Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about the importance of reading music. Do you have to be able to read music to play the piano? Many of you know that I have a deep background in classical music. I am a second generation concert pianist. My father, Morton Estrin, taught me and my sister piano from a very young age. We were taught how to read notation, music theory, and all the rest of it. So you would think my answer would be yes, you must read music to play the piano. But I’m going to surprise many of you by telling you that, no, you do not have to read music in order to play the piano!

There are many pianists who can’t read music.

There are many accomplished players of country, folk, jazz, rock, blues, new age, and other styles, who can’t read music. Maybe they just read a lead sheet, which I’ll talk about in a moment. You’ll never be able to play the blues convincingly reading note for note. First of all, the rhythms are really hard to read with syncopated music like jazz, rock, blues, country and other styles like that. Secondly, the way that kind of music is created in the first place is with an improvised form. You are coming up with your own arrangements and playing by ear.

What about classical music?

I would never have wanted to believe this, but I have encountered quite a number of people who have become quite accomplished at playing sophisticated repertoire, learning note for note, following somebody else on the keyboard. They go on the Internet and watch videos of notes coming down on the keys like a video game. Does that really work? Well, it works to an extent. To get through a piece? Sure. Naturally, that technology doesn’t offer all the nuance of the notation, exactly how long notes last, the phrasing, how they’re connected and detached, and a myriad of other things. But talented musicians who don’t want to learn how to read music sometimes have good ears. They can watch the video, figure out where the hands go, and do a reasonably good job at recreating those pieces of music.

For anybody who wants to play classical music at a really high level, notation is a must.

For anyone looking to play classical music at a concert level, you will need to be able to read scores. But for those of you just wanting to play music and not be encumbered by the complexity of reading scores, particularly those of you who are interested in other styles of music, you can embrace it! I’ll go so far as to say that this is something that’s sadly neglected in conservatory training.

There are so many concert pianists who can’t improvise the simplest tunes by ear, because they’re never expected to.

As soon as they graduate, they discover that most of the gigs out there are not playing Beethoven sonatas and Chopin etudes. It’s really hard to find venues that are going to pay you to play that kind of music. So even if you are a classically trained musician, you owe it to yourself to explore improvised types of music. It’s good to be able to play music without necessarily reading it. A lead sheet is what most musicians utilize and most gigs expect you to be able to read. A lead sheet is just the melody line and the chord symbols. You come up with the arrangement. That’s the way so much music is created in this world! I’ll talk more about that in the future. Express your interest so I know how much of these videos you want to see! Thanks again for joining me, 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 how to establish a slower tempo on the piano. It’s the funniest thing. I have students, and sometimes they have difficulty playing something. So I tell them to play more slowly. More often than not, they play exactly the same tempo! You might wonder, how do you establish a slower tempo?

The simplest way to establish a slower tempo is to figure out the tempo you’re playing and then slow it down.

This may not be the easiest thing in the world to achieve. Let’s say you’re playing a piece, like the Mozart Sonata in C major k 545. If you have insecurity, you may want to play it slower. The first thing you do is figure out the speed you were playing, then just slow that down. You may need to tap the beat along with your playing with your foot to find the speed you are playing first. Then slow down the tapping, and start playing at the new tempo. Now you can play at that slower tempo! That’s one way to achieve a slower tempo.

Another way to slow your tempo is to simply play the first note, wait a moment, and continue at that slower rate.

Play the first note, but linger a little longer. Then just continue playing at that slower tempo. You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to play slower. But unless you establish a slower tempo intentionally, you may think you’re playing slower, but you probably aren’t. You can check this with a metronome.

You can use a metronome to find a slower tempo.

Find the speed at which you’re playing on the metronome. Many metronome applications on your phone have a tap tempo feature. If you have that feature, you can tap to establish the tempo, then slow it down. To slow it down, just turn the metronome to a slower speed. There are many metronome applications that give this feature. It can be really helpful. Sometimes just being able to find the speed at which you’re playing on the metronome can be difficult. The tap feature can be a real help. Traditional physical metronomes have their benefits. They have the notches that don’t contain every single number. Changing tempo by every number is too small a change for working with progressively faster metronome speeds. But for the purpose of finding the tempo you are playing, a metronome app with the tap feature is invaluable.

www.metronomerous.de

Those are the tips on how to establish a slower tempo!

One of the most important aspects of practicing the piano effectively, is slowing things down! Even pieces you can play comfortably at a fast speed will degrade over time if you don’t play them slower from time to time, intentionally looking at the music, playing with a metronome, without the pedal. That’s the way to gain security and to keep your pieces fresh and at a good performance level. 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

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about rubato. How do you know if you’re playing too much rubato? Rubato is a practice of expressive playing in romantic music. It involves speeding up to the top of the phrase, and slowing down coming away from it. This adds to the emotionalism. When it’s done well, it can have a very profound effect upon the feeling of the music.

When rubato is done correctly, you should be able to tap along to the beat.

You might feel the music pulling you along and holding back. But you should be able to tap to it. How do you know when you’re doing too much rubato? If you try to tap along with the music, but you just can’t quite stay with it, the rubato is excessive. This is how you can check rubato to make sure it isn’t excessive.

Record yourself playing a piece, then go back and see if you can tap your foot to it.

If you can tap along with it, it might not be excessive. As long as you can feel where the beat is, you pull your listener along with you. But if you can’t tap to the music that you play, or somebody else plays, then it might be self-indulgent. Going too far with rubato loses the whole pulse of the music. So that’s the way you can check rubato in your playing. Record yourself and tap along! I hope this little tip is helpful for you. 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 talk about why an okay hand position is ideal at the piano. Now what do I mean by this? Wouldn’t you want a great hand position at the piano?

I don’t mean an okay hand position, I mean the okay hand position.

You probably know this gesture. Your thumb and index finger are touching, forming a circle, while your other three fingers are gently outstretched. This hand position, believe it or not, is the ideal hand position on the piano!

Why would you want your second finger curved like this?

By having the second finger curved more than other fingers, you actually are in an ideal position for octaves and chords. If you just take your hands and drop them on the piano without using any muscles at all, you’ll find they naturally will go into this position. So this is the position you want to be in on the piano. An okay position is the ideal position on the piano! You can use that as a little reminder as to how your hands should be placed on the keyboard.

It’s not a tight position.

You’re not trying to keep your hands in that position with force. In fact, your hands will automatically stay in that position if you just let them come down naturally on the keyboard. With no force at all, your hands will fall into that position. Because it takes no effort to maintain, it is the best position on the piano. What’s great about this is by rounding your second finger more than the others, you can accommodate chords and octaves with much greater ease. I hope this little tip 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

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. What is a chord? That’s the question for today. Is a chord just any notes played together at the same time? Well, yes and no. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s have a little primer.

Chords are typically built in intervals of 3rds.

Simply put, chords are built upon every other note of a scale. For example, a C major scale has all the white keys from C to C! If you play every other note of the scale, playing C, skip D, play E, skip F and play G, you have a C major chord, C – E – G! (It consists of a root, a 3rd, and a 5th.) You can keep going adding B, D, F and A. to form a 13 chord (adding the 7th, 9th, 11th, and 13th). Once you get to A, if you went up one more 3rd, you get back to C, your original note. So, that’s the total number of notes you can have in a chord. Now, here’s the interesting thing. There are 7 different notes in that chord C – E – G – B – D – F and A. And how many different white keys are there? Also 7. When you play a 13 chord, you’re playing all the notes of a scale! But if you just play all the white keys at the same time, it doesn’t sound like a chord? It sounds more like a cluster of notes. You may wonder why this is. Well, this has to do with voicing.

Voicing is everything in chords.

Voicing is how the notes are arranged. It was Rameau in the 1700s who theorized that by putting the bottom note of a chord on top, it’s just an inversion of the same chord. So even though it has a 4th in that arrangement, it’s still a chord. It’s just an inversion of a chord. Now, when you get to 7th chords, it gets more complicated. When you get to 9th, 11th, and 13th chords, you’re generally not going to play all the notes.

How would you voice a 13 chord?

If you voiced it with 4 notes, you would have to have the root and the 13, because otherwise it’s not a 13 chord. The important notes are the 7th and the 3rd. For nice voicing, you want to have the notes closer together on top and more distance between the bass note and the rest of them. So you can take the 3rd and put it up an octave. Now you have a nice voicing of a 13 chord. C – B – E – A. (If it was a more typical dominant 13 chord, the B would be B-flat.)

There are some exceptions to the idea of 3rds being used in chords.

First of all, 3rds can be augmented or diminished. (They can be raised or lowered.) So, for example, in a dominant chord, you could have a lowered 5th. That’s still a chord, even though you have a diminished 3rd instead of a minor 3rd. You could have other types of chords built on different intervals, like quartal chords. Quartal chords are built on fourths! So there are other possibilities. But generally, chords are built on intervals of 3rds, and voicing is what makes them work. Otherwise you would have tonal chaos! We should be thankful that composers craft such beautiful music, utilizing chords primarily arranged in 3rds so creatively. I hope this is interesting for you! Thanks again for joining me, 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 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.

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 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