Tag Archives: octaves

The Best Piano Exercises (Part 4) – Octaves

Welcome back to our continuing series of piano exercises. Today we will be focusing on developing your octave technique.

I remember growing up as a kid and watching my father Morton Estrin mortonestrin.com and being enthralled by the way he played octaves – I wanted to develop my technique to play like him and my other inspiration, Vladimir Horowitz. At the time my hands were simply too small to achieve the results I wanted but I kept practicing.

My hands even as a full grown adult never became very large. I’ve struggled my whole life developing strength in order to play octaves and large chords well. Today I’m going to share a few tips for how to improve your strength and octave technique.

If you can’t reach an octave I’m afraid this lesson wont be much help to you. You might grow into it over time. The good news is that if you can reach an octave at all, this lesson will help you develop stronger, faster octaves!

The secret to this technique, and octaves in general, is the hand position. The key is to develop an arch between your pinky and thumb equalizing the strength of your weaker pinky to your stronger thumb. Your other fingers should be up and out of the way. If you have time to watch the video included with this article it shows an excellent visual representation of this technique. The goal of this position is to generate an equal amount of force between the thumb and pinky finger – which will help greatly in developing strength to play octaves.

For octave technique you will want to rely on the arms to place the hands over the keys, not for any up-down motion. All up-down motion should come from the wrist. I have explained this technique a number of times before and it’s explained in detail in the video included with this article.

To perform the exercise, set your metronome to 60 and then play a C major scale at one note to the beat in octaves and play the notes only from your wrist using the arms to guide your hands over the correct keys. This might seem like an easy exercise but it must be done correctly in order to be effective.

As you progress through the exercise and feel more confident you can play two times on each note for each beat. As you become comfortable, add one extra note each to each beat until you reach your limit. As you play faster, be sure to keep your hands closer to the keys and lighten up to help increase your speed.

Play through this exercise every day and you will develop brilliant octaves!

Thanks again for joining me Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com (949) 244-3729

How to Play Legato Octaves – Piano Lessons

Developing a solid octave technique on the piano can be a great challenge. Many pianists want to learn how to play octaves legato (smoothly connected) instead of having them sound choppy and disconnected. There are instances where octaves should be played staccato, but there are times when octaves are meant to blend as seamlessly as possible. Today we are going to discuss some methods and techniques to help you achieve smooth legato octaves in your playing.

You might think that the pedal would be a great option. However, you shouldn’t depend upon the pedal alone to achieve connected octaves. As I’ve stated in the past, learning to play without the pedal, is a very valuable skill for your practice. The pedal should be used to enhance the music but not as a crutch to connect what you can connect with your hands.

There is a very simple technique for connecting octaves. The secret is in focusing on the notes you can connect and not trying to connect what you can’t. Instead of playing all your octaves with the first and fifth finger, try alternating the fourth and fifth finger for the top notes in the right hand and the bottom notes in the left hand. But how do you tell which fingers to alternate? It’s actually very simple; use your fifth finger on all the white keys and use your fourth finger for all the black keys.

In reality, you’re not actually connecting both notes on the octaves, but it creates a great illusion – even without the pedal!

If your hands are big enough you can utilize the third, fourth and fifth fingers with octaves.

The great thing about learning to play octaves this way is that not only does it apply to playing octaves legato, it’s a great way to play them staccato as well since you spread the work among more fingers.

I hope this was helpful and if you have any questions about this topic or any other, please email me Robert@LivingPianos.com for more information.