Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. I’m here at the PIPPA Piano Convention. It’s the first of its kind! I play the French horn, and I always enjoyed going to the French horn convention, the International Horn Workshop. My wife is a flutist. There’s a flute convention; there’s a trumpet convention; there’s a trombone convention; there are conventions for almost every instrument except the piano until now, with PIPPA: Piano Industry Professionals & Producers Affiliated. This piano convention includes pianists, piano teachers, piano technicians and piano manufacturers from all over the world!

I’m really excited to try many pianos including a Hailun 9-foot concert grand piano!

This is the first time I’ve ever played this piano. It is a great opportunity to try so many instruments from around the world. You can check out the accompanying video to hear this 9-foot concert grand from one of China’s premier piano companies, a country with so many piano manufacturers.

Out of hundreds of piano companies in China, Hailun is among the best.

This piano has such a velvety smooth action. It’s really beautifully crafted. With hundreds of piano companies, the competition in China is tremendous because there are tens of millions of piano students there. And this is the pinnacle of what’s coming out of China today. And there are so many other pianos here. There are Petrof pianos from the Czech Republic, which are absolutely exquisite handcrafted instruments. There are pianos, pianists, piano technicians, and piano teachers from all over the world here at PIPPA.

It’s an amazing thing for all of us to be able to get together!

I hope you enjoy this! I think it’s great, and I look forward to visiting PIPPA again! Let me know what you think about the whole idea of a piano convention 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.

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.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m asking: Can you play at 208 on the metronome? Metronomes have all kinds of speeds, typically starting at 40 and going to 208. There are metronome applications that you can put on your phone where any number can be selected. But there’s a reason why these numbers exist in the first place. I’m going to show you that to begin with, and then I’m going to explain some things about the metronome that you probably don’t know.

The slowest speed on most metronomes is 40, and the fastest is 208.

Any speed slower than 40 would be very difficult to follow because it wouldn’t feel like a pulse anymore. Any speed faster than 208 would be very hard to follow as well. Now, how to set a metronome is a whole other issue. Metronomes have guides on them for how to set the tempo showing the range of speeds for Adagio, Andante, Allegro, etc. I’m going to show you how farcical that whole idea is by demonstrating it for you. I’m going to play the famous Mozart C-major Sonata K. 545. I’m going to set the metronome at 208. Can I play this piece at 208!? Watch the video to see for yourself!

It depends on what note value you assign the ticks.

I let the metronome tick sixteenth notes. It wasn’t fast at all! On the flip side, I set the metronome on 40 and let the ticks equal whole notes. That is a very fast tempo! With a beat that slow, trying to feel the pulse is difficult. So really, you must choose the note value that makes the most sense.

You don’t need accented beats on your metronome.

All the metronome apps have accented beats, and it’s really unnecessary for most purposes. The reason why I don’t like that, aside from it being completely unnecessary, is that when you’re practicing with the metronome, you have to wait for that first beat. You can’t just go in on the next beat. If you were playing a slow piece in six, it would take up a lot of time waiting for the first beat. So a simple quartz metronome is your best bet. The other problem with many digital metronomes is that they have every numeric value. You don’t need every single number. If you’re going from 116 to 117, it’s an infinitesimally small increment. 116 to 120, which is what a metronome has, makes more sense. So you should find a metronome or metronome application that has the true numbers of a traditional metronome, not every number.

So yes, you can play at 208 on the metronome!

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about the five benefits of scales and arpeggios. Maybe you work on scales and arpeggios on a regular basis. Maybe you know you should, but you don’t. You might wonder if it’s really that important. I’m going to give you five reasons why working on scales and arpeggios is worth your while!

One of the most obvious reasons is that it improves the evenness of your playing.

When you’re playing scales, you are focusing on the evenness. You’re focusing on your hands being precisely together, the evenness of the sound, and the evenness of the release of the notes. It gives you that benefit in your playing because scales are an abstraction. It’s not music. But if you practice your scales diligently with a metronome slowly and then increase the speed until you can play scales rapidly with evenness, think what that does for your playing!

Playing scales can help you develop strength.

There are two reasons for this. First of all, you will play more notes in a short amount of time when you’re working on scales and arpeggios than working on your music. A lot of your practice of music is a mental exercise. If you’re learning a score, you’re focusing on all the details, like the harmonies and the fingering. It’s a mental effort. When you’re working on scales and arpeggios, it’s all physical. Slow practice of scales is unbelievably important. In fact, in some ways, it’s even more important than fast-practicing of scales. You really develop strength when you’re hammering each note with your fingers, not just using your arms. Of course, you get a lot of power with your arms, but try to play fast that way. It can’t be done! But if you use each finger, raising the fingers and coming down, it stretches your hands and fingers so that you can get a nice, clean attack on each note. Most importantly, you get precise releases of previously played notes in scales and arpeggios. So the spaces between the notes are equal. This is a tremendous way to develop strength in your playing.

Another benefit of working on scales is developing speed in your playing.

How do scales help you develop speed? Once again, the metronome to the rescue! You work slowly. Now you may be able to go from one note to the beat to two notes to the beat. But going from two notes to four notes could be too great a leap. So you might want to just do one or two notches faster at a time on the metronome. As you’re getting faster, you’re getting lighter so that you can develop speed. It’s a terrific way to develop speed because you don’t have all the complexity of shifting harmonies, inner voices, fingering patterns, phrasing, and expression. It’s just an abstraction of piano technique. So it’s a terrific way to develop speed in your playing.

Knowing all major and minor scales and arpeggios is a tremendous benefit to your fingering.

After all, the vast majority of music you play is built on scales and broken chords. If you know all your scales and arpeggios, when you have them in your music, it’s not something you have to practice. You already have the technique there! Now you might think, how can you learn all scales and arpeggios? Well, there’s a very simple way, and that is to just focus on one each week. Spend 5 or 10 minutes a day on scales in your practice. When your mind is tired and you’re ready to quit, that’s the perfect time for scales or arpeggios! It uses a different kind of concentration. Even though you might be mentally tired from memorizing or working out thorny passages in your music, you can still work on scales.

If you do one a week, after a year, you’ll know all major and minor scales and arpeggios!

But that’s not the end. That’s the beginning! Next year, you can start increasing the speed of all of them. Some of them might become more fluent than others. I suggest keeping track of them with a chart so that you know which ones need work. Eventually, you’ll get all your major and minor scales and arpeggios at a certain speed. Then you can notch that up and notch it up again. It’s a never-ending process! There are many other ways you can practice scales and arpeggios, but the first order of business is just to learn all of them. If you consistently spend 5 or 10 minutes a day on scales and arpeggios, it will really help your playing.

Lastly, it improves your reading of music.

When you’re reading a score, if there are scale passages and arpeggios, you don’t have to figure them out. You will already know how to play them! So the fingering becomes obvious. These passages become fluid for you. So these are five reasons it’s worth spending 5 or 10 minutes a day on scales and arpeggios. Once again, it improves your evenness, develops your strength, increases your speed, helps you with fingering, and improves your reading. So if you haven’t been doing scales and arpeggios on a regular basis, what are you waiting for? You don’t have to spend hours a day doing it; just a little bit of time each day when you’re tired of working on other things. Add this to your regimen! I promise you will get benefits. What has it done for your playing? Share your thoughts on scales and arpeggios 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.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you why all beats are not created equal. Did you know that typically in 4/4 time, the strong beats are the first and third beats? The weaker beats are the second and fourth beats. In particular, the fourth beat is not as strong.

The way you count should reflect the feel of the music.

Instead of counting rigidly, you end up counting with accents on the first beat or the first and third beats. I’m going to demonstrate this with a Haydn sonata in D major, so you can hear for yourself. First, I’m going to play it with all the beats absolutely equal to hear what it sounds like, then I will play it with accented beats.

Watch the video to see the demonstration!

When you play with all the beats equal, it doesn’t have a bounce. It doesn’t have a pulse. It just kind of plods along. By playing with accented beats, you give your music a pulse. This isn’t only for 4/4 time. How about 3/4 time? You certainly wouldn’t play a waltz with all beats equal. It would lose the feel of the music.

You have to figure out where the strong beats are.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about the magic of fractal practicing. Fractals are when one part of something is the same as the whole. No matter how small you go, it’s just a replication of the bigger part. You’ve probably seen pictures that are fractals. No matter how much you zoom in, you keep seeing the same patterns. Your music could be thought of in the same way.

Watch the video to see the demonstration!

I’m going to demonstrate with a little piece of Kabalevsky called Fairy Tale. I’m going to start at the beginning and play a little bit, delineating each phrase for you. Then I’m going to do it again, but this time I’m going to put those two phrases together as one long phrase and see what that sounds like.

You could take a whole section of music and think of it as one big phrase.

Ultimately, the entire piece is one statement. As Rachmaninoff said, “The bigger the phrase, the bigger the musician.” Now, here’s where it gets really interesting. If you’re playing a program with several different pieces, for example, you play a sonata, which has three or four movements. At first, each movement is its own concept, its own large phrase. Eventually, the whole sonata becomes a coherent whole thought—one big phrase. Then half a program can become one musical statement. And then the entire program can be one big phrase.

If you start thinking about these larger units in your music, it becomes true storytelling on a personal level.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you how you can use tempo as a practicing tool. This is incredibly valuable for you! It could save you a vast amount of time by making your practicing more efficient.

You all know that practicing slowly is incredibly valuable.

For example, I’m working on this Liszt Sonata in B minor. There’s a section in there that goes quite fast. Practicing slowly can help you get each note absolutely secure. But sometimes, you’re working on all these different passages, and you wonder where you should focus your attention. Maybe you can already play most of it pretty well, but you don’t know where the trouble spots or potential trouble spots will be in a performance. During a performance, you might be a little bit nervous. Maybe your hands are a little sweaty. Maybe you’re playing on a piano that’s unfamiliar. Maybe you’re taking a tempo slightly faster than you realize because of the excitement of the moment.

Try to play your piece faster than usual and see how much of it you can get through securely.

Take a faster tempo, and wherever you can’t play up to that tempo, that’s where you focus your attention. See how much of it you can play accurately and cleanly, and then take it from there. This helps you figure out which parts are weaker than the rest. Then, once you find the areas that need attention, flip it and go back to that slow practice. Slow practice is one of the most valuable tools you can use in your daily work at the piano. Even with something you can already play up to tempo, going very, very slowly with the score, and using the metronome, and without the pedal, is one of the best ways to secure your piano playing. Then, as a test, take things fast. Take things too fast, so you can see which parts are weaker than the rest! This way, you can maximize the effectiveness of your practicing at the piano. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.