Tag Archives: playing piano

Why You Must Accept Your Limitations

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why you must accept your limitations. I don’t want to bring you down. As a matter of fact, it’s quite the opposite! Anybody who’s accomplished anything great, it’s because they accept their own limitations. You look at people who are masters at any craft or art, and you think everything must just come easily to them. What you don’t see is the hard work that goes into it. I can’t tell you how many times I have students who think they’re the only ones for whom piano is so hard. It’s actually really hard for everyone!

Different things are difficult for different people.

Some people excel at some things, and some people excel at other things. But the key to being able to accomplish anything is to accept where you’re at and what it takes to advance. And it takes way more than you think it does. This goes for everything. When you see a beautiful painting that’s absolutely photorealistic, you’re in awe of the quality of the work. You can’t imagine how it’s done. You might think the artist is just a genius and it comes naturally to them. But if you lived with that person, and watched them work, you’d realize the countless hours they spent working and crafting that painting to look like that. It doesn’t just happen. They accepted what it took to create that masterpiece. The same is true in your piano practice.

The learning process takes time and dedication.

It’s very easy to dismiss things and think, “I should be able to get this. Why can’t I get this?”. It’s because you’re human! I have a video that hasn’t come out yet. The editing has been mind-bogglingly difficult because I wanted to put the score in the whole video. I sat down for a while one day and practiced a piece that I had very briefly studied years and years ago. I just showed how I practice. It’s a Mozart fantasie, and there’s a fast section in there. I practiced just that part of it. It’s about a 40-minute practice session. I knew it was too long for anybody to watch.
So I have parts going in fast-motion. It shows how long I take to learn something—to really get it under my fingers and into my head. Just because I can play all this music from memory doesn’t mean that it just comes easily to me, It’s a meticulous process.

You can see for yourself how I learn a new piece of music!

I have a video I did years ago. I flipped open the Chopin Mazurkas randomly, found a mazurka I’d never even heard before, and started memorizing it. You can watch that here. You’ll see what it takes. So don’t beat yourself up! Accept that this is what it takes. Then you decide if it’s worth the effort or not. But to think that it should come easily—you’re not going to get anywhere with that type of thinking. You’ll just get frustrated, and you’ll think less of yourself. Just accept your limitations, and from there, you can accomplish almost anything! That’s the message for today. I hope it’s inspiring for you and not discouraging. Let me know 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

5 Ways to Develop Your Sight-Reading

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to give you five ways to develop your sight-reading skills. Have you ever watched somebody who’s a good sight-reader play a piece of music they’ve never seen before, and it almost sounds like a performance, and wished you could do that? There are countless reasons why sight-reading is a joy if you can do it. In high school, I was a pretty advanced player, but my sight-reading was at an elementary level. I have a video about that. But today I’m going to give you practical tips that you can use to develop your sight-reading skills.

1. Choose pieces that are at your reading level.

I know it can be tempting. You hear a piece of music, and you want to play it so badly. So you try to read through it, and it’s such a struggle that it’s discouraging. More than that, you can’t really get a feel for the piece because you’re stopping and starting so many times. Accept the level that you are at and read pieces at that level. If you read enough of them, you will gain from the experience. Over time, you will grow and be able to read more complex scores.

TIPS FOR IMPROVING YOUR SIGHT-READING – SIGHT-READING PART 2

2. Play slowly enough.

You want to hear the piece the way it’s meant to be heard. Maybe the beginning isn’t that hard for you, so you take it at a comfortable tempo. But then you’re slowing down, speeding up, and stopping, and you really don’t get a feel for the piece. If you play slowly enough, it’s much more valuable. Even though it might seem frustrating at first, you will gain much more from the experience.

3. Have some pieces that are reading pieces.

I don’t know how many of you are like I was, but I used to memorize all my pieces. When it came to sight-reading, I just couldn’t do it. Well, an answer to that is to have some pieces that are reading pieces. Maybe there are pieces that you can’t really sight-read. You can read parts of it, but other parts are a struggle. Take those pieces and work on the parts you can’t read. Go through them, practicing hands separately, taking little phrases at a time, and get those sections so that you can read through them. You make it a reading piece that you never memorize. You always read it. You use the score, and you gain the confidence to be able to play the piece with the music. This is incredibly important if you ever want to play chamber music, because you’re not going to memorize every single thing that you want to read.

4. Look at groups of notes.

When you’re reading English, you’re not looking at letters; you’re looking at words. It’s the same thing with music. You don’t look at each individual note. You look at chords and clusters of notes, and you grab the meaning of the notes so you understand the essential structure. Instead of just painstakingly looking at each note, try to recognize patterns and intervals so you can grab groups of notes.

IMPROVE YOUR SIGHT-READING BY LOOKING AT CHUNKS OF MUSIC

5. Play with other musicians.

This is the most important tip of all, and this was my epiphany with reading. This is the way you truly learn to become a good sight-reader. Why? When you’re playing by yourself, when you miss something, it’s only natural to stop and make corrections. You’re programmed to do that in your practice. It’s almost impossible to keep going when you’re missing notes. But when you’re playing with other people, you have no choice but to keep going. So you learn to make that connection among the three aspects of what you see, what you hear, and what you feel.

THE 3 ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF SIGHT-READING

If you have any other tips for sight-reading that aren’t covered here, please leave them in the comments for other people. I know this is such an important subject for people. We all want to be better readers, and anything that helps is welcome. 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 Your Room Can Affect Your Piano: A Tale of Two Pianos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how a room can affect your piano. This is an incredible story that I would love to share with you. My sister is also a pianist, and a couple of years ago, we were playing a two-piano concert together. At that time, my sister lived in the Cleveland area, where she still lives. But we were in Southern California. So we didn’t get to rehearse together until she came to California.

At the time, I had two spectacularly great Baldwin SF-10 seven-foot pianos.

While they were both great pianos, there was one that was clearly the better instrument. One of them was a high-gloss black. The other one was satin black. The high-gloss piano was a magical instrument. The other one was very good, but that high-gloss black was my go-to instrument. I loved playing that piano. Since she was coming and we wanted to rehearse in advance of the concert that was going to be at the nearby Bowers Museum, I decided to go ahead and move the two pianos into our recording studio, which was right next door. Here’s where it gets really interesting.

After the pianos were moved, I sat down with them, and I couldn’t believe it, but they switched!

The great piano was now the satin SF-10! The high-gloss one was good but didn’t have the same character and warmth as the other one. It was the same two pianos, but in two different rooms. One was clearly the better piano in one room, but as soon as they went to the other room, because of the different acoustics, it was exactly the opposite. They were both still fine pianos, beautifully regulated, nicely voiced, and in tune. But one was so much nicer and warmer, and it was the opposite of what it was before. So how does this impact you?

Where you place your piano in your home can make a tremendous difference in how it sounds and even how it feels.

Did you know that a piano with a brighter sound can feel like it has an easier action? Sometimes a piano can have a heavy action, and yet it doesn’t feel heavy because it has a bright sound. The opposite can also be true. Sometimes a piano has normal action weight, but if it’s voiced on the warm side, you have to work more to get the tone out, so it feels heavy. Room acoustics can play the same tricks on you—these psychoacoustic effects. You can try treating your room, and that can actually make a big difference. You could put a rug under your piano or hang curtains to deaden the sound. Or to liven up a room, you could put a flat piece of wood or even plexiglass under your piano to get the sound from underneath the piano to reflect out because half the sound of a piano comes out from the bottom.

Think about the challenge of trying to buy a piano.

Going from showroom to showroom, or even within one store, going from room to room, how do you know what these pianos really sound like? It’s like the situation I described—how these two pianos swapped. Which one was the great one, and which one was the good one. There is no easy answer to this question, but it’s something to be aware of.

Think about what room to put your piano in, how to treat the room, and where to place the piano in the room.

I’ll give you one more example. I was once in a recording studio with a vaulted ceiling. There was a piano in the room, and we tried moving the piano around. My natural inclination was to put the piano where the ceiling was low so it would project into the room. But it’s exactly the opposite! Putting the piano in the high ceiling part of the room and projecting into the lower part, in that case, sounded much better. So there’s a lot to consider. Acoustics is both a science and an art. The acoustics of a room have a tremendous effect on the sound of your piano. Share your experiences with pianos and acoustics! Have you ever moved your piano and noticed a change in the sound or feel of the instrument? Let us know 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

What Happens to Old Pianos?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is: What happens to old pianos? I’m going to tell you right now that what I’m going to share with you today is very disturbing. For those of you who love piano like I do, seeing what I’m going to show you is really heartbreaking.

There are some companies, like Living Pianos, that restore old pianos.

Most companies that restore pianos specialize in Steinway and maybe a couple of other brands. Used Steinways command more money than other brands because everybody sees them on the concert stage. Everyone knows they are high-quality pianos. But most people don’t know about other high-quality piano brands that were around in the United States when there were hundreds of companies making pianos in this country. And many of them were great instruments.

The problem is that restoring a piano is extremely expensive.

Many top piano restorers get between $30,000 and $40,000 to completely rebuild a piano to make it like new again. As a matter of fact, I took a personal tour of Steinway. The CEO and all the people treated me like royalty there. They gave me a grand tour of the entire facility. And when we passed their rebuilding shop, they said, “It’s a lot easier to build pianos than to rebuild them.” Pianos that have never had any work done to them are actually easier to rebuild than pianos where some work has been done along the way because you don’t know the specifications of the matching parts.

There are resources for old pianos, such as PianoAdoption.com.

PianoAdoption.com is a great place to go if you have a piano you just want to get rid of and you don’t have the heart to see it go to the dump, which is what happens to many old pianos, unfortunately. This is something that happens on a regular basis all around the country. It’s heartbreaking to see what happens when pianos need more work than they’re worth. I have a friend who has a piano business. He revealed to me that this past year, believe it or not, he had to trash 170 pianos of his that he had in storage because there was no way he was going to be able to restore them.

You actually have to pay money when you have an old piano that you can’t get rid of.

You would think somebody would want these instruments. If you have a piano that looks gorgeous, somebody might want it just for the furniture. And there are some pianos that can be restored, thank goodness. But for every piano we take in to restore, sadly, we have to turn down dozens that just aren’t worth it because of compromises in the fundamental structure. There’s only so much you can do to bring life to older pianos. Some are excellent candidates, and you can get stellar results. Others, you just can’t get life out of them anymore. Sadly, those pianos end up in the landfill. Sorry to bring you down with this. But the good news is that we and other businesses restore pianos so that we have these treasures from when the United States was the epicenter of the piano industry. Unlike today, when only about 2500 pianos are built each year in North America. That’s why it is our mission to bring life back to old pianos and to spread the joy of the piano to you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Supplemental Content:
New York Times Article

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/arts/music/for-more-pianos-last-note-is-thud-in-the-dump.html

3 Ways Active Listening Improves Your Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today you’re going to learn about three ways that active listening improves your piano playing. What do I mean when I say active listening? Aren’t you always listening when you’re playing the piano? Well, it’s actually very difficult.

Active listening keeps you engaged in your performance.

Let’s say you’ve been working on a piece for several weeks, maybe even months. You practice it all the time. Then, finally, you’re giving some kind of performance. Maybe you’re playing it for your teacher or for friends. Or maybe it’s a public performance. How can you stay engaged in the whole process? The secret is listening to what you’re doing. Now, that might seem silly. Of course, you’re listening. But are you really actively listening, or are you just passively playing? Maybe it’s become routine because you’ve done it so many times before. This is a tremendous challenge with something you’ve played so many times.

Listen with fresh ears and allow the music to unfold.

Try playing your piece in ways that you haven’t played before. This can be a scary proposition if you’ve never done it in your practice. So active listening is something that you want to do in your practice. Take the music to new places. Listen to inner voices. Maybe you’ve always been listening to your right-hand melody. Well, try listening to the left hand. You could even try bringing out different voices. If you’ve always favored the right hand, favor the left hand just to hear what’s there. Keep yourself engaged! The more ways you can play your music, the more creative you can be in a performance. And once again, listening to what’s happening keeps you engaged. So that’s one important benefit of active listening.

Active listening is the secret to keeping your audience engaged.

If you’re not listening to your performance, nobody else will either! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at concerts where there’s been an accomplished concert pianist playing, and I found myself getting bored. I’m thinking, What’s the matter with me? I’m listening, and everything sounds fine. There’s nothing wrong at all. Then there’s a memory slip, and I realize that the performer wasn’t actively listening. If they aren’t really listening, you can’t stay engaged either. So the secret to being able to have a performance that’s compelling to listen to is for you to be listening to what you’re doing. So that’s the second benefit. You keep yourself engaged, and you keep your listeners engaged in the process.

The third benefit, which is maybe the most important of all, is creating a beautiful sound.

You practice so much. You’re focusing on what you’re doing with your fingers. You’re focusing on the keys. You’re focusing on counting, fingering—a myriad of things. But the actual sound you’re creating is the most important thing of all! And it can easily be neglected. Now, this is particularly important if you’re playing on a different piano from the one you practice on all the time. Let’s say you’re at a friend’s home or you’re playing a recital somewhere, and you sit down at a different piano. You must listen! Maybe that piano is a lot brighter than yours at home. You may have to completely change your approach to the keyboard in order to get a beautiful sound because you might overplay the instrument. Of course, the inverse could be true as well. You may have to use more energy to project sound on a piano that has a kind of dead sound compared to the piano you play at home.

So these are three important benefits of active listening.

Practice active listening in your playing at home! Try to go to different places with your music. Play at different tempos and bring out different hands and different lines in your playing. Try different things to keep yourself engaged in the process. Your audience will be rewarded, and you’ll be able to create a more beautiful sound in your playing. I hope this is helpful for you! 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

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrinContact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Why You Must Not Overthink Your Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we’re going to talk about why you must not overthink your piano playing. Now that might seem like a strange thing for me to say, with thousands of articles and videos about piano playing, technique, how to practice, memorization, how to digest a score, harmony, and so many more. Isn’t that all about thinking? It is. And there is a time and a place for analysis, and there’s a time for intuitive playing. And you must have a balance between the two in your performances. So what am I talking about when I say you shouldn’t overthink your playing?

When you’re performing, you have to have a presence of mind.

You need to make sure you’re sitting in the right place and that your hands are in the right position. You need to listen in order to achieve the proper balance of sound. But if you make the mistake of really thinking about what you’re doing, it can drive you crazy. You might completely lose the ability to play at all! When you’re playing a piece of music, there are thousands of notes, different rhythms, articulations, phrasings, and dynamics. There’s so much going on. If you stop just for a moment to think about what you are doing and look at your hands, you might question if you even know what the next note is because you’re doing things almost on automatic pilot to some extent. Hopefully you’ve learned your music well enough that you can think it through, even away from the piano which gives you great security. You’ve referenced the score, you’ve studied the score, you’ve played slowly, and you’ve done all these things so you have security. But if you start thinking about what you’re doing while you’re doing it, you can get completely psyched out.

Stay in the moment while performing.

You’re playing a piece, and you’re in the moment. It’s great. But suddenly, you start thinking about how the next section goes. You take yourself out of the moment by overthinking. If you’re not right where you are, then you get completely fouled up. Because when you get to that part, you’ve thought it through and you’re not sure if you thought it through right or not, and you might second-guess it wrong. These are the kinds of mind games that can completely destroy you in a musical performance.

Remember, the time for analysis is in your practice, but when you’re performing, don’t overthink it.

Stay in the moment. Listen to what you’re achieving. Try to go with the sound of the music and keep your head on your shoulders. Think about where you are and let the music flow naturally, like you’ve done hundreds of times in your practice. Sometimes that’s the greatest challenge because when all eyes are looking at you in a performance, or even if it’s just a friend or your teacher you’re playing for, you start thinking more about it in a way that you aren’t used to in your practice.

Another thing you can do is practice performing.

Play through your music and pretend people are watching you. Pretend you’re playing for your teacher or your friends, and see if you can keep your wits about you. Try to psych yourself out and see if you can still hold things together. Because inevitably, when you play for people, it just feels different. Your whole psychology changes; so don’t let it overtake you. Stay in the moment in your playing, and you will be rewarded with fine performances. 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