Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Today we are going to discover what is the most difficult scale to play on the piano. By the end of this article and video, you will be surprised at the answer!

When you are first learning scales, just figuring out the notes can be a daunting task. You look at a scale like B major with 5 sharps, and it’s tough to figure out. But when you start to play it, you discover something really interesting:

The thumbs in both hands play white keys at the same time.

Not only that, but the black keys are played with the other fingers in both hands. This is referred to as mirror fingering where both hands anchor on white keys with thumbs on the same notes, in this case B and E and the other fingers play the black keys. This makes it easier to play.

So, what about scales with a lot of flats – are they harder? Let’s take G-flat major which has 6 flats. There is certainly a lot of black ink on the page! You will discover that while there are 6 flats, there are only 5 black keys in a G-flat major scale. This is due to the fact that C-flat is a white key (the B key). Here again there is mirror fingering. However, in the B scale, the white keys in both hands occurred a half-step above (the very next key) the notes played with the thumb. The G-flat scale is slightly more challenging in that the first white key in the scale (C-flat) is a half step above the previous black key (B-flat), but the next white key (F) is a whole-step (2 keys) above the previous black key (E-flat). But at least you have the benefit of anchoring both thumbs at the same time whenever they play.

Next, we are going to look at a scale that you would think would be easier since it only has 2 sharps – D major. Here you have the challenge of having the thumbs both anchor together on D, but as you go up the scale, the right hand plays the thumb on G, but the left hand plays the thumb on A. So, you don’t have the benefit of mirror fingering where both thumbs play at the same time. This is somewhat more challenging to play.

So, what is the most difficult scale to play? Once you know all your scales, they are about equal in difficulty. However, there is one scale that presents challenges no other scales have, and that is the C major scale!

How can this be? It’s the first scale most people learn and it’s simple to learn because it’s all white keys. That’s exactly what makes it more challenging to master. You don’t have the benefit of having black keys to guide you.

You are faced with a sea of white keys!

There are no black keys to differentiate where you are in the scale. On top of that, you don’t have the benefit of mirror fingering where you anchor the thumbs on the same notes in both hands. I bet some of you are surprised, but it’s a fact that C major is the most difficult scale to play even though it may be easier to learn than other scales.

Incidentally, the resource for fingering of all the major and minor scales and arpeggios on the piano that the vast majority of pianists rely upon is:

Another Thought:

There are two major scales that don’t have any mirror fingering whatsoever. That is, the thumbs never play the same notes at all. Those scales are B-flat and E-flat. For that reason, it is arguable that those scales may be the most difficult.

Hanon: Sixty Studies for the Virtuoso Pianist

There is another school of thought that a small number of pianists adhere to which has mirror fingerings for all the scales. I would be interested in hearing from anyone who plays all scales with mirror fingering. Having learned all my scales and arpeggios as a young child, I couldn’t imagine relearning the fingering to them at this point any more than I could imagine typing on a more ergonomic keyboard where letters used most often were in the middle of the keyboard instead of the one we are all used to.

I hope this has been interesting for you and I look forward to comments on this presentation. This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729 Robert@LivingPianos.com

Arpeggios are simply broken chords. Scales and arpeggios form the foundation of technique, not just for the piano, but for virtually all musical instruments. I’ve talked about how to practice scales and arpeggios in the past. Today, I’m going to give you three ways of practicing arpeggios specifically. If you like this, I could probably give you 10 more ways of practicing them because there are many ways of practicing arpeggios.

Here are three good starters for you:

Let’s start with a basic C major chord which forms the foundation of a C major arpeggio. Since you’re going all the way up and down the keyboard with both hands, you have to deal with finger crossings. I suggest you reference Hanon – 60 Selected Studies for the Virtuoso Pianist. This is a resource for all the fingerings of all major and minor scales and arpeggios as well as exercises and additional materials. The first way to practice arpeggios is perhaps the most fundamental. I’ve talked about this before in videos and I’m going to recap this because it’s essential.

You must practice slowly first to develop independence of the fingers.

As you get faster, place the fingers closer to the keys to get speed and lightness. You want to use the metronome when practicing arpeggios and scales because the whole idea is to measure your playing because you want to achieve precision. You must strive for evenness in tone, touch and timing.

Of course you can practice arpeggios with different phrasing and dynamics. For now, I’m going to suggest you play them at a strong level always from the fingers. It won’t do any good to practice arpeggios or scales using your arms or wrists because as you go faster, they’re not going to be able to keep up. The whole idea is to develop the strength of your fingers. So, watch how you can approach arpeggios slowly. If you’re a beginner studying arpeggios, I recommend putting the metronome at 60 and going one note to the beat, then two notes to the beat, and finally playing at four notes to the beat. You can even do gradual metronome speeds raising a notch or two at a time if you run into difficulties going faster. There is a brief demonstration on the accompanying video on how to practice this way with the metronome.

Notice a couple of things. First of all, you want to avoid any up and down motion with the arms. Use only your fingers. Notice how you raise your fingers to achieve independence and strength. You get the feel of exactly where each key is. It provides an opportunity to dig into each note gaining security. Once you’re comfortable, you should do that at least four times before moving on any faster. Then you can go to two notes to the beat. Notice, as you get faster, the fingers must be closer to the keys. When transitioning to four notes to the beat, you want to have your arms almost floating in air just above the keys because they don’t have the strength to support the arms at great speed. At four notes to the beat there’s less motion of your fingers as well. They are kept very close to the keys. You must spend sufficient time at each speed. At one note to the beat, you might spend around five minutes mastering it. If you’re playing only an arpeggio at one note to the beat at 60, five minutes is a pretty long time! This helps you gain great strength and independence of the fingers.

So we’ve covered one way of practicing arpeggios which is essential. It think it’s probably one of the best ways to practice arpeggios. You may get to a stumbling block and get to a point where you know you can do one note, but getting to two notes or four notes to the beat proves to be very difficult. You’re wondering how you can get it any faster. Are there any shortcuts? I’m going to show you a couple!

One shortcut is to practice in chords. Here is how to do this: Delineate where the thumb crossings are and play two notes together, then play the thumbs. You can watch how to achieve this on the accompanying video. Once you are comfortable, you can do that at two notes to the beat. Doing four notes is probably too fast for this practice technique depending upon the tempo you choose You want to get it fluent so you get the sense of the thumb crossings which are essential for smooth transition of registers. Instead, of trying to go faster, try breaking up the inner notes quickly and land on the thumbs securely holding them longer so that you gain security of the thumb crossings in both hands. This helps you get the sense of how the thumbs anchor you versus the finger which hover over the other two notes of the chord. You must strive for evenness playing the inner notes cleanly.

Today, we are going to demonstrate some fundamental differences in American and European pianos. Naturally, there is a tremendous variance of pianos within Europe as well as in the United States. However, what we are going to show is how it is necessary to approach playing American and European pianos with dramatically different techniques in order to get the sound you are after out of them.

You will hear the beginning of Debussy Claire De Lune on the 9′ 2″ Petrof Concert Grand. Then you will hear the same section performed on a Steinway Model D Concert Grand.

Next, I will play the Debussy on the Petrof the same way I approached the keyboard on the Steinway. You will notice that the Petrof doesn’t require the same support of the keys. A more delicate approach is all that is required to get the sound out. Like a fine sports car, the piano responds to the most gentle motions. Playing on the Petrof with the technique utilized previously on the Steinway creates a crass, overblown performance.

Next, I play the Debussy on the Steinway with the technique utilized on the Petrof. It results in a lifeless sound that lacks projection.

Each instrument has unique responses to touch. You must approach every piano in a unique manner in order to achieve the sound you are after. Even the room acoustics play a large part in the technique you must use in order to achieve the desired sound.

I am also a French hornist.

There is a parallel with American French horn playing versus European hornists.

Generally, in the U.S., people play larger bore horns with bigger mouthpieces than in Europe. More than that, American horn players like myself tend to play more on the F-horn side of the instrument rather than the B-flat side as European hornists do. The thumb valve adds around 3 feet of tubing to the horn! So, European horn players have a more open sound and an elegance whereas American French horn sound tends to be bigger and fatter.

The same is true of American pianos compared to European pianos. American pianos require more arm weight which is analogous to using more breath which is necessary on larger French horns. While European pianos have an open, clear sound and respond to smaller gradations of touch and require a more refined approach than American pianos.

A lot of people have noticed that I have lost weight. In the past, I have gone up and down in weight which I know is not very healthy. But lately, I feel great and can go hours without eating, yet retaining energy. Musicians are typically very busy and it’s hard to have enough time to eat!

On a recent trip to New York to hear my student Bijan Taghavi play his senior recital at The Manhattan School of Music, I discovered that a lot of the music students there do what I’ve been doing which is:

Intermittent Fasting – doing all your eating within a limited number of hours of the day, say from 9 or 10 in the morning until 6 or 7 at night

You may have heard about the:

Keto Diet – basically, you stop eating carbohydrates, particularly refined carbohydrates, but eat lots of vegetables. You even avoid eating healthy carbohydrates like potatoes, rice and bread. In a few days your metabolism changes and you don’t get the big swings of hunger and energy throughout the day. So you can go long periods of time without eating and maintain energy and clarity.

If you’re healthy and want to lose weight, and your doctor says it’s O.K., I recommend it. It’s been great for me!

This is a really interesting question and it brings to mind a video I made years ago demonstrating how the pedals interact with tone and techniques that add sustain to the tone of the piano by utilizing the pedals. If you push down the sustain pedal after you’ve played a note, you can enhance the tone after the initial attack. You can also depress the una corda pedal (soft pedal) which shifts the action so only two of the three strings are struck directly by the hammer for each note which makes the attack softer and creates a more sustained tone. By using these two techniques in conjunction with one another, you can achieve a very sustained tone. But what about just using the soft pedal alone? Is that ever done?

Here’s an interesting fact for you. Way back when the first piano was developed by Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1600, he had sort of a una corda pedal. It wasn’t like a modern type, but indeed he had a mechanism on his early pianos that could provide a softer tone. However, that piano didn’t have a sustain pedal! Later on in Mozart’s era, the early pianos had a lever that could be operated with the knee that did the same thing as the sustain pedal on modern pianos. You could combine changes of registration achieved by engaging felt on the strings, along with the sustain lever, thereby softening and sustaining the tone. This is like on a modern piano combining the sustain pedal along with the soft pedal. For example, in the second movement of the Mozart sonata K330 in C major; I always love to take the una corda pedal in the minor section. I use the sustain pedal along with the una corda pedal to achieve a soft, singing sound.

If you’re playing Baroque music which predated the invention of the piano, composers wrote for various keyboard instruments including the harpsichord, clavichord, virginal as well as others. These instruments had no sustain pedal. Yet there were changes of sound with registrations which engaged different sets of strings. This is why many people believe that you should not use the sustain pedal in Baroque music for the reason that it wasn’t on any of the keyboard instruments of the time that composers like Bach and Scarlatti were writing music for. So this is one instance where there is a good case for using the una corda pedal without using the sustain pedal. You can hear the change of color on the accompanying video which demonstrates engaging the una corda for a change of tone. Indeed it is possible to use just the una corda pedal without necessarily combining it with the sustain pedal as is usually the case.

Today you are going to get a glimpse in the accompanying video into our studio where we record our videos! Starting out in the control room, you will hear a brief snippet of a recording project for a film score we recorded this weekend. It is a documentary which features ragtime music. Through some creative equalization and other techniques, we reproduced the sound of a piano going through a 1930’s radio! The piano was recorded on my new prototype which provides a virtual concert grand experience which I will demonstrate briefly for you. As you can hear, it sounds like a first class concert grand! It’s funny that we downgraded the audio experience to 1930’s technology for the film!

Moving into the performance room, you see grand pianos, microphones, lights and the equipment we use to record videos. The acoustics are dialed in with bass traps in the corners to avoid a muddy sound, while keeping reflections for natural reverberation.

Recording has been a passion of mine since childhood. My father had professional recording equipment in his teaching studio growing up. I would get his hand-me-down equipment which I played with as a young child. Eventually, I got into recording music both in the studio and on location for fun and later professionally.

I also had the good fortune of attending my father’s recording sessions from a young age. The Connoisseur Society Recordings from then were state-of-the-art and hold up well on CD today. In fact there was an artistry to these recordings that is quite rare as you can hear on some of these links on YouTube:

We have a great show today with special guest, Scott Houston; The Piano Guy! A lot of you may know Scott from his many appearances on PBS television. Scott is the perfect person for this series because he has educated countless people all over the world in how to play piano by ear, playing with chords, and dealing with popular styles of music. My background is primarily in classical music. So we’re going to have a real treat for you. There will be tips on both sides for people who play by ear and people who have never tried to play by ear.

The first thing to consider is being able to play popular songs.

Why do you need to play by ear in order to play popular music? Popular songs oftentimes are first conceived by jamming together and later on after the record is produced, somebody goes and transcribes it into sheet music. If you ever try to decipher the sheet music, often times it just doesn’t sound quite right because it’s not the original. Also consider that often, sheet music is just a piano/vocal arrangement where the original was a whole band. So it doesn’t always translate well.

So there is a good place for being able to play by ear or to pick something up and make your own arrangement. People who have traditional classical training may feel a need to see the written score in order to play it. A lead sheet which has the melody line and the chord symbols allow you the freedom to play stylistically correct. It’s not like classical music where the original manuscript is the complete work. In the case of pop songs, Taylor Swift, for instance, may write a tune and by the time it gets out on a piece of sheet music you’re reading, a staff arranger may have produced the sheet music after the record was produced. What Taylor Swift may have done, was to write a melody line and chord changes. That’s the DNA of the song. Arrangers, producers, and musicians may have fleshed out the rest.

There are a few intrinsic piano parts that should be played verbatim if you want them to sound like the recording. The other 95% may just require comping chords that highlight the melody line. By learning to build upon the essential chord structure, it frees you up to sound more authentic than the sheet music in many instances. What makes it even more complicated is that sheet music is usually written with the melody line contained within the piano part. Occasionally you’ll get sheet music that doesn’t have the vocal line in it. It just has the accompaniment which is appropriate when accompanying a singer. In this case, it doesn’t work at all as a piano piece. The opposite is also true. If you’re trying to accompany a singer, you don’t want to double every one of the notes the singer is singing. This is an essential point. It’s 180 degrees opposite when you’re accompanying someone compared to playing a solo on the piano.

The next reason to play by ear is to be able to improvise.

Feeling like you absolutely must read notes to be able to play anything on a piano will keep you from the fun of ever being able to improvise. Using a lead sheet is a terrific way because after all; pop, jazz, rock, and country players use lead sheets most of the time for the melody and basic chord structure rather than have all the notes written out. To give you an extreme example, I’ve seen accomplished classical musicians who can’t even play happy birthday because they have never tried to play by ear! It’s totally alien to them. Playing from a lead sheet and learning chord changes is the crawling and walking before you learn to run in the world of improvisation. Improvisation isn’t a wildly free, play anything, anytime sort of thing for people. What improvisation is most often, is creating a melody line while playing over the chord changes. You’ve got to know the chord changes to a tune or you really can’t improvise. By just doing that, it may provide the foundation you need. Learning chords and learning to play from lead sheets creates the foundation that very naturally leads into improvising. Because it’s not black ink on paper, doesn’t mean it’s not music. Written notation is nothing more than a documentation of music. Music is what we play. It’s the sound we make that’s the music. So, sheet music is nothing more than a recording of music.

It’s a tough thing sometimes to get people who have had nothing but traditional lessons to accept that what you’re playing might not be exactly what is written. Something that is missed in classical circles is that almost all the great composers were improvisers, but we only have the recordings on the paper because there was no audio recording back then. So the score is elevated to the point where people don’t realize that improvisation has always been an essential component of classical music. Many if not most of the great composers were prolific improvisers!

The last of the three benefits of playing by ear is instant gratification.

Most adults who are taking piano lessons don’t plan on doing it for a living or making a career out of it. They’re just wanting to have fun playing the piano. They want to sit down behind this piece of furniture they’ve been dusting for the last 20 years and play something! For that reason, it can be a phenomenally faster route to learn to play three chords which can take about five minutes. By doing that, they’ve got the chord changes to probably 70 or 80,000 songs! This isn’t to suggest that that’s all you ever want to do by any means. But it can be a great way to get someone to experience gratification through playing the piano. It gives an incentive to want to keep going.

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

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

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

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