place and only a 8.5 inch hand span can comfortably play a knife furthermore when you're playing fast passages with lots of arpeggios or jumps such as chopin's waterfall ballad number one coda hungarian rhapsody number two la campanella rachmaninov's prelude in g minor music moment number four or even beethoven's rage against the last penny having a smaller travel distance between the keys helps so much more to let your fingers get to the note faster at higher speeds every millisecond counts there is also a growing body of evidence that hand sizes under 8.5 inches are more prone to injury in a study by yoshimura and chesky researchers measured the pain experienced by pianists as they played a chord's passage from debussy starting at 220 millimeters hand span the pain starts increasing exponentially as the hands get smaller researcher rhonda boyle notes that pianists with hand spans above 8.6 inches experience no pain these findings are consistent with another study done in 2002 by nakota sakai all my life i have experienced pain when playing some advanced pieces and like many other pianists i just don't talk about it the third big reason is stigma which seems a little subjective but i will explain because the improvement of narrower keys benefits more females than males it seems that piano manufacturers don't want to be known as the company that creates a feminine keyboard for some reason there is a myth amongst the piano playing population of all genders that having smaller hands is somehow a sign of inadequacy women would come and they would be embarrassed about their hands and i would tell them there's nothing wrong with your hand the women are embarrassed because they can't play the same range right profound discrimination and appears that piano manufacturers don't want their brand name to be associated with this undertone this is a sensitive topic especially for men you know what they say about men with small hands the myth that hand size is somehow correlated with member sides has made its way into mainstream consciousness you might think i'm joking but i genuinely believe that this stigma is a barrier to male pianists openly speaking out about this issue for example daniel bramboy one of the most famous pianists of our time plays on a customized steinway with narrower keys made just for him and so did the legendary pianist joseph hoffman but neither of these men ever revealed publicly that their pianos have different keys and even myself when i thought of making this video this was the first thought that came to my mind as juvenile as it seems the last reason is what i believe to be the most important because honestly the other three reasons pale in comparison to this fourth and final reason which is lack of awareness people just don't know that narrower sized keyboards exist it's actually quite funny if it wasn't so sad so many pianists all over youtube universities and classrooms all around the world complain and wish they had larger hands but like myself none of them ever thought to ask the piano companies to make a smaller size keyboard for 26 years of my piano playing life i never knew that narrower sized keyboards even existed i've talked with hundreds of pianists taking classes at juilliard peabody nyu performed at carnegie hall watched thousands of youtube videos about the piano read thousands of articles and internet discussions on the piano and yet not one of them even mentioned the possibility of narrower sized keyboards i remember in mid-september of 2021 i was looking through the piano world forums about something completely unrelated and then i stumbled upon this forum post about the dallas international piano competition which at the time allowed contestants to play on alternate sized pianos if they chose when i read this post my brain was somewhat confused it was kind of like looking through an old closet and seeing something used to love but have forgotten about an old toy a book or a piece of clothing at first the object looks a bit foreign but upon closer glance it becomes strikingly familiar and then you realize this was meant for me that was the feeling i got when i touched the ds 6.0 keyboard for the first time it was a feeling of coming home after a long trip and knowing that here i could finally be comfortable you

Channel: MusicalBasics

Views: 532,263

Keywords: hand size, piano, musicalbasics, alternate sized keyboards

Id: ZXlknI-Jc48

Length: 19min 13sec (1153 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 05 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/arcticwanderlust]

Hopefully it's a start of the change in the right direction. I'd gladly donate to a GoFundMe. Enough is enough!

[u/SrtaCuac]

Professional pianist here.

My hands are 8 inches or 20 centimetres, I can play octaves pretty comfortably and I can reach a ninth if both notes are black or whites keys - if one of them is white and the other one is black, I can't play it. I think other people with my hand size would have an even smaller hand span since mine are really flexible.

Only good point I can find in having small hands is being able to play in between the black keys, and this can be needed in a bit more modern repertoire like Debussy or Ravel. Pianists with larger hands but thin fingers are still able to do this, though.

In most cases if you reach an octave you're said you're ready to go. That's true while you're a beginner, but when you try to play more difficult repertoire problems start to show. I'm not talking about Rachmaninov or Liszt, who wrote for their own gigantic hands. It can be difficult to play a Beethoven sonata. The problem is not the extension of the chords, but the amount of movement you must do to reach the different keys, especially while playing really fast.

Some milimetres make a huge difference. In my case, it would be the difference between being able to play only the first movements of Grieg piano concerto, or being able to play the complete concerto. It's so sad I can't finish it just because of my hands aren't big enough to play the accompaniment at the right tempo, even when having a great leaping and chord technique.

And finally the injuries. You probably won't injure yourself if you play half an hour a day with small. You'll probably do if you have to face Chopin's etude op 25. n°10. You'd have to care for yourself a lot for not getting injured, have a great technique, take rests, and still would be suffering to play it, and meanwhile a bigger handed pianist could play it with half the effort assuming they have the proper technique. Is it fair?

I would definitely cry if I had a smaller sized keyboard. I just hope companies start to manufacture them, and give us small hand pianists an opportunity to play those pieces I can only dream I could play.

[u/spikylellie]

There's at least one narrow-key baby grand in London, which I've played, and it's a delight. The keyboard was made by Pinkham, but they are a very small company. It belongs to an acquaintance who's happy to let people try it.

I think there would be a lot less obvious nonsense talked on this subject if every professor of piano had experience of a keyboard - even a model - that is in in proportion to their hands as the standard keyboard is to the majority of their students. So that they could understand what they are actually asking their students to do.

[u/dikaiyang]

I feel so depressed after 0:44, my hands are smaller than the small female hands!!

[u/spikylellie]

This is a brilliant video, you did a great job.

[u/saturnianbliss]

Yall are missing the point: in the beginning he says that getting a sense of what relaxed hands feel like made him play regularly at the regular keyboard. I say this all the time here on this subreddit on videos where people say they can't reach a note: R E L A X. Start with being ok with not playing the right note immediately; trust your hands, trust the process, no force. It is completely surprising what that does to your reach.