Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about the worst mistake you can make on the piano. There are a lot of different mistakes you can make that are terrible. I picked one particular mistake that I think is worse than any of them!

What kind of mistakes can you make on the piano?

You could hit wrong notes. Wrong notes are certainly bad. Of course you don’t want to play wrong notes! You could play the wrong rhythm. A lot of people play wrong rhythms. What about somebody who plays with an ugly sound? That’s a terrible mistake, isn’t it? Another mistake is smearing everything with the pedal. Some people think they’re playing really musically by using a lot of pedal. It can cover up a lot of inadequacies if the fingering is bad and things aren’t as connected as they should be. But of course you sacrifice the clarity of your playing. So what could possibly be worse than wrong notes, wrong rhythms, or an ugly sound?

The most insidious problem on the piano is…………..Hesitation!

Why is hesitation so bad? Well, have you ever seen a film where there’s a jump cut in the middle of the film? There’s a mistake in the editing where a scene jumps back or forward a little bit. It’s jarring! Even if you weren’t paying attention to the film, it draws you in. It’s the same in musical performance. If somebody is playing and then suddenly they make a mistake and hesitate for a moment and go back a little bit, it takes you out of the moment. It draws you in more than other mistakes.

When you make a mistake in your practice, you’re probably in the habit of stopping and correcting it.

That is the appropriate thing to do when you practice. But in performance, the show must go on! You have to keep moving. If you hesitate, everyone will be disturbed by it. It not only makes you look bad, it takes the joy out of the musical performance for the audience. They’re trying to just soak it in and enjoy it. They might be able to overlook little mistakes like cracked notes or slight rhythmic inaccuracies. But once you lose the continuity, it ruins the musical performance. So what can you do about it?

You must differentiate when you are practicing and when you are performing.

Not only that, you must practice performing! Most of the time when you’re practicing, if you make a mistake, you go back and correct it. As I’ve explained, this is a multi-pronged exercise. First, take out the score. Find exactly where the correction is and take note of it. Work out the correction until it is solidified and repeatable. Then go back to the beginning of that phrase and pass that point several times until smooth. Are you done? No, you’re not done yet! Believe it or not, you must go back to the beginning of the piece or the beginning of the whole section. Even though you’ve made the correction and you’ve even put the correction into a musical context by starting a little bit before, if you are used to missing it when starting from the beginning, you will probably miss it again unless you’re present at that moment. You’ve got to think it through. So it takes all of that work to make a correction.

How do you practice performing?

The easiest way is doing it by yourself. To have the discipline, take out your phone or other recording device and set it up. Get it into your head that this is a performance. No matter what, you’re not going to stop. You’re not going to correct anything. That’s not the appropriate time to make corrections. Nobody wants to hear you practice in the middle of a performance! Once you get comfortable performing by yourself or for a device that records you, then you can play for close friends or relatives. Take advantage of that opportunity to see how you will recover from mistakes.

You have to practice recovering from mishaps.

Everybody has mishaps! There isn’t a pianist alive who doesn’t have a finger slip or a memory insecurity at some point in a performance. You must learn how to deal with it. The only way to do that is by practicing performing. So those are the two lessons for today. One, avoid hesitations by practicing how to eradicate them with the three pronged approach of finding the place in the score and working out the correction, going back to the beginning of that phrase and being able to get through that point several times, and then going back to the beginning of the piece or the section and thinking through the correction. And the second thing is to practice performing so you can play from the beginning to the end of a piece without losing continuity, without hesitations. I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about why you can’t sit too close to your piano. Oftentimes I see people sitting too close to their pianos. You might think it’s nice to be close to the music. Well, there’s a very big problem with that when you’re trying to play in the extreme registers.

When you sit too close to the piano you end up with an extreme angle of the hands.

You can’t possibly play comfortably. The bend is tremendous! Your elbows push into the sides of your body. It’s a nightmare trying to play this way. So sit back a bit. You’ll know you’re at the right distance if you put your hands straight out with your wrists bent and they reach the fallboard. That means your elbows are in front of you, not next to you when you’re playing the piano. That enables you to play in all registers of the piano easily.

You don’t need to scoot around on the bench to reach the extreme registers.

I see many students move over on the bench so they can play the high register. Then they scoot back over to play the low register. What happens if they’re playing something that goes quickly from high to low register? You can’t possibly be jumping around the bench to get to different areas of the keyboard.

From a central position, you can reach all the keys!

The keys are not that far apart. So find a central location far enough from the keyboard that your elbows won’t get in your way. That way you can comfortably play in the high register and low register on your piano. You’re going to be in great shape this way! If you haven’t been sitting at this distance, try it for yourself. See how it makes you feel, particularly when playing the extreme registers on your piano. 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

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

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to feel dotted rhythms. What does a dot do to a note? That’s a good question. A lot of people say a dot after a note adds half the value of the note. That can be kind of confusing because if you have a quarter note, half of a quarter is an eighth. Particularly if you’re teaching piano to children and you say, “How much is a quarter plus an eighth?” You’re going to get a glazed look in their eyes. So another way of looking at what dots do to notes is to say that a dot after a note adds the value of the next faster note.

All the note values are half the value of each successive note.

A whole note contains 2 half notes. A half note contains 2 quarter notes. A quarter note contains 2 eighth notes. An eighth note contains 2 sixteenth notes. So a dot on a whole note adds a half note to the whole note. A dot on a half note adds a quarter note to the half note. A dot on a quarter note adds an eighth note. You get the idea. It’s always adding the next faster note. There’s another way of looking at this.

A dot after a note adds the next faster note, but it also equals three of those notes.

If you have a dotted whole note, that makes a whole note plus a half note. That’s a total of three half notes. It’s the same thing. A dotted half note equals a half note plus a quarter note, which is three quarter notes. Why am I bringing this up? Because a dotted rhythm usually means that you have a dotted note, followed by the shorter note. So, for example, if you have a dotted eighth note, that’s an eighth note plus a sixteenth note, which is 3 sixteenth notes. Usually it will be a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth. So you have 3 sixteenth notes basically tied together, followed by another sixteenth. So in counting in 3/4 time, for example, in Clementi’s Sonatina in G major Opus 36, the second movement has a dotted rhythm. If it was a fast enough tempo, imagine having those 16th notes ticking on your metronome. That would be ungodly fast! Metronomes don’t even typically go that fast. Trying to play with that would be hard. So what can you do about that to make it easier?

First, I want to show you what the danger is with dotted rhythms.

The dotted rhythm is a total of four subdivisions, three plus one. So it can be very easy for your rhythm to degenerate into a triple division like in 6/8 time. For example, having a quarter followed by an eighth. A quarter note contains 2 eighth notes. So this should be a total of three divisions, two plus one, instead of the three plus one that a dotted rhythm is, as I explained earlier. So how do you get the precision of the dotted rhythm so it doesn’t sound like a triple division?

I have a dotted rhythm hack!

Instead of having the metronome ticking 16th notes, suppose you have just the eighth notes ticking. Put the metronome at half the speed. But I’ve got another further little trick for you. Put it even at half the speed of that! Just have the second eighth of each beat ticking. Then you just have the 16th come between the tick and the next note. That eighth note is the pulse you have to feel in order to fit the dotted rhythm in so it’s not approximate and it doesn’t degenerate into a triple feel. You can experience this for yourself with the accompanying video.

So that’s the way to feel dotted rhythms!

Feel that second eighth note and just fit the 16th between the second eighth and the next beat. I hope this makes sense to you! If you’re trying this on your own, I suggest you first have eighth notes ticking and practice just by clapping. Put the metronome on with eighth notes ticking, and then fit the sixteenth notes in where they belong. That’s the dotted rhythm tip for the day. I hope it’s helpful for you! Let me know in the comments here at 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

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to share with you the ultimate wrist exercise for your piano technique. Wrists are so important in piano playing! Everyone knows that you need to use your fingers in order to play the piano. But the fingers don’t do you much with fast chords and octaves. It’s very hard to play octaves with your fingers with the exception of legato octaves. But when something is fast, there’s no way the fingers can keep up. You have to use your wrists! If you use your arms, it’s cumbersome. You can’t go fast enough! The wrists are also incredibly important for chord technique. There are some chord techniques that are slower and bigger where you use your arms in order to get maximum power. But in most instances, the wrists must be utilized. The arms are just too big and slow.

How do you develop the wrists?

Developing the independence of the wrists so you use them separately from your arms is a major difficulty for some people. For others it comes quite naturally. Some people struggle to avoid arm motion when utilizing the wrist. Your arms have too much mass to go fast enough in many cases. But your wrists can go very fast! Here is a very simple exercise for you.

It’s how you do the exercise that makes all the difference.

It only utilizes the second and fourth fingers in both hands. Using only your wrists, you just go up on white keys starting on C and E in both hands ascending in thirds. You just go eight times on C and E, then you go up eight times on D and F. You go up as high as you want diatonically (by white keys), then come back down again eight times on each third. Do this with the metronome set at 60.

When you do this exercise, your arms should not be going up and down at all.

You want to use only the wrists. But the arms are very important! They must guide the hands over the right keys. So after the eighth time playing C and E, the arms move right over D and F. If you’ve never done this exercise before, you’re going to feel it in your forearms, because these are muscles you don’t ordinarily use. If you are a tennis player you might have very well-developed wrists. But other than that, there are not a lot of times when you use your wrists independently from your arms. The first time you do this you might not keep the wrist motion separate from your arms and have both of them working together. That doesn’t do much to strengthen your wrists when using your arms.

Keep your wrists up the entire time, except for the brief moment when they play.

Another problem you might face is letting your hands fall back down on the keys when you’re not playing. It may seem fine when practicing slowly, but this is a hyper slowed down version of what you need to be able to accomplish playing fast later. There won’t be time to go back down. You must strike from above. It has to be one motion.

There’s one more problem to watch out for. You have your wrists raised, but then your arms get lazy and start lowering. Before you know it, you’re playing in a terribly uncomfortable position with your wrists bent way up. Even when you’re playing the notes, they can still be bent. This isn’t good. It can be destructive, as a matter of fact. You don’t want to flex too far because you have nerves that can be stressed. So it’s a gentle slope of the wrist. At the moment the keys are struck, your wrists should be straight.

Go through this exercise once every day. You’ll be amazed at how the independence of your wrists helps you to develop strength, and speed!

The wrists are so important, from octaves to chord technique to delineating staccatos. Utilizing the wrists for staccatos gives you a crisp sound. When using your arms for staccatos, you would get a limp, heavy sound. The wrists play an incredibly important part in piano playing! This exercise can help you develop the independence and strength of your wrists. 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

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. The subject today is about why a piano should be on an inside wall. You’ve probably heard before that you must put a piano on an inside wall. There is some truth there. Why should that be important?

Pianos are incredibly delicate instruments.

Pianos are robust in some respects. But the wood of the piano, particularly the soundboard, is susceptible to very small changes in the atmosphere in regards to temperature and humidity. This is particularly true with an upright. If you have an upright against a wall and the wall has any drafts at all, then the piano will not hold its tuning as well. Worse yet, if there’s a heating vent or something blowing in the back of the piano, it could destroy the soundboard. So in some homes, it’s really important to avoid an outside wall with your piano.

Modern homes are very well insulated.

You can judge for yourself. Is it a place you would be comfortable sitting day in and day out? If so, your piano should be fine. But if it’s a place that’s drafty or cold or the sun is beating on you, this could be a bad place for your piano. So it’s really just common sense. In a well insulated home, an outside wall shouldn’t present a problem, so long as the sun isn’t beating on your piano and you don’t have a hot air vent or a radiator nearby. But for older, drafty homes, it’s really essential to use an inside wall for your piano.

There’s another thing to consider, which is disturbing neighbors.

If you’re in an apartment, you don’t want your piano on an adjacent wall with another apartment. This is particularly true with an upright. It’s going to throw the sound right into your neighbor’s room. So you could have trouble. There’s a lot to be considered here. 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

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

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. Today’s subject is about how to identify notes on the piano. You have 88 keys on the piano. What are they? I’m sure many of you already know the answer to that question. But for those of you who don’t know what the keys are on the piano, I will explain. We get a lot of pianos here at Living Pianos. Sometimes somebody has carefully put little letters on every one of the keys across the keyboard. Is that necessary? No, it’s not necessary! So, how can you figure out all these notes?

Why do pianos have black and white keys?

I have a video on that subject which you can watch here. The simple answer is, if they were all white keys, you wouldn’t be able to find any of the notes. You would have no reference. If you look at the way the piano keyboard is oriented with groups of two and three black keys, it’s a repeating pattern. Now, here’s how to find the notes on the piano. You have groups of two black keys and groups of three black keys. Any group of two, if you go to the white key just to the left, that is C. Now, what is so significant about that? Well, from there, you can go up the alphabet on the white keys. C, D, E, F G. Then it continues with the first letter of the alphabet. A, B, C. The octave higher C is also below two black keys. So now you can find all the keys on the piano. Any time you have two black keys, the note to the left is a C. The highest note on the keyboard is also a C.

What about the black keys?

The black keys are designated by either sharps or flats. But white keys can also be sharps or flats. Any two keys that are next to each other, black or white, are all called half steps. Two keys together with no keys between are a half step apart. There are white keys that are a half step apart. So what’s the significance of this?

A sharp raises a note a half step.

If you have a C sharp, it raises it a half step to the black key to the right of C. If you have D sharp, it would go up a half step as well to the black key to the right of D. You can even have an E sharp. It would be the same key as F on the piano because a sharp raises a note by a half step, and the next key on the piano is a white key.

There are also flats which lower notes by a half step.

It’s the same principle. So if you have a C flat, it’s the same key as B on the piano. But it would be indicated in your score as C flat. A B flat would be a half step lower than B, etc. So that is the way black keys are designated on the piano. You may wonder why white keys would sometimes be indicated with flats or sharps. Scales are written diatonically with all the letters in order without skipping or repeating any. On the staff they appear on consecutive lines and spaces. They are actually easier to read that way, believe it or not!

I hope this is helpful for you! Now you know all the notes on the piano. You can figure all 88 out just from that brief tutorial. 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

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. I’m here with an incredible practicing tip that will turbocharge the work you do at the piano: Assembly line practicing. What is this all about? I’m going to tell you all about it and how it relates to your piano playing. Early in the 20th century, Henry Ford revolutionized automobile manufacturing by making the assembly line.

The assembly line lets people work on all stages of development simultaneously.

Another great example of this is the post-World War II housing boom. I grew up on Long Island adjacent to Levittown, where potato fields were transformed into whole neighborhoods seemingly in an instant. How was this done? Previously, houses were built from the beginning to the end. Then when the houses were finished, the builders would move on to the next house. Well, there’s a much more efficient way. If you’ve ever been to a neighborhood being built, you see tractors digging dirt. You go a little further and see foundations being laid. Further still you see frames of houses being assembled. Then the electrical and plumbing are being put in. When you get to the very end of the neighborhood, there’s the model home. All the work is being done on all these multiple stages of development simultaneously. It’s an incredibly productive way of building neighborhoods.

How does this relate to your piano practice?

If you have watched my videos, you are probably aware of the way I practice, and the way I teach my students to practice. Rather than practicing a whole piece and eventually trying to memorize it, you flip it. Read through the piece a couple of times, then get right down to work and start memorizing a little chunk at a time. However, this type of practice is incredibly mentally challenging. Everyone thinks that it’s hard just for them, but it’s hard for everyone if you’re doing it right! Let’s say you’re learning a new piece. You learn as much as you can and it’s enough for the day. The next day you can refine what you’ve done the previous day. But you also forge forward.

Eventually you have music at many different stages of development.

The first section is at performance level, like that model home or the finished car coming off the assembly line. Later on, maybe after the double bar in the development section of a sonata movement, it needs further polishing. So you work to refine that. You’re trying to refine what you learned the day before and solidify your memory. Yet you are always memorizing new material to add to the pipeline for the next day.

Your practice becomes exponentially more productive.

You can’t just memorize for an entire practice session. There’s a point of diminishing returns of your effectiveness. There’s only so much you can absorb at one time. So you memorize what you can. Then you refine what you did the previous day and the days before that. The first sections of a piece may be at performance level, especially a multi movement work. You might have the first movement at performance level. The second movement is coming along. This is what I mean by assembly line practice. It’s so effective if you can work on different stages of development all at the same time. Instead of just working on a whole piece and trying to get it up to a high level, then go on to the next piece, you work on all different stages of development within the work. You can even be working on the second and third movements while you’re doing the final polishing on the first movement. 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

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

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. The subject today is about how failure breeds success in music. When you see somebody who is accomplished on the piano, you might think it’s easy for them. Things must just come naturally to them. They’re so talented! But if you see behind the scenes what it takes, it’s the people who can fail again and again and again, and yet keep trying who become seasoned artists. This isn’t just in music. This covers a wide range of activities.

As a child I took a vacation with my family to the Finger Lakes and we had an opportunity to water ski.

I wanted to stand up on the skis. I tried and I tried. I’d start up and then bam, I’d be down. I was relentless, trying it again and again and again. I didn’t want to give up. I really wanted nothing more than to be successful. I even stood on the skis outside of the water tied to a tree to try to get the sense of it! Try as I might, I could not seem to stay up on the skis in the water. My sister today says that at the time, they didn’t have skis that fit me. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe she’s just being kind, because I guess it could be an embarrassing situation. Although I wasn’t embarrassed. I just wanted to water ski so darn badly! Eventually they had this contraption that was supposed to hold the skis together and then lift up. I used it and it held the skis together, but it never lifted up! There I went halfway around the lake, hunched over. That was the degree of success I had in water skiing. Many years later, I was on a boat with friends and they were offering water skiing. I tried it again and I was finally successful!

How does this relate to piano?

As a child, my hands were very weak. I have small hands even now. But as a child, I could barely reach an octave. Even in my teens I could only reach an octave around the keys. I was playing some pretty sophisticated music and I couldn’t even reach an octave! I rose to the occasion to play the whole Debussy Children’s Corner suite when I was 13 years old, which was really an achievement for me. There was a strong B-flat octave at the very end of the suite (Golliwog’s Cakewalk). And it just sounded anemic. My father actually had me leave out the octave in the left hand at the end and use all my fingers on the key in each hand to get some power to end the piece strongly. That was a really good workaround. I had to struggle for years to develop strength. When I was in Salzburg, Austria, in high school, I spent a summer studying at the Mozarteum. This was a time when I really practiced a lot. I was working on the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6. I spent hours and hours practicing to the point where I had cracked, bloody nails. I was just trying to develop strength. That piece ends with a huge octave section that you’ve probably heard before. So that’s what I did to try to overcome natural weakness.

Other pianists might have completely different obstacles to overcome.

I remember one of my father’s students who was very talented from an emotional level. He had fire in his playing! It was a pleasure to listen to him. But his brain didn’t always cooperate. So his challenge was just holding the cohesiveness of the form together. Holding together an extended work or a whole program was very difficult for him. He had the fire, the passion, the technique, but musical intellect was his challenge. So he worked very hard. He’s a seasoned artist with a career. Everybody has to find what failures they have and build upon them. It doesn’t all come naturally.

It’s how you deal with failure that makes the difference.

If failure makes you feel defeated, and you stop trying, you won’t ever overcome weakness. But if you choose to fight on and not accept failure, that’s the secret to success! It doesn’t happen easily for people. It just seems that way on the outside. So remember, if you’re suffering from failure in your playing or in anything in life, just keep persevering! You can learn from your mistakes as to how to solve them appropriately in the future. The more things you try, the more things you know that don’t work. Thomas Edison once said of his struggle to invent the light bulb, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” That’s what it is with the piano. You try, and keep trying, until you find the answers that solve your problems so you can overcome failure in your music. I hope this is helpful and perhaps even inspiring to 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/RobertEstrinContact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com