Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Have you ever wanted to develop more stamina on the piano? That’s the subject for today. Many of my students, and people who contact me, wonder how to develop more stamina, to be able to play longer periods of time without wearing out. Some people find if they play through a longer piece, by the time they get to the end of it, their hands are giving out. They wonder, Is there anything they can do about that? I’m going to give you two tips today to develop more stamina in your playing!

Play more and vary your practice.

You may find that if you play for a certain amount of time, your hands get tired. Your abilities start to fall off on what you’re able to do with the instrument. Well, here’s a tip for you: Vary your practice between things that are technical and physically oriented, and things that are more mental. Memorization comes to mind. If you’re learning solo music, memorizing takes a great deal of time. Even if you’re playing music that you’re reading, you need to practice the music, figure things out, and intellectually understand the score. For example, let’s say you’re working on a really tough passage, spending a good deal of time with it. Take a break! Move on to other things. Absorb new material or read through some of your new pieces, which might be very slow going at first. This won’t be nearly as physically demanding. But at the same time, you’re practicing for longer periods of time. Just like in exercising, the varied amount of work you do with interval training (alternating between high and low intensity activities) is beneficial to your muscles and your general well-being. It’s the same thing with your piano playing! So vary your practice.

Another thing that is incredibly valuable is just playing through your pieces.

Let’s say you’re working on a new piece, but you have several older pieces that you still have in shape to some degree. Play through your pieces each day! By playing through your music, you get used to playing for longer periods of time. Not only that, you have the tremendous benefit of solidifying your performance! If you’re used to running through your pieces again and again and again, when an opportunity comes to play for people, it’ll be second nature for you.

The other technique has to do with how you approach the keyboard.

You can actually play lighter on the piano. There are times when this is incredibly valuable. In your practice, of course, at times, you’re going to play slowly with firm fingers to make sure every note is secure. But when you’re performing, you flip that. You play lightly, staying close to the keys, with rounded fingers. Why rounded fingers? There are two fundamental reasons. Number one is the fact that if you play with flat fingers, you’re using one joint, just the knuckle joint. When you play with rounded fingers, you’re using all the joints. So the load of working to push the keys down is spread among more joints and muscles. The other thing is if you just let your hands rest on the keys, they’re naturally going to go into a rounded position. It takes effort to keep your fingers flat! So just let your hands go into the natural rounded position, and you’ll get the benefit of all your joints working together to play the piano with ease.

Stay close to the keys.

It takes much more effort to raise your fingers. In practice, using raised fingers helps to delineate what keys are down and what keys are up. It really helps your hands feel the notes and all the reaches. That’s a great way to practice. But when you’re performing, you want to lighten things up and stay close to the keys. This is also true with wrist work with staccatos and such. You use your wrists in order to achieve a crisp staccato and speed. But by staying closer to the keys, you play lighter. Staying close to the keys takes much less effort and it enables you to go faster.

Developing more endurance involves practicing intelligently.

To recap: try to play through a lot of music on a regular basis. Take breaks if you get tired, but come back to it again and again. You could just take breaks from intense practice that uses a lot of physiology and do more mental work. Intersperse the physical with mental practice. When you perform, lighten up. Stay close to the keys with rounded fingers and don’t use excessive wrist motion for octaves, chords and staccato technique. This should help you develop more endurance. Let me know how this works for you! Any other tips? You can post them here on LivingPianos.com and on 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. The subject today is about minor scales. What are minor scales? When you have a piece of music, how do you know if it’s in the major or in the minor? You’re going to learn that today! I have another video on key signatures and also on major scales, which would be very helpful for you in preparation for this video if you don’t already have a solid grasp of that.

Major scales are a series of whole steps and half steps with all whole steps, except between the
3rd & 4th and the 7th & 8th notes.

On the piano, the C major scale is obvious because it is all white keys. You have half steps between the 3rd & 4th, and the 7th & 8th notes which are E & F, and B & C which have no black keys between them. So I’m going to use C major first as an example. If you have a piece with no sharps or flats in the key signature, it may be in C major. But suppose it was in a minor key. What key would that be? How would you know it’s in a minor key if it has the same key signature?

The sixth note of the major scale is the tonic, or the root, of the minor scale.

You take that C major scale and count up to the sixth note, which is A. Play all the notes of a C major scale starting on A and you’ll end up with the A natural minor scale. So when you see a piece of music without any sharps or flats, it may be in C major, but it may be in A minor. How do you know? Well, the minor is rarely found in its natural or pure form, unless you go really far back before major/minor tonality was really entrenched in Western music, starting in the Baroque era in the 1700s. Before that, modal music was very popular in Renaissance music and such.

In post-modal music, there are two forms of the minor that are prevalent:
The harmonic minor and the melodic minor.

This is how it works. The piece might be written with no sharps or flats, but accidentals are written in the score wherever they occur. The harmonic minor has a raised seventh. The seventh note is raised by a half step. So you go back to what we started with. Go to the sixth note of the major scale. Play the minor scale, but when you get to the seventh note of that minor scale, raise it by a half step. You can hear the strength of the raised seventh propelling you up a half step to the tonic. It begs for resolution! So if you have a piece of music with no sharps or flats, and you have G sharps all over the place, it could very well be in A minor, the relative minor of C major.

Another form of the minor that’s also very common in Western music is the melodic minor.

The melodic minor has a raised sixth and seventh. However, it descends using the natural minor. So if you have a piece with no sharps or flats, you would be looking for G sharps in particular, and possibly F sharps. If there are a lot of them, and you look at the harmonies, and there are a lot of A minor chords, and the piece ends on an A minor chord, it is undoubtedly in A minor, not C major.

How does this help you with other key signatures?

If you have two sharps, you might know that two sharps would be F sharp and C sharp. Go up a half step from the C sharp. That could be D major. But if it’s in the relative minor, you go to the sixth note of that major scale, and form the relative minor. So if you have two sharps in your key signature, it might be in B minor. The B minor scale would have a raised seventh. Instead of playing A natural, the harmonic minor would have A sharp. If it was in the melodic form, it would have a raised sixth and seventh, and it would descend in the natural minor.

Any time you have a key signature, figure out the major key first.

Once you know the major key, go to the sixth note of that major scale. Play all the notes of that major scale starting from the sixth note to that same note an octave higher. When you get to the seventh note of that minor scale, raise it a half step to figure out the accidental to look for. It won’t always be a sharp. It could be a natural that would raise the note. If the seventh note was already a flat, then you would raise it a half step by making it a natural. I hope this makes sense to you! If you have questions you can address them here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube in the comments section. I will try to answer as much as I can for you and make future videos based on your questions! 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. The subject today is about how to play with rubato. When you hear great pianists and other instrumentalists, they bring you on an emotional journey with their music. This is in no small part by the use of rubato. Rubato is an expressive playing technique, used primarily in Romantic era, 19th century music, of speeding up and slowing down, never gaining or losing time, but having a little bit of motion in the tempo.

Rubato pulls the listener in and adds emotion to your playing. 

An example of a piece you would play with rubato is the B minor Prelude of Chopin. Play it absolutely straight with no rubato whatsoever and it doesn’t really grab you and pull you in. It’s a beautiful melody, but it doesn’t feel right without rubato. If you tap along, you’ll notice you can just tap out the eighth notes along with the music. 

One of the secrets is thinking of the larger pulse. 

Instead of feeling the eighth note rhythm, feel the quarter note as the beat. The ebb and flow never gains or loses time, but just floats around the beat. It pulls you in. It’s very emotion inducing music when you play with rubato. Experiment and remember to feel the longer note value. You can’t play rubato very effectively if you’re thinking every single eighth note, or worse every sixteenth note! Feeling the pulse of the quarter note gives you a lot of room to play around with the beat. And remember to never gain or lose time.

That’s the secret to rubato!

Try it in your music! Let me know how it works for you 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.

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 magic formula for key signatures. Many of you know your key signatures. But maybe you don’t quite understand them or you’re not fluent with them. Do you need to memorize all that stuff? Surprisingly the answer is no. Why not? There are formulas you can use to figure them out!

You never have to memorize your key signatures.

Believe it or not, I have never memorized my key signatures, but I can name them. F, C, G, D, A, E, B. How did I do that so fast? I’m actually thinking through the intervals that fast. I’m going to show you how to do exactly the same thing so that you don’t have to memorize them. You can understand them and figure them out. You might not be able to figure them out as quickly as I just did, but you will be able to figure them out. You will get faster with it over time.

The interval of a fifth is critical in key signatures.

What is a fifth? The fifth, simply put, is the fifth note of a scale. So in C major, G is the fifth note of the scale. This interval is what’s called a perfect fifth. It’s a perfect fifth because G is the fifth note of the C major scale. You can invert this and put the C on top. It’s still a perfect interval, but now it becomes a fourth. So fourths and fifths are essentially the same. That’s one of the reasons they’re perfect intervals. Inverted, they remain perfect. Incidentally, octaves are also perfect intervals, as well as primes or unisons. If two people are playing the same note on different instruments, that’s called a prime. Once you understand fifths and fourths, the rest is easy!

If you have a key signature with sharps, the first sharp is always F-sharp.

You have to memorize that F-sharp is the first sharp. Once you memorize that and a couple other small details, the rest is seamless. So you have F-sharp. From there it goes up by fifths. You can either count with your fingers or you can do it on the piano. Count out five notes, F, G, A, B, C. C is the second sharp. From here you count out the next one, C, D, E, F, G. G is the next sharp. You can keep counting this way. D is the next sharp, then A, then E, and the last sharp is B. So these are all the sharps, F, C, G, D, A, E, B. You don’t have to memorize them. You just have to be able to figure them out.

How do you know what key you’re in?

If you go up a half step from the last sharp to the right, that’s the major key. So if you have one sharp, an F-sharp, go up a half step to see you’re in the key of G major. If you have two sharps, F-sharp and C-sharp, you’re in the key of D major. If you have three sharps, F-sharp, C-sharp, G-sharp, you’re in the key of A major. If you have four sharps, F-sharp, C-sharp, G-sharp, D-sharp, you’re in E major. If you have five sharps, F-sharp, C-sharp, G-sharp, D-sharp, A-sharp, you’re in B major. With six sharps you end on E-sharp, which means you’re in the key of F-sharp major. And finally, all seven sharps mean you’re in the key of C-sharp major.

That’s just half the story, because now we go to flats!

The first flat, if you only have one, is going to be B-flat. From here it goes down by fifths. I mentioned earlier that fifths and fourths are the same thing reversed. So you might as well go up by fourths because it’s easier to count up than down. So B-flat, E flat, A-flat, D-flat, G-flat, C-flat, F-flat. That’s the order of the flats. This is exactly backwards from the order of the sharps. The patterns are unbelievable!

Finding what key you’re in is even easier with flats.

There is one that you must memorize. The key with one flat is F major. It has the B-flat in it. You just have to know that. From there, the second to last flat is the key you are in. Because all flat scales, with the exception of F major, begin on a flat. So if you have two flats, B-flat and E-flat, you’re in the key of B-flat major. If you have three flats, B-flat, E-flat, A-flat, you’re in the key of E-flat major. If you have four flats, B-flat, E-flat, A-flat, D-flat, you’re in the key of A-flat major. And it goes on and on that way.

So all you have to look for is the last sharp on the right and go up a half step to find your major key. Or look for the second to last flat to the right to find the major key. I hope you enjoy these theory primers! Let me know 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.

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. Is it okay to re-divide the hands in piano playing? That’s the question today. There are many schools of thought on this subject. With Beethoven in particular, there are many people who feel that it’s very important to play the music exactly as it is written and not to redistribute the notes between the hands in a way that Beethoven didn’t write. Other people think as long as it sounds good, what’s the difference? Is there a difference? Should you divide the hands or not?

It really depends upon how you execute the music.

The question is, can you make it sound the way it is written while re-dividing the hands, or is it going to sound different? If it sounds choppy then that’s no good. If you know the sound that the composer intended and you divide the hands in a way that sounds the same, but it’s easier to negotiate, in my opinion there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing that. As long as the integrity of the sound is maintained based upon how the composer wrote the music, there’s nothing wrong with re-dividing the hands to be able to negotiate passages more cleanly and faithfully.

If somebody can hear the difference in the way it sounds, you should avoid dividing the hands.

Re-dividing the hands can be a lifesaver in a lot of instances. It can make the music sound better. It can help you play more cleanly. Just always keep in mind the intent that the composer had in the way they wrote the score. That’s my opinion. Let me know in the comments how you feel about this! 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’ll be sharing two ways to solidify your musical performance. Say you have a piece of music you’ve worked on for a long time. You can play it pretty well, but not every time. Maybe when you’re alone at home, it comes out perfectly sometimes. Then, for no reason you can discern, things fall apart. It’s just not dependably solid. Is there anything you can do about that? Yes! I’m going to give you two completely different methods for solidifying your musical performance.

Take out the score and play slowly with raised fingers.

Whether it’s a piece you’re playing with the music or a piece you’ve memorized, get out the score, put it on your music rack, get out your metronome, take your foot off the pedal, and play slowly with raised fingers. What’s this about raised fingers? When you play with raised fingers, it trains your hands which fingers are down and which fingers are up. Everything is exaggerated. When you play a piece over and over again, after a while, your hands just naturally go to the right keys. But then you’ve done it so many times, you don’t even know what your hands are doing. They’re kind of doing it all on their own! You lose sense of the intellectual understanding of what you’re doing.

When you take out a metronome and you play something slowly with raised fingers, it ingrains the music into your hands and into your ears.

This is a great way to solidify your performance. You would be surprised how productive it is going through your music even once like that. And obviously, if there are any parts that you can’t play perfectly at that slow speed, then it’s going to show up like a sore thumb! It’s like putting your playing under a microscope when you play that slowly and intentionally. Anything that isn’t solid is going to be obvious. So that’s a great way to solidify your musical performance. The other way I’m going to show you is completely different.

Take a piece you can play and play it faster than you usually do.

Take a piece that you can already play and you want to solidify. You can play the piece, but every now and then something falls apart. It seems very random where things fall apart. How do you figure out what to practice? Go through your music faster than you usually do. When you miss something, that is the weak point. Zero in on the ten or twenty percent of the piece that you can’t play at that faster tempo. Those are the weakest parts. Then you’ve just zeroed in on what to practice! A shotgun approach to practicing is not very efficient. You don’t need to practice equally on everything. This is a great way to discover what needs work.

You can practice those trouble sections in innumerable ways.

You can practice hands separately. You can do progressively, faster metronome speeds, starting from a slow tempo and working your way up a notch at a time. You can practice little snippets and put the little snippets together. There are many different ways of practicing. But for identifying where to put your practice time in, this is a great technique!

So to recap, there are two ways you can solidify your pieces of music that you can already play.

One is to play with raised fingers. Use the score and a metronome with no pedal. Really delineate and articulate everything with precision. Sink in and feel every finger. Then there’s the polar opposite. Play everything a little bit faster than you usually do. See what places you can’t keep up and focus your practice on those sections. These are two tips 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

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’ll be doing a piano test drive! I have two of the great American semi-concert grand pianos, Steinway and Baldwin. In the past, concert artists had a choice. Baldwin supported concert pianists around the world with their concert instruments. Of course, Steinway won the marketing war. They became the only de facto choice for touring artists, because putting concert grands in every major city in the world is a very daunting task.

In their heyday, Baldwin was making amazing pianos!

I’m going to play a brief excerpt of the Chopin G Minor Ballade. First I will play it on the Steinway Model B from 1981. Then I will play the same excerpt on the Baldwin SF seven foot semi-concert grand from 1967. I’m really interested in your opinions! Leave your comments here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. I want to know your impressions of these two magnificent American semi-concert grand pianos!

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about major scales. What is a major scale? I’m sure most of you probably already kind of know what it is. But for those of you who know what a major scale is, you might want to stop right now and see if you can put it into words. You might find that you’ll be stumbling a bit if you’ve never asked yourself this question. You kind of intuitively know what it is, but how do you define it succinctly?

A major scale is a series of whole-steps and half-steps.

I want to define whole-steps and half-steps for any of you who are searching for this because you don’t know anything about what a major scale is at all. A half-step is any two keys next to each other with no keys between. That’s black or white keys. It can be two white keys, or it can be a black and white key. Two keys together with one key between is a whole-step. A major scale is a series of whole steps and half
steps.

Major scales contain eight notes.

The first and eighth notes are the same. They are spelled diatonically. What does that mean? It means it has all the letters in order without skipping or repeating any. For example, an A major scale would contain some form of A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A. It has to have all the letters in order without skipping or repeating. Spelling counts, and there’s a good reason for it. When you look at the music, you see the notes on consecutive lines and spaces. All major scales will go from line to space to line to space, or from space to line to space to line. That’s essentially what a major scale is.

Where are the half-steps?

As I mentioned, there are eight notes. They are all whole-steps except between the 3rd & 4th and the 7th & 8th notes. That’s why on the piano, because you have some white keys that are a half-step apart, the C major scale contains all white keys. All other major scales contain either sharps or flats, but never both.

How can you figure out scales?

You can take any note on the piano, and remember that the notes are going to be in the order of the alphabet. So if you have a D major scale, it’s going to have some form of D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D. It must be spelled diatonically with all the letters in order. But those notes don’t form a major scale because the half-steps are not in the right place. So you use accidentals, either sharps or flats, never both. It just happens to work out that way! You can count the numbers of the notes. Remember to move by whole-steps except between the 3rd & 4th and the 7th & 8th notes. Of course you can hear when a major scale is correct, because you know what it’s supposed to sound like. So that is how you can figure out all your major scales, simply by spelling them diatonically and arranging them with all whole steps, except between the 3rd & 4th and the 7th & 8th notes. You can start on any key on the piano and you can spell a major scale.

It’s not always quite so simple.

I’m going to do a G-flat major scale. We start with G-flat. Then we move up by whole-steps to A-flat, then B-flat. Now we move up by a half-step. You may be tempted to say “B”, but I already said it can’t be B, because you have to have all the letters in order without skipping or repeating any. So the fourth note has to be called C-flat! You might think that’s crazy, but if you saw it in the music it would be much more logical to have all the letters on consecutive lines and spaces. So indeed the spelling makes it more logical visually because a scale will always go alternating between lines and spaces. This is why a C-flat makes much more sense than a B-natural in this case. Having that C-flat keeps it diatonic, makes it easier to read, and it’s more logical. If you enjoy this little tutorial, I can offer you more! If any of you wonder about key signatures, let me know in the comments below here on LivingPianos.com and YouTube.

With music theory the fundamentals must be solid for you to be able to understand more advanced concepts.

This is akin to mathematics. Imagine trying to do algebra if you were rusty on your multiplication tables. Everything builds on everything else. It’s the same with music theory. If you have the fundamentals down, you can get to really advanced harmonic analysis and structural analysis of compositions. It will be as easy as reading notes became for you early on. Everything builds on everything else with such beautiful logic. It also makes your music easier to learn, to digest and to read. 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

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