Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to negotiate when you’re buying a piano. This doesn’t just apply to pianos. You’ve probably experienced this if you’ve bought a car or anything where the price isn’t set. With large ticket items there’s often negotiation in the pricing. How do you approach such a thing? A lot of people are very uncomfortable with this. That’s why cars are being sold at Costco, so people don’t have to negotiate. There are also things like college sales where the prices are pretty much set so you don’t have to go through the rigmarole of having to negotiate down to the lowest price.

How do you approach negotiating a price?

Well, there are all different personality types in this world. You have to go with what’s comfortable for you. But what I recommend is to just be honest with people. If you tell the salesperson what you’re looking for, what your budget is, and what you have seen, you give them the opportunity to help you. After all, they’re there to make a living. You want to let them know what they’re up against. They might be able to give you special treatment if you let them know the truth!

Be honest and respectful.

Blowing a bunch of smoke and pretending things, that’s really not going to help you. You want to deal with people in a respectful manner and, hopefully, most people are going to be respectful back. There’s no science to this. It’s just a matter of being forthright with people. You should be able to find out what the situation is and work something out if you find the right piano for yourself. Keep in mind that there isn’t always room in the price of pianos or cars. Right now there is scarcity of both due to shipping industry problems.

So some prices are actually being negotiated up from list price!

I hope this is helpful for you! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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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 what to do with a piece you have learned. There are so many things you can do with it! The first thing is the most obvious thing in the world: Play it! You’d be surprised how many people learn pieces but never play them and they forget them. There are so many benefits to playing the pieces you have learned. One, it’s fun! What’s all the work for anyway if not to be able to play music? Secondly, it keeps the pieces fresh. If you play your pieces every day it gets to the point where you can just whip them off without any problems. So if you ever have a performance opportunity, you’re so used to playing it that it’s almost automatic.

Playing your pieces keeps you physically and mentally in shape on the piano.

A lot of people spend hours a day on exercises to keep their fingers in shape and their muscles moving. You know what? There are many pieces of music that can accomplish the same thing. Now this isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for exercises. There certainly is. Scales, arpeggios, octaves and other exercises are a vital part of piano practice. But in regards to just keeping your fingers limber and the muscles in good shape, playing through your music can accomplish that. You also have the ancillary benefits of developing fluidity and reliability in performance. But like anything else, if you play them over and over and over again, there could be minute changes along the way.

It’s important to periodically reference the score of pieces you have memorized.

In the olden days of analog tape recording, if you ever made a tape of a tape of a tape, the sound gets pretty awful. Each successive generation has a little bit of loss of quality, unlike digital recording today. Another example of this is the old game of telephone that we all played in school, where you whisper a message to the person next to you who then whispers it to the person next to them going all the way around the room. At the end, you have a completely different message! Well, you can end up with a completely different piece of music if you just play it over and over and over again without ever referring back to the original score!

How do you approach reviewing your pieces with the score?

The best way is to take your score out and find a tempo at which you can read it. Now that tempo is going to be far slower than the speed you’re probably playing it. If it’s a piece you have played hundreds of times, you have a tempo that’s much faster than the tempo at which you can actually read all the details of the score. Slow way down, find the appropriate speed on the metronome, and take your foot off the pedal so you can clearly hear everything you’re doing. Then exaggerate everything as you play, delineating all the notes, phrasing, fingering and expression. For example, let’s say you learned the Moonlight Sonata and you want to refresh it. You’ve been playing it and playing and playing it and you want to make sure you’re playing it accurately. And you want to solidify the performance. You want to know exactly where all the rests are, whether chords have two notes or three notes, where the crescendos start and end. There are so many little details. It’s not just the notes and the rhythm and the fingering, it’s every single detail you want to cement and re-cement.

I guarantee this will help you with any piece, no matter how well you play it and how well you’ve learned it.

If you slow it down and play with the score, with no pedal, and with a metronome, you will find little things you had forgotten. You’ll cement your performance and make it much stronger. So the lesson for today, what do you do with pieces you’ve played before that you’ve learned? Keep playing them so you don’t forget them, number one. Number two, review with a score, playing slowly with no pedal, with a metronome to make sure you keep an honest performance. There are other practice techniques you can also employ in strategic parts that need the work, but these are the basics for what to do with pieces you already know. I hope this is helpful for you! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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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. The subject today is about how to finger octaves. Octaves have a very simple fingering solution the vast majority of the time. Unless you have very large hands, the simple solution is to use your first and fifth fingers on white keys and your first and fourth fingers on black keys. Now, this is great for legato octaves, but it also divides the load of the hand when playing rapid octaves from the wrist. Using the fourth finger on the black keys divides the load a bit on the hands.

Move your arms in to reach the black keys.

There’s another technique I want to show you that is really vital. The wrists accomplish octaves, but the arms have an essential role in getting over the keys. You want to think of going in and out of the keyboard for black keys to accomplish those octaves without having to reach with your fingers. Move your arms in for black keys and out for white keys. It makes it so much easier. By moving your arms in you don’t have to use so much finger strength to hit the black keys. This is a great technique for you in conjunction with using the fourth finger on black keys. Remember to get over the keys by moving your hands closer to the fallboard for black keys, and closer to you for white keys.

Those are the tips for octaves today!

I’ve made a lot of videos about octaves. You can enjoy all of them here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube as well. We welcome your comments! Thank you for subscribing. I’m 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

Supplemental Content:

How to Play Legato Octaves

The BEST Piano Exercises pt 4

How to Develop Brilliant Octaves in Your Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Are there different pianos made for different types of music? Are there rock pianos, classical pianos, jazz pianos, new age pianos, or ragtime pianos? Some people say a Yamaha piano is best for rock to be able to get that bright sound that cuts through. Can you play rock music on a Steinway? It can be done!

Let me give you a parallel: Computers.

Are there computers made for business, computers made for photography, computers made for music, computers made for video? To some degree, yes. However, any high powered computer can accomplish any of those tasks. A gaming computer might have a beefier graphics card, but any computer can do any job. Some might be a little bit better suited to certain tasks, and some types of applications require more processing power of one sort or another. To a certain degree, the same is true with pianos.

A great deal depends upon the voicing and regulation of the instrument.

You could take a piano like a Steinway, which you think of as having a rich warm sound that maybe gets a little bit of growl when you really lay into it. But if you harden the hammers you’re going to have a really aggressive sounding piano. That might be appropriate for some classical pieces, but it also could be great for ragtime or rock. So there aren’t necessarily pianos that are built for different styles of music. However, the voicing of a piano has a lot to do with how appropriate a piano may be for certain styles or certain players. For example, Vladimir Horowitz played on a super bright piano. Of course, he was a classical pianist. You might wonder why he wanted a bright piano. With his unique technique of sitting low and playing very delicately, he could control that very bright piano and get all different colors from warm to bright, just from the amazing control he had. On the other hand, my father, Morton Estrin, always liked to have his piano voiced on the warm side. He liked that he could play powerfully and never overdrive the piano into a harsh sound. Yet he could still get that beautiful, warm tone when he was playing delicate pianissimo. So any piano can be voiced one way or another.

There could be some pianos that are more appropriate for certain styles.

For example, sometimes European pianos with their bell-like, clear tone can be just wonderful for Mozart. They have a nice, clear, crisp sound. Where an American piano like a Mason & Hamlin, or even a Steinway, may be a bit thick for that sort of music. If you’ve ever heard the original forte pianos from Mozart’s era, it’s a dramatically different sound from a modern piano, particularly the fat sound of a Steinway. So there is some validity to choosing pianos for certain styles of music. But the voicing, and more importantly the playing, will determine which pianos will be appropriate for your music. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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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. The subject today is why looping sections of music doesn’t work in piano practice. It seems counterintuitive since you want to repeat things over and over to solidify them. Many times, I see students struggling, looping something over and over again, and not getting anywhere. Why doesn’t this work? Well, it comes down to the simple fact that practicing has some physiological component to it, but primarily:

Practicing is a thought process.

Take the time to stop and listen. Let’s say you’re working on a piece of music. Everything’s going fine, but then you get to a section that you can’t play up to speed, or it’s sloppy, or uneven. So you start practicing it. You just keep looping that section hoping to make it better. The problem with this is you’ve turned yourself into a robot! You’re just a machine playing it over and over again, without giving yourself the time to listen to what you’re doing. You’re not stopping long enough to make a judgment. Listen closely, then stop and ask yourself if that’s the way you want to play it. If the answer is yes, great! See if you can do it that way again. If the answer is no, decide specifically what you want to do differently next time.

Looping a phrase doesn’t give you time to listen.

When you loop a phrase, your mind can be anywhere. It’s not a thought process anymore. It’s just a mechanical motion. You might get a little exercise for your hands, but are you going to get any real value? Are you going to clean up your playing? Are you going to make it more even? No, you’re just repeating the same thing again and again. So if it happens to be exactly the way you want to play it, great! But if it isn’t, you’re cementing a poor performance. Your hands now know how to play it the way you don’t want because you never stopped to listen. You have to listen each and every time you repeat the phrase so you can determine whether it is what you want. And if it’s not what you want, you need to know exactly what to listen for the next time and find a solution.

Give yourself the time to listen to each repetition of a phrase rather than mindlessly looping it over and over again, because that accomplishes very little.

You’re not really refining your music when you’re just repeating things over and over in a loop fashion. So avoid those loop situations, unless it’s so perfect that you want to loop it again and again, perfectly. At that stage, there’s nothing wrong with looping. But make sure it’s the sound you’re after, because you’re going to cement it into your hands and your ears. If it isn’t exactly what you want, it’s going to be 10 times harder to undo what you have learned. Motor memory is very strong! It takes great intentional work to undo motor memory that’s ingrained in your hand. So looping can be dangerous! Be sure you are mindful taking time between repetitions when you’re practicing sections of music. That’s the lesson for today! I’m 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. The subject today is about improvising using diatonic seventh chords. I’ve been to many conservatories and master classes. Improvisation is almost never taught unless you’re a jazz major. It’s really shameful. As a matter of fact, I remember once meeting a pianist who was doing master’s work at Julliard in piano performance who couldn’t play Happy Birthday by ear! Isn’t that a sad fact? I’m here to show you some very simple improvisation techniques you can use in your playing. If you’re a sophisticated jazz player, this might not be of great value to you, although you might get something out of it. But for those of you who think you can’t improvise, you can! A great deal just comes down to having a command of some basic theory.

You have to know what notes to choose among when you’re improvising.

I’ve talked about simple things like improvising utilizing the dorian mode, but today is a little bit different. I’m going to talk about diatonic seventh chords. Now, that’s a mouthful! What am I talking about? First of all, what are seventh chords? I’ll just give a very quick theory primer, because it’s not that complex. It’s only complex if you don’t know your key signatures and your major scales. You have to learn those first before you can do much of anything with improvisation. It also is unbelievably helpful for your sight reading and learning music. So any of you who haven’t learned your key signatures, I highly recommend it. I’m going to assume you know your key signatures for this lesson, because it’s all based upon that. If you would like a video tutorial on key signatures, just let me know in the comments.

What are diatonic chords?

Well, first of all, what are chords? Chords are notes arranged in the interval of thirds. What are thirds? Thirds are notes of the scale that are three notes apart counting the first and last note. The notes in a scale are all seconds apart. If you skip one note between each scale degree, you have thirds. 7th chords consist of 4 notes: a root, third, fifth and seventh. That’s why they’re called seventh chords! The interesting thing is that you can do this in any major key. If you are in C major, you play every other white key going up from C to form a 4 note chord, C – E – G – B. If you are in D major, you can leave out every other note of the D major scale. You’re left with a D major 7th chord: D – F-sharp – A – C-sharp. You can do this in any key. But that’s just the one-seven chord. That’s a seventh chord built on the first scale degree. What about a two-seven chord? You can start on the second scale degree and have a two-seven. So in C-major, a two-seven will be D – F – A – C. You can start on the third scale degree and have a three-seven chord, and so on.

How does this apply to improvisation?

If you just want to play something really simple, you can go from a one-seven chord to a two-seven chord, back and forth. You can use any note of the scale to make up a tune in your right hand. If you find that easy, you can continue going up to three-seven, then to four-seven, then back down to three-seven, two-seven and finally one-seven. It’s a lot less complicated than it sounds. Here’s the beauty of it: you don’t have to play fast. A lot of times, people see great artists playing a mile a minute and think you have to play fast to improvise. You don’t have to play fast! You just have to make melodies. Strive for something that you would want to sing. It doesn’t have to be fast. It doesn’t have to be technical.

If you find that you’re having difficulty, the difficulty is most likely going to be with your left hand, believe it or not.

It can be challenging keeping the left hand rhythmically coherent, where you’re not changing the chords in random fashion, but holding each of them the same amount of time. You can use a metronome for that. Or better yet, find a drum beat on your keyboard or on YouTube to play along with. The best way is to play with other musicians where there’s give and take. But you can get your feet wet just by finding a drum beat to play along with. YouTube is loaded with drum beats. Just come up with any kind of drum beat you can imagine, like lounge drums, swing, or a shuffle drum beat, and you’ll find them at different speeds (BPM, Beats Per Minute). People have posted just about every kind of beat you can imagine on there! Find one that’s a speed you like, and then experiment!

Try it out for yourself!

Start off in C major. If you’ve never improvised before, just go from a one-seven to a two-seven in C major – back and forth holding each chord for 4 beats. Make sure you maintain the integrity of the comping. In your right hand, just play any white keys. Try to vary how long you hold notes. And play some notes at the same time you play the chords, and sometimes play chords without playing notes at the same time in your right hand. If you have friends who play music, comp for them and let them solo, and then let them comp for you while you solo. Comping is playing the chords behind the solo. Improvising by yourself, where you’re doing both the comping and the soloing is hard at first. If you have musical friends, this can be so much fun for you! When you get into things like blues, and if you learn how to read a lead sheet, which has just the chord symbols and the melody line, it opens up vast possibilities of music for you in a myriad of styles from folk to rock to new age, jazz, blues, country, you name it! This is a great way to get your feet wet. Let me know what you think! I’m 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. The subject today is about how you can develop brilliant octaves in your piano playing. It’s exciting when you go to a concert and there are big octave sections, like in the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor Piano Concerto. Or, in Liszt or Chopin octave sections where both hands are playing octaves in unison. There’s a power to it that is so exciting! It almost seems impossible if you’ve never done it before. But there are techniques that I’m going to share with you.

I’ve been working on the Liszt B minor Sonata for a recording session that I’m doing later this year. In relearning this piece, I’ve had an epiphany that I’m going to share with you. But first, I want to show you the essentials that I’ve covered before in previous videos.

What are the essential techniques for brilliant octaves?

Just playing octaves doesn’t seem very difficult. So what’s the technique? Playing octaves with the arms won’t work at speed because the arms are just too big to move fast enough. There’s a limitation to how fast the arms can go. So it comes down to the wrists. I’ve talked a great deal about the importance of the wrists in piano technique. It’s important to use your wrists not just for octaves and fast chords, but also for articulating staccatos. Even in Baroque and Classical period music, the wrists are so important for clarity of your phrasing. Even for something like a Bach minuet. If you were to play a Bach minuet without using your wrists for staccatos, it just would be lacking in definition. By using the wrists on the staccatos, instead of the arm, it has far greater clarity. Even for music that was written when the piano was in its infancy, the wrists delineate phrasing in a way that the arms can never achieve. But when you’re doing fast octave or chord technique, the wrists have to be independent from the arms. But there’s more to it than that.

The most important thing for achieving fast octaves is maintaining an arch position of your hands.

One secret of octaves is having your hands in exactly the right place. In order to accomplish this, you use a technique I refer to as, the arches. Your hand must form an arch. The arch is an amazingly strong structure. The Roman aqueducts used arches. A tent that you go camping in has supports that form an arch, and they’re very strong to withstand winds. Your hand must have an arch for strength as well. You do this to mitigate the difference in strength between the thumb and the pinky. Forming an arch equalizes the force that you have on either side of your hands. Even with an arch, the other fingers are in the way, aren’t they? So the other fingers need to go up and out of the way. This forms another arch! There are two sets of arches, essentially. The arch for support, and the arch to get the fingers out of the way. That way, positioning your hands less than an inch over the keys, any effort goes directly to playing the keys. You want to always keep your hands just a fraction of an inch above the keys, never touching the keys. You don’t want a big motion because there’s no time for that. If you place your hands precisely over the keys, less than an inch, with a nice arch, you can get tremendous power and speed with a minimal amount of effort.

How do you practice the arch technique?

There’s a great little exercise I’d like to show you. You must not use the arm for the up and down motion of octaves, only for going from key to key, moving towards the fallboard for black keys, and closer to the edge of the keys for white keys. Set the metronome to 60 and just play a slow C major scale in octaves. When you play this, your wrists should be moving up and down, but your arms should just be making a fluid motion over the keys. The arms provide absolutely no up and down motion at all. Maintain the arch position between your thumb and pinky, and keep your other fingers up and out of the way. That doesn’t seem hard. To play it correctly, however, is very important. It’s how you play this exercise that will develop your strength. If you just play with your arms, it might work at a slow tempo. With your metronome set at 60, you could play almost any way at all, and it’s going to come out! But to get greater speed, the motion must all come from your wrists. The wrists can go very fast! Once you’re secure and you’re not using any up and down arm motion, just your wrists, go to two notes to the beat, then three notes to the beat. Go as fast as you possibly can, adding a note each time.

Playing fast octaves with the arms feels horrendous.

Playing with the arms, and not the wrists, is painful. And you can’t get control or speed. The secret of the arch is equalizing the force of the pinky with the thumb so you get a sound that is equal in both notes of the octave. As you go faster, stay closer to the keys and play lighter. That’s the secret of fast octaves! Develop the independence of the wrist and unlock the secret power of the arch! Work slowly and identify the wrists separate from your arms as you practice octaves. For some people, this comes very quickly. Other people struggle for a long time because it’s not something you’re accustomed to doing, isolating wrist motion from your arms. Sometimes, I liken it to waving bye-bye, just moving your wrists up and down keeping them separate from your arms.

The arms only place the hands over the right keys, the wrists provide the up and down motion.

Using the arms will just slow you down and make everything much heavier. Get used to waving bye-bye first. Then, eventually get into the arch position. You’ll be able to get clear, fast octaves! So that’s what brilliant octave technique is all about! You can work on your octaves with the exercise I’ve shown you. Learn to get into the arch position. Start off just waving bye-bye a bit, and then go to the piano and try it out. Then get into the arch position and work on the octave exercise. And you can develop brilliant octaves. I promise you! I’m 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

Supplemental Content:

How to Play Piano PT 2 – It’s All in the Wrists

The Best Piano Exercises (Part 4) – Octaves

A Secret Octave Technique for Piano

Welcome to Living Pianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about learning a piece of music from the end to the beginning. This is quite a concept! I once had a long discussion with a pianist who swore by this technique. There is some merit to it. If you watch my videos, you know my practice method is to start from the beginning of a piece. You read it through a couple of times, then get to work learning one small section at a time. Take a little phrase, learn the right-hand, then the left-hand, memorize each of them. Then memorize hands together. Then go on to the next chunk. Connect each section as you go until you get to the end of the piece. Well, what about starting at the end and working backwards?

Why would someone learn a piece backwards?

If you start at the end of a piece and work backwards, when you’re done practicing, the end is already solidified for you. You just get to the beginning and you’re done! It sounds great, doesn’t it? Sometimes you will see a student recital and they’re doing just fine, but when they get to the end, they don’t close strong. The end of their piece is weak and you feel badly for them. Maybe they just didn’t have enough time to get the end of the piece secure. So why not just start a piece from the end? That way, you avoid that whole problem. I have never used this technique, even though this gentleman begged me to do so. He even gave me a score. He said, “Learn this working from the end to the beginning like I learn pieces, and I’ll learn one your way, from the beginning to the end.” And I didn’t take him up on it. You may wonder why not?

Like reading a book, learning a piece of music is a story that unfolds.

There’s a logic to the sequential nature of a musical composition. Dramatic material, motifs, all develop as they go. To go from the end to the beginning is like being in a maze. You don’t know where you are. When you finally get to the beginning you have to rethink everything because it’s not meant to be thought of that way. I just have an aversion to the whole idea. When I’m learning a piece of music, it’s an exciting adventure! I start off at the beginning. I’m always raring to go at the beginning because I’ve often heard the piece before. If I’ve read through it, I’m already a bit familiar with the beginning. As I get further along, I’ll notice similarities to the beginning. It’s fun exploring a piece and seeing the changes along the way. It’s interesting to see how the themes are slightly different in various places.

Learning a piece beginning to end gives you a deep understanding of the structure of the music that learning it backwards would not reveal.

My take on this is that it’s better to learn a piece in order. Afterall, there is a reason the composer wrote it that way! I’m sure some of you have a differing viewpoints. I’d love to hear from you! I’ve articulated some of the benefits of learning from the end to the beginning. Maybe you have others that I haven’t even thought of that would encourage me to try it at least once with a piece of music. For those of you who have tried learning a piece from the end to the beginning and from the beginning to the end, and found one to be better than the other, let us know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com, and on YouTube. I look forward to hearing from you! I’m 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. The subject today is about how you can play really quietly on the piano and have all the notes play. I’m sure you’ve experienced some frustration trying to control the tone of a piano at some point. You’re playing a beautiful melody, trying to craft things just the way you want, and then notes drop out. Is there anything you can do about that? The simple answer is yes, as long as you are playing on a well-regulated piano. If you’re playing on an instrument where some notes don’t respond equally to other notes, it’s going to be impossible to play delicately, and have all the notes play just the way you want them to. But assuming you’re playing on a piano that is regulated properly with all the myriad adjustments of each key, then yes, you can get every note to play as softly as you like!

There’s a way that you can make sure all the notes play no matter how quietly you play them.

It’s possible to go for extreme pianissimo in your playing and it’s a wonderful thing. In fact, there’s no better way to draw an audience in during a performance than playing delicately, where everybody’s hushed listening to what comes next. It’s the contrast between loud and soft that ultimately is key for being able to get dynamic contrast in the first place. Soft doesn’t mean anything if it’s not in relation to something else that is loud. So what’s the technical secret behind this? It’s really quite simple. As long as you push the key from the top of the key to the bottom of the key in one motion, it will always play. Mistakes sometimes happen if you don’t quite push the key all the way down, or if the key’s already down a little bit and then you push it the rest of the way.

It’s helpful to understand how a piano action works.

A piano action is a very complex mechanism that has what’s called a double escapement. You must get to that feeling where you have that click. You probably know what I’m talking about. Particularly on a grand piano you can feel it. But it’s exactly the same on any fine piano, uprights included. There’s an escapement you must overcome. So as you push the key down slowly, you get to a certain point and there’s a little bit of resistance. That’s why you must play with the weight of the arm, which I’ve talked about so many times. If you play with floppy fingers that aren’t supported with the weight of your arm, there’s no way to be sure that the key is going to go all the way down in one smooth motion. So you have to have a certain amount of firmness to your touch in order to achieve this.

The weight of the arm is a great way to achieve balance because the weight transfers smoothly from note to note.

When you’re playing loud, there’s a lot of arm weight supported by the fingers. When you’re playing quietly, there’s very little weight. But there always must be some weight. That is how you get the key to depress from the top of the travel to the bottom of the travel in one motion. Remember to make sure the key isn’t down even a tiny amount before you push it, because that could mess things up. Piano keys are not meant to be able to respond that way. The action will not always be responsive if the key is partially down to begin with. You want to travel from the top to the bottom of the key bed in one motion. Try this and see if it works on your piano! If it doesn’t, ask your piano technician next time you get your piano tuned to check the regulation. It may not be you at all. It could be your piano!

Try this for yourself.

I’m interested in your reactions to this. Let me know what you discover in your playing and on your piano. You can leave comments on LivingPianos.com and on YouTube. Thanks so much for joining me again. We have some big announcements coming soon, so stay tuned! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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