All posts by Robert Estrin

How to Take Your Phrases Further in Music

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about how to take your musical phrases further. One of the biggest challenges when playing lyrical music is controlling the ends of phrases to achieve a nice diminuendo, such as in the second movement of Clementi’s Sonatina in C major Opus 36, no. 1.

I like to play simple, effective trills that can be negotiated easily.

You don’t have to be distracted by highly ornamented trills. It’s not necessary to get the beauty of this music. Trills are left up to you. If you want to play more notes, go ahead. But don’t spend an inordinate amount of time on playing fast trills. Instead, concentrate on the beauty of the music and creating a singing line. Of course, the challenge of this movement, like so much other music, is twofold. You want to have melody above accompaniment throughout, and you also want to have the rise and fall of each phrase.

The secret to being able to control phrase endings to make them quiet is to peak later in your music.

Remember to start softly so you can grow in the middle of the phrase. You can keep growing further than the middle of the phrase. If you peak in the middle, instead of later in the phrase, it is very difficult to end the phrase quietly. Not only is it hard to control, but it also loses intensity and support. It sounds like a singer who doesn’t have enough air at the end of a phrase. Once again, it’s all about utilizing arm weight. You can look at some of my previous videos to understand what I’m talking about.

You can give the music more life by supporting the phrase further than the middle.

When you do this, the phrase endings have a nice taper. You won’t struggle to end the phrase without notes dropping out. Peak your phrases later so that the phrase endings can be beautifully controlled. You can make life so much easier for yourself while creating a longer musical line that projects all the way to the end of the phrase. You won’t have to worry about notes dropping out. So that’s the tip for today! I hope this has been helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Living in the Comfort Zone in Your Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about living in the comfort zone in your piano playing. Have you ever had a fast piece that you’re struggling to play fast? You have tension, but you want a beautiful, relaxed quality to your playing. You want to play with fluidity. You might wonder how to achieve this. If you keep struggling to play just a little bit faster than you are able to play with comfort and relaxation, you’ll never be able to achieve that kind of relaxed fluidity in your playing.

The secret is slow practice.

Find the speed at which you can play completely relaxed. It might surprise you how slowly you have to go in order to achieve that. The metronome is such an invaluable tool! Finding the speed at which you can play in a relaxed manner is the first step. You should have the score in front of you when you’re doing this kind of work. You may find that when you slow things down, you will realize you don’t know it as well as you thought you did. That’s why having the score in front of you and setting a metronome at a speed you can play your piece with absolute solidity is a great way to live in that comfort zone. Once you can play it at a slow tempo with total relaxation and accuracy, then you finally have the capability of speeding up your performance.

Slow practice is invaluable, but sometimes it’s hard to translate that slow playing to performance speed.

Another thing you can do is take small note groups and use extreme repetition to solidify the small section. You can take even just one or two notes! Keep playing them until you can play with complete relaxation. Then add other tiny note groups in the same relaxed manner. You can continue working this way through a passage or section of music.

These are two ways of approaching relaxation. Remember to go slowly enough that you can play with complete relaxation. Have the score in front of you so you can check your work. You’ll be surprised to learn what you know, and more importantly, what needs clarification in your playing. You can either play very slowly or you can take very small groups of notes and piece them together.

You’re working on two fronts!

One is to get a feel for what it’s going to be like when it’s up to tempo, even if you’re just playing small groups of notes that you string together. And the other one is to play at a slow tempo with complete security and relaxation. You live at that slow tempo! Live in the slow zone, in the comfort zone, and you’ll be rewarded with relaxation in your playing when you finally get things up to speed. I hope this has been 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

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

Free Pianos & Lessons!

Hi, this is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. Amazingly, there are hundreds of free pianos available all over the country. You can check out the links in the description below. But there’s so much more than that! What about free piano lessons? There are so many resources online, it’s unbelievable! You can check out what we have for you right here on LivingPianosVideos

There is a lot to consider here. The first question is:

Can you find an instrument for free that suits you, and if free video lessons are what you are after.

Some people may prefer a good, inexpensive digital piano. Again, there are countless resources online. Some people may resort to Craigslist.

But maybe you’re after a high level piano like a Steinway. But the prices have gotten out of reach for most people:

So, you may appreciate expertly restored American and European instruments from Living Pianos with top-tier instruments with free delivery anywhere in the continental United States! Aside from the thousands of free videos and articles on LivingPianos.com

I teach private lessons to students all over the world:

I was fortunate to grow up in a musical family. I also got to study with so many great pianists! So I enjoy sharing my passion for the piano.

I started teaching the piano while still in high school assisting my father with his teaching as my sister did before me. I got into selling pianos after graduating from music conservatory. Many people who contacted me for piano lessons didn’t have pianos! So I made it my business to find good used pianos which I had my piano technician put into good shape for them. There was such a demand for this sort of thing, and because of my extensive experience with pianos, people have relied upon me to help them with pianos ever since!

Teaching has been a continuum in my career which has many facets, from performing, to recording, as well as writing articles and making videos. So you can consider me your personal resource for information about pianos and piano lessons. Just email Robert@LivingPianos.com for a personalized response to help you! Thanks for joining me here at LivingPianos.comYour Online Piano Resource!

LINKS:

Piano Adoption

Piano Lessons – How to Play Piano

Digital Pianos

Craigslist

Steinway

Living Pianos

My Teachers:

John Ogdon

Ruth Slenczynska

Constance Keene

Morton Estrin

The Single Greatest Challenge of Piano Playing

Welcome to Living Pianos. I’m Robert Estrin. In this article, we will be discussing the single greatest
challenge in playing the piano. There are many aspects to playing the piano, such as playing with both
hands, playing multiple parts, playing fast, and playing scales, arpeggios and repeated notes. However,
there is one aspect that is the Achilles heel of piano playing, and that is the envelope of the sound
produced by the piano.

The Piano’s Sonic Characteristics

If you listen to just one note played on the piano, what do you hear? You hear a sharp attack, a quick
decay and a slow, quiet sustain that gradually decreases in volume. This presents a major challenge for
playing the piano since it is difficult to play melodies which imitate the human voice. After all, the human
voice is the original musical instrument of all time! Wind instruments have the benefit of using breath to
create musical lines. Violins and many other string instruments have bows to sustain notes. But on the
piano, in order to overcome this limitation, you must master the art of illusion!
How to Create the Illusion of a Continuous Line on the Piano
One of the techniques for creating a singing line, or sustained line, is to use the weight of your arm. The
arm has weight and, by using it as an analog to the breath, you can create a smooth line. You can
transfer the weight of the arm smoothly from note to note, rising and falling like the breath, with more arm
weight in the middle of the phrase, and less arm weight in the beginning and end of a phrase. This
technique can be enhanced with the use of the pedal. But before we discuss this, let’s talk about
something I refer to as, “The Phantom Pedal.”

The Phantom Pedal

The Phantom Pedal refers to the use of finger technique to hold down notes with your fingers instead of
relying upon the pedal. This allows you to sustain notes with your left hand while adding emphasis to the
melody notes in your right hand with the pedal. This creates a much more sustained melody, without the
risk of creating clashing harmonies or muddy sound.

Bonus Tip

As a bonus tip, we will discuss the use of the una corda, or soft pedal on a grand piano which is the
pedal on the left. Una corda means, “one string” because in early pianos, there were 2 strings on each
note. Depressing the pedal shifted the hammers so that the hammers only struck one string on each
note. Modern pianos have 3 strings on each note in most registers. The hammers still hit all the strings,
but not directly. This results in a softer initial attack. Yet the sustain is just as rich because of sympathetic
vibrations. By combining this pedal technique with the use of the arm, as well as the other techniques I
described earlier, you can overcome the inherent limitation of the piano’s sonic characteristics.
In conclusion, the single greatest challenge in piano playing is the envelope of the sound produced by
the piano. However, by mastering the art of illusion, and combining techniques such as using the weight
of the arm and using your fingers to hold notes (phantom pedal), you can overcome this limitation and
create a beautiful, sustained sound. This is the secret of artistry in piano playing.
I hope this has been helpful for you! Leave your 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 or want more information about pianos. I have many
resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Should You Use Pedal in Bach?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Is pedal necessary in playing Bach? That’s a question I received from a viewer. Most of you probably know that the piano wasn’t invented during Bach’s lifetime. However, Bach did try the very earliest incarnation of what was ostensibly a piano. But he never wrote any music specifically for the piano.

Bach’s favorite keyboard instrument was the clavichord, because of how expressively it could play.

Because there wasn’t an escapement on the clavichord, you could actually impart vibrato on notes after you played them! Of course, the piano has escapement. That means the hammers escape the strings after striking them. This allows for a wide range of dynamics. But the sustain pedal didn’t exist during Bach’s lifetime.

What I’m going to do today is a really interesting experiment!

I’m counting on you to help me with this! I’m going to play the first section of the Bach French Suite No. 5. The first movement has a repeat. The first time I’m going to play it with no pedal at all. Then I’m going to play it with lots of pedal. But I’m going to be using little tiny bursts of pedal, just to enhance the tone. The questions are, can you hear the difference? And do you have a preference? Watch the video, then let me know your impression in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube.

Watch the video to take part in the experiment!

So I’ve shown you two examples of the same exact section. You probably wonder what I was doing with my foot there, fluttering up and down so quickly. Well, in this piece, as in so much Bach, there’s so much counterpoint going on that it’s difficult to really use much pedal. If you’re playing Chopin, for example, there is obviously so much you can do with pedaling. In fact, you need to use the pedal! If I were to play, for example, the Chopin G minor Ballade without the pedal, it would sound pretty thin. In music like that, the sustain pedal is absolutely essential to hold out notes for harmonies to blend together. But the music of Bach wasn’t written with the sustain or damper pedal in mind. So it works just fine without the pedal.

Why would you want to use pedal in Bach?

In Bach, you use short bursts of pedal to enhance longer notes to make them sustain longer. Because, as you know, when you play a note on the piano, it’s always dying away. As pianists, we’re always fighting that. We are trying to create a singing sustained line for the illusion of continuity, like in the human voice or the bow of a violin. The pedal helps to enrich the sound of key notes so that you get a sense of the line. Why just little flutters of pedal? Because to do any kind of substantial pedaling where the pedal stays down for any length of time, would blur the counterpoint together. And that’s not what you want. I’m really interested in reading your comments on this! Which way do you like better? Could you hear a difference at all? Let me know! 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