Tag Archives: piano lessons

The Secret of Rounded Fingers

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you the secret of rounded fingers. If you studied piano, you probably had teachers who said you must round your fingers and make them into a ball. But that can be painful! So why am I telling you to use rounded fingers? Well, there are different ways of approaching rounded fingers. I’m going to show you the correct way, which takes zero effort, and I’m going to explain why it’s so important in your piano playing. And I’m going to give you examples of it. The first example I’m going to give is the famous Mozart K 545 C Major Sonata. I’m going to explain where the rounded fingers really come into play and why it’s so important for you.

Using rounded fingers is particularly helpful when playing trills.

Why are rounded fingers necessary to be able to execute trills? Think about this. You have three different finger joints. If you only use one joint, that’s a lot of work for that one joint. But you have two other joints. If you use all your joints, you divide the load among many more joints. It’s much easier than moving a whole finger from just your knuckle. That’s the main reason. But how do you do this without stressing? The idea of holding a ball is a terrible analogy.

You never want to be in a position that takes any effort to maintain.

I’m going to repeat that. Don’t go into a hand position that takes effort to maintain. You might think, well, how can you possibly be in a position that’s rounded like that without any effort? You just drop your limp hands straight down toward the keyboard, and let your hands completely relax on the keys. Your hands will naturally be in a rounded position. And it takes absolutely no effort to maintain because your hands naturally go into that position. Try it on your piano. Without any effort at all, just go down, and you’ll be in that rounded position. Isn’t that remarkable? What are the key places where this is really handy? Well, there are several actually, and I’m going to show you. For one thing, you have a short trill right at the beginning of this Mozart sonata. If you were to try to do that with flat fingers, it would be cumbersome. Your fingers are too big and heavy. It’s much easier with rounded fingers. With flat fingers, it’s all but impossible. By the way, three and one are your strongest trill fingers. I know a lot of you like to use three and two. Those are good too. But three and one are even stronger.

You always must know exactly how many notes you’re playing in a trill.

If you don’t know how many notes you are playing in a trill, you might end on the wrong note. You need to know exactly how many notes you’re playing, and the way to do that is to practice slowly. I play triplets in the long trill before the repeat sign which is also found just before the end of the movement. Now, some of you might be tempted to play sixteenth notes there. But when you play up to speed, that’s a lot of notes to play. So, you may find triplets work much better. Find a number of notes in your trills that works for you. You don’t have to play a lot of notes in trills, but you must have trills you can execute faithfully and repeat cleanly. So remember this technique of using rounded fingers for ornamentation. Try it in your playing any time you have any kind of ornamentation or any quick playing at all, for that matter. Your rounded fingers can really come in handy to execute ornamentation. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Why You Must Know The Perfect Authentic Cadence

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about the power of the perfect authentic cadence. Have you ever heard of this before? Well, I’m going to show you way more than that today! And what you’re going to learn here today is going to help you with your sight-reading, memorization of music, and improvisation. It’s that basic and important. It’s unbelievable. I’m surprised I have not done this video before because it’s so important.

What is a perfect authentic cadence?

In its simplest form, authentic cadence is basically just a five to one with some passing tones.

Cadence 1

But what I want to show you today is even more valuable. It’s essentially how to establish a key with primary chords. What are your primary chords? Primary chords are your major chords. If you go up your scale and play chords on all 7 of the scale degrees, you have major chords on one, four, and five. The other chords are secondary chords. Your two chord, three chord, and six chord are minor chords. And your seventh chord is the one diminished chord, the outlier. So you have the one, four, five which are primary chords

Seventh chords are as follows. I7 and IV7 are major seventh chords. II7, III7 and VI7 are minor seventh chords. The VII7 is a half-diminished seventh chord. Why half-diminished? Because it is a diminished triad with a minor seventh.

And the V7 is the strongest chord of all – a major triad with a minor 7th which creates the dominant 7th chord. This chord is so powerful because it can establish the key with just this one chord. So here’s a great voicing for your basic four-part perfect voicing, resolutions, note leadings, and distance between all the notes. It follows all the classic rules of harmony.

Cadence 2

Why do we have these rules?

We have these rules because they sound good! That’s why Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, and all the great composers wrote utilizing this basic structure in their music. Musicians analyzed all their great music and realized the truths behind it—the gems of truth that date back to Bach chorales. This basic chord progression is I, IV, I6/4, V7 I. You have nice voice leading and good spacing between the bass and the tenor, because it sounds better that way. Notice with the V7, it has the root, the seventh, and the third, but there’s no fifth. (It’s missing D.) Why would that be? It achieves better resolution. Doubling the root and leaving out the fifth can help to avoid the four going up to five because it resolves better going down to three (F resolving downward to E).

Why is this chord progression so basic and intrinsic to music?

Knowing all your primary chords and how to establish a key is enlightening in your music because it intrinsically makes you understand the harmonic underpinnings of all the music you play, read, or improvise. You can do this same chord progression in all major and minor keys. Once you get comfortable with all your keys, you can start expanding your repertoire of chords. A substitution for a four chord is a two chord in the first inversion, a II6.

Cadence 3

Or you can spice it up even further with what’s called a Neapolitan sixth. What’s that? A Neapolitan sixth is like the II6, except it’s a major triad built on the flatted second degree of the scale. It’s almost like your II6 chord, but with two flatted notes. So you get a different flavor.

Cadence Neapolitan

You can get to the point where you can modulate using a V7 of another key.
For example, if you used a D7, D is the five seven of G.

Cadence 5

And instantly, you can modulate to G major! Start in C major, go to the D7, the dominant seventh, (the major triad with a minor seventh), and there you are in G major! And if you want to go to F major, the C7 (dominant 7th chord) brings you to F major.

The dominant seventh, the V7, is the secret to modulation.

Any time the key changes, the dominant seventh chord is pivotal. The V7 chord is almost always responsible for changing keys in music. Sometimes a diminished seventh can accomplish it too, but there’s nothing stronger than a dominant seventh chord for bringing you to a new key in music.

What is a dominant seventh chord?

A dominant seventh chord is a seventh chord built on the fifth scale degree. Build a chord on the fifth scale degree, (which in C major would be G B D F) and you get a major triad and a minor seventh. It’s the only place that exists in a scale. You can build seventh chords starting on any other note of the scale, and only the V7 has this arrangement.

I7 is major, II7 is minor, II7 is minor, IV7 is major, and V7 is the major triad with a minor seventh, it is the powerful dominant seventh chord. VI7 is minor, and VII7 is half diminished. Why half? Because it has a diminished triad and a minor seventh.

So the power of the dominant seventh can’t be stressed enough. For example, when you’re playing a sonata movement, they almost always modulate to the dominant (the key five scale degrees above the key of the piece). How does it modulate to the dominant in the exposition? Typically, it uses a dominant seventh chord! There’s modulation in so much of your music and the pivotal chord that gets you there is the V7, the dominant seventh chord, a major triad with a minor seventh

What is modulation?

Modulation is changing keys. For example if you start with a piece that has no sharps or flats in the key signature, then suddenly you have F sharps all over the place; you’re probably in G major! That’s an example of modulation. What gets you there? The D dominant seventh chord, which is the dominant of G (the fifth note of the G major scale).

So try to play this chord progression in all keys! I promise that you’ll have tremendous benefits in your playing. You’ll understand your music on a deeper level. You’ll be able to learn music more quickly, read music more effectively, and improvise music with more fluidity. Try it out for yourself! Let me know how it works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Sheet Music Download for this lesson

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Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

The Power of Musical Snippets in Your Practice

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about the power of musical snippets in your practice. What you’re going to learn today is one of the most valuable techniques you could ever use in your piano practice. The amazing thing about it is that you can use this technique with almost all of your music! It’s incredibly valuable, especially for something fast. I’m going to play the beginning of the B minor Scherzo of Chopin. It’s a little rusty, so I can practice it in front of you. You can see for yourself how this technique works in the accompanying video.

The technique of fast playing is sometimes dramatically different from the technique of slow playing.

When you’re working on a fast section like this, you could do the obvious thing and put the metronome on a slow speed and do metronome speeds to work it up. But the problem with that approach is that you might hit a wall where you can’t get any faster. Why is that? Because the technique of fast playing is sometimes dramatically different from the technique of slow playing. This is particularly obvious on a wind instrument because the breaths come in different places. It’s a whole different experience. Even on the piano, fast playing feels different from slow playing. You try to get faster and faster with the metronome, but sometimes you just can’t get any faster.

I’m going to show you a completely different technique using musical snippets.

Just play the smallest possible unit that makes sense to you. Take a tiny number of notes. You can just take the first two notes, then take the next two, and then put them together. Now you might not want to go note by note. You might instead consider note groups that fall under your hands. Some snippets are basically broken chords. You want to get over the next note group as soon as you hit the new hand position; otherwise, you’ll never gain speed. So as you finish one note group, you get your hand in position over the next note group.

You can work through your music this way, gaining confidence and playing with the technique you’re going to eventually use when you play the whole piece.

This technique is great for fast music because you’re playing up to tempo, but you’re just playing a few notes at a time. The number of notes that fit under your hand at a time is usually the right number. Or, you could take even less. Let’s say you’re playing four notes, and it’s not even. Try just playing two or three notes. Try this in your practice, particularly with fast music. It could be almost any piece of music. Just practice little snippets, little groups of notes that fit under your hand at a time, and get over the next position of the next notes that are under your fingers. Work through pieces this way, and you won’t believe the progress you can make when you hit a brick wall practicing with progressively faster metronome speeds. But it’s important to go back and forth. Sometimes metronome speeds are the way to go, and other times using musical snippets can give you an epiphany that takes you to that next level. If one doesn’t work, try the other. You can go back and forth. Let me know how it works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

How to Start From Anywhere in Your Music

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today, I’m going to show you how to start anywhere in your music. To have effective practice, you must be able to start anywhere. Let’s say you’re playing a piece of music. You mess up somewhere, and you keep starting at the beginning. Maybe the next time you get it, but you haven’t really solved the underlying weakness that caused that problem in the first place.

Being able to start where the correction is made is vital.

You want to be able to start where the correction is made, but sometimes it’s really hard to even find that place. I want to demonstrate this with a piece that’s difficult to start in the middle because it’s counterpoint. I’m going to use Bach’s Invention No. 1 in C major. Watch the video to see the demonstration! This piece does divide itself into some macro-sections that I can articulate for you. Suppose you have an issue in the middle of a section. So you decide to just start the whole section again. Whether you get it again or not, it doesn’t really matter because you still have the same odds moving forward of getting it or not getting it. Just finding the exact place is a big challenge! You must read your score and identify where it is. Now you know where to start, but you can’t start there. It seems totally foreign.

The reason it’s hard to start in the middle of a section is that you don’t know what fingering to use.

When you’re starting in the middle, it’s hard to figure out what fingering to use. So here’s the tip. Go back to a place you can start from. When you get to where the issue is, stop and pay close attention to what fingers are on what notes in each hand. Then you lock it in, and you can start from there. Now you can make the correction and get it solidified by playing through the passage a number of times. Then you go back to the beginning of that macro section and connect it several times until it is smooth.

To recap: Step one is: Find where the correction is. Step two: Go back to a place you can start from before that place. Step three: Lock in what fingers you use to start in that measure or phrase so you can effectively start there. Without this method, you get there, and it’s almost like you’re reading the music for the first time! It seems totally unfamiliar. Have you ever had that experience where you almost feel like you don’t even know the piece when you try to start in the middle? Your fingers know where to go, but you can’t solve the underlying weakness because you can’t start right at that particular spot. Well, now I’m giving you the tools to start from anywhere in any piece!

This is the way to have effective, productive practice!

Zero in on the places that need work and start from there. Solve those issues first, then correct them with the whole macro section. Try this in your practice! I guarantee that you will have a boost in productivity like you’ve never seen before! Let us know how it works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

How to Make Your Melody Float on Water

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to show you how to make your melody float on water. What am I talking about? You want to be able to have your melody soar above a bed of rippling currents. The accompaniment in the left hand is like the rippling waves, with the melody in the right hand floating above. I’m going to tell you how to achieve this!

You must find really great fingering for the left hand in order to achieve a delicate legato.

The way to discover good fingering is by practicing without the pedal. Support the melody in the right hand with a lot of arm weight, so the melody can be above the accompaniment, and then play with a very fluid legato in the left hand. By playing without the pedal, you can hear what’s involved in this process. You’ll hear the fluidity of the left hand. You have to find fingering that enables that kind of legato.

The other side of this is that you must have a buoyant melody that rises above the accompaniment.

Why is this so difficult? For two reasons. First of all, high notes don’t last very long on the piano compared to low notes. And on top of that, you have more notes in the left hand. The left hand is faster than the right hand, so it’s a double whammy. So you must create an angularity in your balance where the melody is much louder than the accompaniment. But how can you achieve it without making it sound harsh?

The secret is to transfer the weight of the arm smoothly from note to note.

Instead of articulating each separate note, use the weight of the arm to smoothly transfer from key to key achieving a fluid line, like the breath of a singer or the bow of a string player, so each note floats to the next. You can never achieve a smooth line by calculating from note to note. It will end up sounding calculated! When you transfer the weight of the arm smoothly from key to key, you get a fluid line. By doing this, you can play with tremendous energy without getting a harsh sound. Remember, the piano is a percussion instrument. When you’re playing a beautiful melody, how can you make it sound smooth? Use the weight of the arm in the right hand and a smooth left hand that’s very beautiful, but underplayed. Find a fingering where you can play that extreme legato.

Practice incessantly without the pedal so you can find the fingering that enables this.

That is the secret! Find great fingering in the left hand, practice without the pedal, and use the weight of the arm in order to get a smooth line. Try it in your playing! Let us know how it works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

How to Practice Bach: C Minor Prelude Well Tempered Clavier BK I

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today, I’m going to show you how to practice Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Minor from book one of his Well-Tempered Clavier. First, I’m going to play it for you. Then I want to zero in on the fast section. The whole thing is 16th notes, and then just towards the end it gets fast. It’s a great prelude. I want you to hear it first, and then I’m going to show you a bunch of ways you can practice this prelude. Stay until the end, because the last technique I’m going to show you is the ultimate technique!

Some people spend countless hours learning exercises.

Instead of learning tedious exercises, you might as well use music to develop your playing. That’s exactly what I’m going to show you how to do here. I’m going to show you a whole bunch of ways you can practice this prelude. These methods are really valuable. It kind of turns this prelude into different exercises that have great value, not just for playing this piece but for developing your technique.

First, let’s talk about the obvious things you can do.

Turn the metronome on. Find a comfortable speed where you can play it accurately. At first, when you’re playing slowly, articulate each note with gently rounded, raised fingers. This way, you get precise release of notes so the notes don’t blur together. Take the tempo up one notch at a time. As you get faster, make the fingers more gently rounded, and stay close to the keys. Of course, you don’t raise your fingers when playing fast. It’s only a way to help you practice the release of notes when playing slowly. When you get faster, lighten up and stay close to the keys.

Another handy way of working on this is with different articulations.

For example, try playing with staccato fingers. Or you could play one hand staccato and the other hand legato. There are also different accents that you could use. You could do four-note groups. You can play with different rhythms. You can play with different dynamics in the two hands. Naturally, there are other things you can do—other rhythms or accents. Some people might even want to accent the offbeats. See the video for examples of each of these techniques!

You could just spend hours, days, weeks, months, or even years with this one prelude, turning it into hundreds of different exercises!

You can use these different practice techniques with your music instead of learning hundreds of different exercises, and you get the same value. Plus, you get the added benefit of learning a piece inside and out as a reward for your hard work.

As I promised, here is the ultimate practice technique.

I love this practice method because it really trains your hand and your brain to be able to play this piece by practicing different note groups. First, play through the section broken up into four-note groups. Then, when you get comfortable going through the whole section that way, you can practice playing groups of eight notes. And then you can play groups of 16 notes at a time. You can focus on sections that need work, and identify the precise group of notes that need to be solidified.

Zero in on the parts that need work.

You don’t necessarily have to go through the entire section with all these different methods I’m showing you. Maybe you can play a good deal of it cleanly, but you keep missing one part. Try the various practice techniques on that part. Zero in where you need it. You shouldn’t just do an equal amount of practice on all of it because you might not need equal amounts on all of it. Now, at the beginning, you may very well need to work on all of it. That’s why a great starting point is playing it with the metronome with raised fingers, articulating everything, and making sure you get it all clean. Do some metronome speeds just to get it under your fingers, then strategically use these practice methods. That way, you can take the parts that are weak and make them strong. Build note groups upon note groups, and strategically use all these different techniques to help you master not just this Bach prelude but any piece of music! It will help you develop your technique on the piano. I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For the sheet music for all the exercises mentioned and demonstrated, please visit: https://a2f360.myshopify.com/products/bach