All posts by Robert Estrin

Why is Your Left Hand Bigger Than Your Right Hand?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. Is your left hand bigger than your right hand? This is a great question. My left hand is bigger than my right hand. I bet a lot of you pianists out there find the same thing. You might wonder why. I’m really interested in comments from all of you to see if this is true! I’ve talked to many pianists who have found that their left hands are slightly larger than their right hands. It has nothing to do with being right-handed or left-handed either.

My left hand has a bigger reach than my right hand.

I can barely play white key tenths around the front of the keys. That’s my maximum reach. I’m going to talk more later about how you can overcome small hands and why it doesn’t really matter. Some of the greatest pianists of all time had very small hands, even smaller than mine! I can just barely reach white key 10ths. I don’t really depend upon it. I rarely play tenths because it takes so much time for me to grab tiny slivers of keys. It’s not really very useful. On the right hand, if I try to do the same thing, I absolutely can’t do it at all. I just can’t reach tenths with my right hand. You will find that this is true for most pianists. So you might wonder why this is the case. It might have to do with how much you practice and play the piano. And of course, natural physiology enters into it. I’m sure this is not a hundred percent universal. The reason pianists’ left hands are usually a bit larger is that left-hand parts tend to be more outstretched than right-hand parts. The right-hand usually has the melody. The left hand has accompaniments involving all kinds of stretching. So, your left-hand ends up being ever so slightly bigger than your right hand, generally speaking.

What are some ways to overcome the limitations of small hands on the piano?

I promised you some tips about small hands. I have relatively small hands. I always wanted to play music beyond my reach. I will say this: if you don’t have a solid octave you’re going to have a hard time with a lot of repertoire. Fortunately, you don’t really need much of a reach for baroque music or even most classical period music. Octaves are somewhat prevalent, but the reaches in earlier period music are not nearly as great as later period music. So you still might be okay, at least in some repertoire, if you don’t have good solid octaves. If you want to be able to play bigger reaches than an octave, or you can’t quite reach an octave as well as you’d like, perhaps what you want to do is to break the chords. I’ve talked about this before. When you break chords very quickly on the pedal, it’s hard to tell that you aren’t reaching all the notes at once! So, if you want to play big chords that you can’t possibly reach, how can you play them? Using the pedal while breaking chords very quickly will create the illusion of playing big chords beyond your reach.

Can you stretch your hands to expand your reach?

When I was a kid, my father taught me a stretching technique he had heard about. It involved gently pushing your hands against the keyboard to get a little more reach. I didn’t find this technique to be at all helpful. What did help me enormously was developing more strength for rapidly breaking chords. Chords that were beyond my reach became accessible to me! And, you’re going to find the same thing. So don’t fret if you don’t have a big reach! If you develop strength in your playing, you can learn how to break chords successfully and it sounds great! In fact, a lot of pianists with large hands will choose to break chords because of the richness of the sound it creates. So, get your hands nice and strong and learn how to break chords quickly and you’ll be fine. Just from playing music that has bigger reaches you can develop a slightly larger reach. Since the left hand generally has bigger stretches than the right hand, you will tend to find your left hand reach will be a smidgen larger than your right hand.

Have you noticed this? I’d love to get a conversation started! Let me know in the comments how you feel about this! Thanks so much 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

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The Passing of a Piano Legend: Joe Ross

The piano world has lost one of the great proponents and innovators with the passing of Joe Ross. Joe has had a profound impact on countless people around the world by creating PianoMart.
Ross was a piano technician who had a vision way back in the 1990s when the internet was in its infancy, he thought, wouldn’t it be great if people could buy pianos from private parties, just the way they do cars and books and things like that. And he started PianoMart.

You think about back then most homes didn’t even have internet!

And if they did, it was probably dial up. A lot of people thought what he was doing would be impossible, but he built this into an amazing empire. And I think about the countless people and families who grew up with piano as a direct result of Joe’s vision and determination and perseverance and creating this resource for people to buy pianos. After all:

Joe wasn’t a computer programmer. He was a piano technician.

But he found allies in his venture and persevered over many, many years. He came up with an innovative escrow system because you think about the challenges of people doing commerce on the internet back in the nineties. This was really cutting edge. And that way, people could put the money into an escrow account held by PianoMart to make sure the pianos were safely delivered.

Back then, the only way people in rural communities could get a piano from a private party was through local classified advertisements, or maybe a bulletin board at a local supermarket.

Many people living in outlying areas didn’t even have piano stores!

Joe’s vision also created the opportunity for people to find some relative value of their pianos. So if somebody for example, had a Steinway model M for sale, they could look and see all the Steinway M’s all around the country and yes, around the world, and get some idea of what the value was.

So I thank Joe for bringing piano to countless families all over the world. People who maybe would not have had pianos ever if he hadn’t had the vision and the determination, and worked so hard to help bring pianos to people. Joe is going to be missed by a lot of people. Everyone who knew him, loved him and loved his dedication. And we’ve all been touched by Joe. So this is for Joe Ross. Thank you. Thanks for joining me. Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com.

How to Start a Piece: The Secret of Lifting

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to start a piece of music. I’ve talked a great deal about how to create tonal balance between the hands. And I’ve talked about using the weight of the arm, transferring weight from note to note in order to create a smooth line. So, instead of just playing a key and having no support, no weight, you actually support the weight of your arm on each key, transferring the weight smoothly from note to note enabling you to get a smooth line where every note plays, no matter how quiet and delicate. That’s the secret to crafting a musical line. But how do you start that first note? How do you get the sound you want out of it?

What’s the analog of diaphragm support on the piano?

To start notes on the horn, you put the breath under pressure and start with the tongue saying, “tu”. On the piano, it’s a little bit different. On piano, you use the weight of the arm to start notes. If you push a key on the piano and you want a certain volume, how do you get the precise volume you want? How can you possibly be assured of that? Well, if you were to lift your arm and your hand, with your wrist bent upward, then bring your hand down while straightening your wrist, you would be increasing the speed your hand hits the keys. But if you do exactly the opposite, it gives you tremendous leverage! You relax your hand letting your hand hang from your limp wrist. And then, as you go down with your arm, you slowly straighten your wrist. So, as your arm goes down, your hand is coming up as you straighten your wrist. By going two different directions at the same time, you can achieve exactly the sound you want. You can start any note at any volume with total assurance! You may want to watch the accompanying video to see this in action.

That is the secret of how to start a piece of music!

Now, of course, there are some pieces that start heroically. If you’re starting a piece like the Military Polonaise of Chopin, there’s no need for lifting. You can just sail right into it. Because when you’re playing with that kind of volume, it will pop just the way you want it to. But starting something like a Chopin Nocturne, this technique will help you get exactly the sound you want. By lifting, letting the wrist go limp, and as you’re going down with the arm coming up with the wrist, you have total control, no matter what piece you’re starting. Even within the piece, sometimes it’s helpful to lift for new phrases. Much like on a wind instrument, when you’re playing each new phrase, you take a breath, put it under pressure, and attack using the tongue. It’s the same thing. Whenever you start a phrase fresh, use this lifting technique. I want you all to try this and see how it helps you to start with precisely the tonal balance you want, right from the very first notes you play. Let me know how this works for you! Thanks so much 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

www.LivingPianos.com
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949-244-3729

Saving Time in Your Piano Practice: Interlocking Phrases

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. I have a tip for your practice that can save you vast amounts of time! The subject today is the secret power of interlocking phrases. I’ll explain what I mean, but first I’m going to give you an idea of how I practice the piano and how I teach others to practice the piano.

There are many different skill sets in practicing the piano.

For example, if you’re accompanying and reading, that’s one type of skill. If you’re improvising, that’s another skill. But if you are memorizing music and you want some tips about that, you’ve come to the right place! Taking a small phrase at a time hands separately and mastering all the elements of the music is the way I’ve been taught to memorize music from the time I started the piano as a young child. My father, Morton Estrin, taught this method. It’s so powerful!

Let’s say you are learning the famous Mozart Sonata K. 545 in C major. Of course you’d want to read through it first to get familiar with it. But then my suggestion is to get right to work and start learning it rather than playing it over and over again. It’s almost impossible to absorb all the thousands of details in the music, because you don’t just have the notes and rhythm. You have to figure out fingering, phrasing, and the expression as well. There’s so much information to digest; which is why you want to learn small chunks at a time, hands separately at first, putting together each phrase, then connecting sections as you learn them.

Taking smaller chunks is great because you’ll never work yourself too hard, which enables you to sustain a longer productive practice.

Let’s say you just take the very first phrase, right-hand alone. You get that memorized. You get it fluid. You check your work. Then you take the left-hand, and you get that perfect. Then you put the hands together, slowly at first. Then you go on and learn the next phrase one hand at a time. You get that memorized hands together. Now you think, great, I’m going to go back to the beginning and connect the phrases. You play the first phrase, which you’ve gotten up to speed. You start slower at first to give yourself a chance to connect the phrases smoothly. But when you reach the end of the first phrase, you feel lost. The tip I’m going to give you is going to make this a fluid process. You will be able to connect your phrases like a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces fit together perfectly right from the get-go!

Go one note beyond so you have a common note between the two phrases.

So, as you learn the right hand, take the first phrase plus the first note of the second phrase. That is the connecting note. You do the same thing with the left hand. And when you put the hands together, you will play through the first phrase landing on the first note of the second phrase. When you learn the next phrase, you do the same thing. This makes it a seamless process to connect phrases as you go. The hardest part about learning music is putting the hands together, which is why you want to solidify each hand separately first, getting them up to tempo, fluid and repeatable. This gives you half a chance of being able to put the hands together to get them memorized. The next hardest thing is connecting phrase to phrase in a smooth manner. By using interlocking phrases this way, where each phrase is going one note beyond, you have that connection note!

This is a great tip that I want all of you to try out! Let me know how it works for you! You’ll find this will save you a lot of time in your practice as you connect your phrases. Thanks so much 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

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Improve Your Sight Reading by Looking at Chunks of Music

I’m Robert Estrin, and this is LivingPianos.com. Today’s subject is about how you can improve your sight reading by looking at chunks of music. When you first start out it’s really tough just being able to identify notes on the page! Eventually you get to the point where you start to make the relationship between lines and spaces and keys on the piano. So when you see line to line, you skip the space, and when you see space to space, you skip the line, which means you skip a key when you’re going from line to line or space to space. Chords usually are all on lines or all on spaces because they’re built on the interval of a third which is every other note of a scale. Or if you’re going from line to space to line to space, they’re probably going to be consecutive notes on the keyboard. Now, of course, there are black keys. That’s a whole other issue, but this is one way that you can improve your reading, by identifying distances between notes.

When you have really high or low ledger lines, way above or below the staff, sometimes it’s hard to know what the notes are.

There are some little cheats you can use. For example, when you have really high notes, if the bottom note is on a space and the top note is on a space, that’s not an octave. Because octaves are always space to line or line to space. That’s a little tip for you. If you have never really thought about this before, you can sometimes guess the right note if it looks like around an octave. But it better be line to space or space to line, or it’s not an octave. But what I’m talking about today is something quite different.

The secret of sight reading is to look at groups of notes!

At first, when you’re reading, it’s an arduous task. It took me many years to become a good sight reader. The secret is instead of looking note to note, look at groups of notes. Depending upon the piece, sometimes you’ll look at half measures at a time, taking in the entire thing as a digestible chunk you can comprehend. For example, the famous Bach Prelude for The Well-Tempered Clavier Book One in C major is a great example of this because the whole prelude is just broken chords. So if you’re playing the beginning of this piece, there’s no need to look at every note. Once you see the first chord, you can shoot your eyes to the next measure even before you’re there, because you’re already over the chord that you’re playing. This is an ideal piece to check out this technique for yourself if you’ve never done it before, because the entire piece is broken chords. And the whole measure is the same chord repeated twice, broken. You always want to be looking at the next group of notes, getting ahead of where you are. This is an incredibly valuable technique!

You’re never going to be able to read and keep time if you’re looking at each individual note.

This is one of the most important lessons for learning how to read in a fluid manner. Sometimes you have to surmise what the harmonies are and what the composer’s intentions were. There are some scores that are just so dense with notes and articulations! If you’re sight reading, you can’t always take the time to figure out every little detail. Particularly if you are accompanying other musicians.

Nobody wants you to take the time at rehearsal much less performance!

They’d rather you just flesh it out and get a sense of the music. A lot of times, you can kind of guess what the composer intended by seeing enough of the chord structure that you can play what’s written without necessarily seeing every single note. Now, that’s not an ideal situation. But if you’re reading something for the very first time, particularly if you’re playing with other musicians, sometimes that’s necessary.

Try this in your reading!

I’m very interested in how this works for you! Take a piece like Debussy’s 1st Arabesque or Bach’s Prelude in C Major to start, but you can do this with virtually any music! Some music is going to be a lot more difficult to do this technique with. That’s why a Bach fugue is really hard to sight read, because it doesn’t break itself down this way. You have too many separate lines. So this is not 100% foolproof. But in some pieces of music, it’s a godsend! So try it out for yourself and let me know how it works for you! Thanks so much 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

www.LivingPianos.com
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949-244-3729

Brahms & Ravel VS Tchaikovsky & Beethoven

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today may sound strange to you. Today we’ll be discussing Brahms & Ravel versus Tchaikovsky & Beethoven. What could I possibly be talking about? These are four great composers, and this indeed is not a contest. It’s just an interesting observation, a fundamental difference among composers. There is something that Brahms and Ravel share that distinguishes them from Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. There is a fundamental difference in how they presented their music to the public, which lives on to this day. I wonder, do any of you know what the difference is?

Brahms and Tchaikovsky are both 19th century Romantic composers who wrote a lot of works.

Tchaikovsky wrote six symphonies, and Brahms wrote four symphonies. So the output of Tchaikovsky is a little bit bigger than Brahms in this regard. However, if you look at what orchestras typically program, it’s only three of the Tchaikovsky symphonies that get 90% of the play. The Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth symphonies are played constantly. They’re played in public performance and recording. If you were to search out how many different recordings there are of those latter three symphonies, it’s far greater than his first three symphonies. Not that those early works were mediocre, by any stretch of the imagination. However, the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies are arguably better works than his earlier ones.

So what about Brahms? He wrote four symphonies. Could you say that maybe the third and fourth are better than the first two? I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, you might have a favorite, but you couldn’t honestly say that any one of those Brahms Symphonies is better than the next. Why is this?

Brahms destroyed any music he didn’t feel was on the absolute highest level!

We don’t know what Brahms wrote that wasn’t his absolute best. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, wrote a lot of works. Some of them are phenomenally great, for example his B-flat Minor Piano Concerto. Everybody knows and loves that concerto. But that is his second piano concerto. What about his first concerto? I don’t even really know it, and you probably don’t either, because it’s seldom played. The second concerto is a blockbuster everybody knows and loves. So Tchaikovsky released whatever he had, whereas Brahms was more selective. And the same thing is true of Ravel.

Beethoven, on the other hand, wrote nine great symphonies.

Beethoven didn’t write any bad symphonies. However, generally, the odd-numbered symphonies are the ones that are really enriching, and played much more often than the even-numbered ones. They’re all great worthwhile works. But you could arguably say that his third, fifth, seventh and ninth are his most famous works for good reason. Not that any of them are bad works, because it’s all great music! But there are some Beethoven works that are arguably better than others, and have lived on more.

Beethoven wrote 32 piano sonatas. There are some that are absolutely stupendous! They’re all more than worthwhile. But some are arguably better, like the Appassionata, the Hammerklavier and the Pathetique. Yet Beethoven wrote other sonatas that are not played as much. They’re still worthwhile works. He let it all out, for better or for worse, and they’re all worthwhile! But some are more substantial works than others.

If Brahms and Ravel had released more of their music that wasn’t up to their highest standard, would we be richer for it?

I certainly wouldn’t want to have less Beethoven and Tchaikovsky works out there! Even if some of the pieces are not among the absolute cream of those composers, it’s still nice to be able to hear and enjoy those works. So it’s a different methodology. I’m curious as to what your feeling is about composers being very selective and self-editing (or burning as Brahms did!) before the music even gets out to the public. We only have the greatest works of Brahms and Ravel. But with Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, there are some works that are still great, but not as great as some of their other works.

I hope this has been interesting for you! Let me know how you feel about this in the comments! Can you name composers you feel released things they perhaps shouldn’t have? Or composers you wish had released more? It’s a tough thing as a composer, knowing which compositions to release and which ones to hold back. The same thing is true as a performer. If you have recordings of concerts, or recordings that you made in the studio, which ones should you release and which ones should you hold back? Thanks so much 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

www.LivingPianos.com
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949-244-3729