All posts by Robert Estrin

Advanced Pedal Techniques

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about advanced pedal techniques. It’s absolutely not what you would expect at all. I guarantee it! I could talk about half pedaling, which sometimes you do to get a certain sonority. I could talk about combining the una corda pedal, the soft pedal, with the sustain pedal. I could talk about engaging the sostenuto pedal, the middle pedal, to hold some notes when maybe you don’t want to blur everything together. Then you can combine that with the sustain pedal. I could talk about using little dashes of pedal to bring out certain notes. There’s a wealth of pedal techniques that you couldn’t possibly even write in, and even if you could, it wouldn’t be that helpful. Because the piano you’re playing on, the acoustics of the room, not to mention the music you’re playing, all enter into these advanced pedal techniques.

What I’m talking about today are next level pedal techniques.

I will use the slow movement from the Mozart K 545 C Major Sonata as an example. I’m talking about the second movement. I know many of you purists out there might say, “Why use pedal in Mozart at all? Mozart’s piano didn’t have a pedal.” This is true. However, there are two reasons why you might consider using at least some pedal in Mozart. Number one, although Mozart’s piano did not have a sustain pedal, it did have a lever operated with your knee that did exactly the same thing as a sustain pedal. So there was a certain amount of sustain that could be achieved, much like with the pedal. Secondly, when you’re playing on a modern piano, it’s so drastically different from a Mozart era piano that it essentially becomes a transcription for modern piano. The sound, the sustain, and the whole quality of the instrument is so different from what Mozart heard out of his piano. Arguably, you’re playing on a whole different instrument! You might as well take advantage of what the modern piano offers you.

What kind of techniques am I talking about?

I’m not talking about any of the pedal techniques I brought up before. So what am I talking about? In pedaling this, you might be tempted to pedal so that the chords in the left hand get blurred together. Why not simply change the pedal whenever the harmonies change? It’s a very simple technique. The problem with that is when you add the right hand, the right hand notes become blurry. You don’t want the right hand to be blurry. But you want the left hand to be sustained, giving that bed that the melody can float on. Well, here’s the technique. It doesn’t involve the pedal. Not at first.

Use your hands to simulate the sound of the pedal!

In the left hand, you want to hold the bass notes longer. When you do this, the left hand is sustained without having to depend upon the pedal for it. Why is this so helpful? Because then you can use little touches of the pedal to articulate certain notes in the melody, to make the melody more sustained. These touches of pedal on the melody are really subjective. They’re not going to be the same for everyone. It depends upon the room, the acoustics, and the piano. By using little dashes of pedal on the melody while playing the accompaniment with this phantom pedal technique, you can capture the long notes on the melody to make them sing longer.

Simply pedal the long notes in the melody so they sustain longer.

With your left hand, use the phantom pedal technique holding the notes that fall on the beat so that you can use the pedal to enhance the melody instead of trying to pedal the chords to make them sound more lush and sustained. This opens up dramatic possibilities for using the pedal in a more subtle fashion to enhance the melody rather than connecting the accompaniment. This isn’t just in Mozart. This goes for a vast array of musical styles. Try it in your playing. You’ll be richly rewarded with a far more musical performance! You will get a sound that’s cleaner because you’re doing more with your hands. You won’t have to depend upon the pedal to connect what you can connect with your left hand. This opens up great expressive possibilities with the pedal in your piano playing. 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 Stay Engaged in Your Musical Performance

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to stay engaged in your musical performance. This is such an important topic. You can tell when a performer isn’t engaged. You can tell because your mind wanders. You can’t listen to a performer who isn’t engaged in their own performance.

The secret to engaging an audience is being engaged in the performance yourself!

So how do you do such a thing? Think of the challenge. Let’s say you’re playing a piece or a whole program. You’ve practiced for weeks or months on this music. You can play it without even thinking about it because you’ve gone through it so many times. Your fingers just know where to go. That’s the problem! How can you possibly concentrate on something that you’ve done so many times? How can you hear it? How can you really listen to it? The number one key is listening to what you’re doing! Focus on the sound as if it’s the first time you’re hearing it. Now, that’s a hard thing to do.

Are there any things you can do in your practice to help keep the musical score fresh?

Absolutely! What I’m going to tell you right now is the greatest thing you can do if you have pieces you can play, but they just feel kind of lackluster. You’ve finally gotten to where you can play the piece, but you’ve played it too many times. You can play it, but there’s just no spark anymore. You’ve almost gotten tired of it. You’ve lost the enthusiasm. Is there any way to regain that enthusiasm? Yes! It’s so satisfying to play through pieces with all the expression and the pedal and all the nuances. But to regain your enthusiasm for a piece, you have to flip it.

Go back to the score!

Whether it’s a piece you’ve memorized or a piece that you play with the music, either way, put the music up there. Take out your metronome and play without any pedal, slowly and absolutely faithfully to the score. No more and no less. Just play with precision. I’m not saying to play unmusically. You can play musically and still play exactly what’s written. But no shtick! You have little nuances you like to do. Maybe the second time around with a repeated phrase, you play a little softer. Maybe you do other little things that aren’t necessarily written. Get rid of all that stuff and just play exactly what’s written. Just taking your foot off the pedal is going to make you work harder to get a halfway decent sound. Practice this way a great deal. When you finally add the pedal, get rid of the metronome, and free yourself from the score, if it’s a piece you’ve memorized, it’s so refreshing to come back to it. It feels good and it sounds great! You will become engaged in your musical performance again!

I do more of my practicing without the pedal than with the pedal.

I also do a great deal of metronome work. With pieces I have memorized, I constantly revisit the score. Now, this could be extraordinarily difficult, particularly for those of you who are not very good readers. If your sight reading is at a very low level, maybe you have a piece memorized, and you can play it fine, but you go back to the score, and you can barely play it! Well, guess what? You need to play it with the score! If that means going back and playing way under tempo, do it.

You will always learn things from the score.

This process is a way to really engage in the music in a new way. Put the metronome on. Open your music. Play slowly and take your foot off the pedal. Practice that way and when you get to your musical performance, if you have an audience, and you’re nervous, let that energy inspire you to do new things. Listen to the sound of each note. Maybe you’ll hear inner lines you hadn’t noticed before. Particularly when people are watching you, things seem different, don’t they? Go with it! Don’t be afraid to follow a line that you haven’t really paid attention to before in your practice. It may put you a little bit out of your comfort zone. That’s the way to become engaged in your own musical performance and draw in your listeners. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

What is the Most Expensive and Least Expensive Instrument?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about the most expensive and least expensive musical instrument. There are so many choices! You might think the piano is the most expensive instrument. There was a time when digital pianos didn’t exist and the cheapest piano was about $1,000. But now, you can get an 88 key digital piano for a few hundred bucks.

What are the most expensive pianos?

The most expensive pianos go for $200,000 to $300,000, unless it’s some sculpted work of art. There are some pianos that are worth millions, if they were owned by one of the Beatles or something like that. But generally speaking, the top end is going to be in the $200,000 to $300,000 range, unless it’s an exotic wood or intricately carved or painted or something of that nature. The cheapest pianos may be a few hundred dollars. So pianos might not be the most expensive or the cheapest. You know, you can get a student model clarinet for not that much money. There are a lot of instruments that you can get for less than $1,000. rMany orchestral instruments are not that expensive.

You’ll be surprised to learn that the most expensive instrument and the least expensive instrument are the same instrument!

How can this be? The cheapest instrument you can buy is the violin. Go on Amazon and see if I’m right. Search for the cheapest violin you can find and it will probably be the cheapest instrument you can buy. I mean a real musical instrument, not a kazoo or a penny whistle. Violins are really cheap. You can get one for far less than $100 easily. But Stradivarius and other rare violins can be in the millions of dollars! These aren’t works of art, like pianos that are carved and painted. No, these are just instruments that cost that much.

Any great violin is going to be very expensive.

It’s not just Stradivarius violins. High level violins can be in the high five figures. And for something really high level, you’re going to get into six figures pretty quickly. And like I say, if you want a world class violin, you could easily get into the millions! Yet it’s also the cheapest instrument there is. I bet you didn’t expect that one instrument is the cheapest and most expensive instrument there is. I hope you find this interesting! If you have different ideas about this, leave a comment on LivingPianos.com and 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 Play With 2 Hands on the Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to play with two hands on the piano. Now this may seem like the most basic thing. But I bet you there are people searching for answers about this. This can be particularly perplexing for those of you who have played other instruments where you play only one note at a time. You might wonder, how the heck do you play with two hands and play all those notes? So it is really a valid question, and the answer may surprise you!

The secret to learning how to play with both hands is to practice hands separately!

That might seem like a contradiction, but it is far from it. The hardest part about piano playing is putting the hands together. Practicing small sections at a time, hands separately, really breaks things down. It makes it easier for you to play hands together. If you try to play hands together immediately, and that is the way you practice a piece of music, it’s going to be tough to get all the details straight. You will struggle to get the phrasing and fingering. There’s just so much information to amass when you’re looking at a score. So that is the secret to playing hands together.

When you first start learning a new piece of music, read through it really slowly, hands together, to get familiar. You’ll probably have to play incredibly slowly at first, because it’s hard! But once you do that a couple of times, you can start from the beginning, just taking a very small section. Figure out the right hand. Learn all the details of the right hand. Then do the same thing with the left hand. Then put them together. You repeat this process one small section at a time. I’ve talked about this process many times before. I was so fortunate to study with my father, Morton Estrin, who showed me this at my first lesson as a young child. I have taught this to countless people. It really works!

If the piano was played with only one hand, it would probably be the easiest instrument there is!

Trying to get a sound out of a clarinet or a flute is an arduous task. Basic tone production on a piano is as simple as pressing down a key. You can get a sound the first time you try it! But put those hands together and it becomes exponentially more difficult. So the secret to playing hands together is to work out your music section by section, hands separately. Get each hand really flowing and then slowly put them together. Then increase the tempo. You can connect section by section working through the piece this way. Before you know it, you can play hands together on the piano! I hope this is helpful for those of you who are afraid of the piano because of having to play with two hands. 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

Piano Music for Small Hands

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. What are good pieces of music for people with small hands? Many of you know that I have rather small hands. Fortunately I have a good, solid octave. I can even reach most 9ths. Although, I can’t quite reach a 9th from above the keys. I can only reach a 10th if I grab one key and stretch to grab the other. But that’s not very practical. I can’t quite reach it with my right hand. As many of you know, your right hand is a little bit smaller than your left hand, if you’re like most pianists, from all the years of stretching. The left hand generally has more outstretched reaches than the right hand.

You can play music beyond your reach, as many great pianists have in the past.

Josef Hofmann had such small hands that Steinway actually built a piano for him with a smaller keyboard! This is a technology that some companies are even working on today. I have videos on this subject for you as well. You can see one here.

What repertoire is ideal for people with small hands?

Early period music is perfect! During the romantic era, the pedal was utilized extensively. The reach was greater, generally. However, the key to being able to play music beyond your reach is capturing notes you can’t reach on the pedal and breaking the chords very quickly. You can hardly tell they are broken the way they’re caught on the pedal. That is a technique that many pianists use in order to play music beyond their reach. It’s very effective. It does not in any way hinder the music.

If you have really small hands, and you don’t want to struggle, the music of Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, or Haydn is great.

The instrument wasn’t as highly developed yet during the time these composers lived. It didn’t have the sustain pedal that we enjoy today. The music doesn’t demand a lot of big reaches. Think about Bach two part inventions. There’s never more than one note in each hand at a time anyway! That’s going to be splendid for anyone with a smaller reach. But even Mozart is really accessible for people with small hands.

There is a wealth of music that will fall right in your hands, even if an octave is all you can reach.

Now, if you don’t have a solid octave, it is more of a challenge. You might want to look into some of those smaller keyboards. It would be wonderful if this became a standard. It’s possible that if this became a standard, a pianist could choose among different sized keys. Why is this size the standard? It doesn’t have to be this way! It’s just what evolved. If you can’t reach an octave, a smaller keyboard could be just the thing 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

What 2 Instruments Do You Have to Study in Conservatory?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you the two instruments all music majors at conservatories must study. You may be surprised to learn what these instruments are. One of them is the piano, which probably isn’t surprising. After all, the piano offers you the possibility of seeing the structure of music. On a piano you can play chords. If you’re a clarinetist, you can only play one note at a time. It’s hard to conceive of intervals, chords, and key signatures. So the piano is a natural choice. What is the other instrument that all music majors have to study? Aside from piano, the answer is voice!

The human voice is the most intrinsic instrument there is.

It’s the instrument we all have! We’ve all tried it out. We grew up with it from the time we were born and we have it with us all the time. Now, why is it so important to sing your music? Well, singing and sight-singing are so valuable for developing your ear. The piano is great because you can play such complex music. But you know what? You don’t really have to hear the pitches before you play them! You push the keys, and the notes comes out. It’s simple, right? Well, suppose you want to actually hear what you’re doing. If you want to sing that note, you have to know the pitch.

The best way to train your ear is by singing.

However, singers are at a great loss when actually conceptualizing or intellectualizing what they’re doing because it’s so intuitive. It’s literally coming out of them! But when you have to quantify the pitch on a piano, you have to make a decision which key to push and when to push it. You need to understand the relationship of the intervals. You can clearly see the half steps. It’s all very visual. So those are the two instruments everyone should study.

If you are a pianist, you might want to consider singing your music.

Do it when no one is around if you’re embarrassed. You will learn a lot. The other thing you can do is test yourself at the piano. For example, if you play a C, could you sing an E? Could you sing a G? Could you sing the different notes just from thinking of them? If you can’t, don’t despair. There is a secret! Think diatonically. If you want to think from the C to the E, you can think through the scale in your head. That is the secret to being able to hear intervals and hear chords. If you can think the notes between the notes, you’ll know where you are. So, if you want to sing E after hearing C, try singing C – D – E. That’s exactly what sight-singing accomplishes.

I was so fortunate to study with my father, Morton Estrin.

I not only took private piano lessons with my father, as my sister did, and countless other people over the years of his teaching career, but I also got to study in his weekly classes. In these classes he taught sight-singing, ear training, theory, harmony, dictation, harmony, all of it! Because of this, I can hear all music in solfeggio, do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. Everything goes into those syllables for me. So I can determine all the notes hear once I have one reference note.

I encourage you to sing your music!

If you are not a pianist, go ahead and study a little bit of piano. Whatever instrument you play, it will help you in the study of your instrument to have both piano and voice. So that’s the lesson for today! 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