Piano and Music Videos

While this might sound silly, learning to play music mentally is one of the best practice methods. All practice is mental practice. While the action of playing an instrument has a physiological component, learning and practicing is much more of a mental experience than anything else. In fact, recent brain scan tests have found that there is no difference in brain activity between someone playing an instrument or just thinking about playing an instrument!

In college I had come down with mononucleosis when I was scheduled to play a solo recital. I had become very weak but was determined to play the program. An hour and half a day is about all the practice I could handle – and that was about how long the program was. Needless to say, this was not enough time to practice. Determined to succeed despite my physical ailment, I tried something new. I ended up taking all my scores into bed with me and I practiced mentally. To my surprise, the performance ended up being the best I had ever had by far! But how can this be?

Don’t hop into bed with your musical scores just yet! You have to develop technique and playing your instrument is essential. However, you should continue practicing even when you are away from your instrument. Imagine the performance in great detail, every sound and action. By doing this you will be able to hear the music exactly how you want it to sound so you can develop your performance. Learning your music mentally away from your instrument will help you identify problem spots you didn’t know existed before. You may be depending upon tactile memory on some passages and you may realize that you don’t actually know the music as well as you thought.

Here is a great exercise for you: Take a piece you are very familiar with, remove the score, and try and play it mentally. Play as far as you can go without stopping and when you have to stop, refer back to the score and start again until you can play the entire piece from memory away from your instrument. If you do this, you will have mastered that piece of music better than any other piece you’ve played before. Whenever I play a recital I play my music in my head constantly before the performance. I make sure I can get through difficult sections again and again until things are totally clear. There is great reassurance in performance when you know your scores on this level.

Today we have a question from Umberto, who asks, “How do you approach pedaling in the Moonlight Sonata? Do you pedal throughout all of it?”

These are excellent questions. In fact, yes, you use pedal in some parts rather sparingly, other parts very generously, but you use it throughout the whole piece in different ways. Of course the different movements have different requirements, but we’re going to focus today on the first movement, the famous melodic first movement.

So first of all, just a little primer. Whenever you’re using the pedals on the piano you want to keep your your heels firmly on the floor. You never want to put your pedal like this because it’s noisy. So you keep the heel on the floor, and then the ball of the foot is how you control best. Always keep it in contact, because if you go from above, once again you get noise. All pedals are very different on pianos. You have to experiment to find how you could play it quietly and effectively, because they all release the dampers at different points. One of the first things you want to try out when you’re playing over a concert is how the pedal responds on the instrument.

So getting to the Moonlight Sonata. As with any music, the pedal changes wherever the harmonies change. So if you were to play this piece in chords, each time the chord changes . . . and notice the pedal always comes up exactly on the beat but goes down right after the beat. So that’s the secret of pedaling. The pedal always comes up exactly on the change of harmony and goes right back down again. So if I play it now not in chords, but as it’s written, and with the soft pedal, the una corda pedal, depressed the entire time, you get this.

The reason for changing the pedal, coming up on the pedal exactly on the beat, is otherwise harmonies blur. If you were to play the pedal and put it down on the beat instead of up on the beat, you’d end up with this.

I can’t even do it. It’s so hard. I’m so trained. I’m gonna try it again. I’m gonna try to play the pedal wrong for you.

Yeah, that’s also not connected. I haven’t experimented with playing pedal wrong. It’s a hard thing to do. Any of you who are a pianist accustomed to using the pedal, try it how hard it is to play it wrong. So get in the habit of always coming up at the change of harmonies and right back down again so you get that smooth transition, and if you’re not sure where the harmonies change, break the music down to chords and it becomes very obvious for you.

You may or may not have heard this term before. In studying with my father, Morton Estrin, he stressed the concept of playing with a quiet hand years before I left for conservatory and it’s something I’ve incorporated into my playing ever since. This is a great technique for creating expressive playing on the piano and today we are going to learn about what it is and how you can incorporate it into your playing.

This might sound like a funny topic but I’ve gotten this question quite a few times over the years.

In the past, I’ve had students who would let their fingernails grow to ridiculous lengths and they caused clicking whenever they played! This can be distracting!

Why are long fingernails a problem? Good hand position is extremely important when it comes to playing the piano. You want to be in a position that takes no effort to maintain. Naturally, your fingers curve into a comfortable position.

In this position, your fingernails would be the first things to strike the keys. Playing the piano with your fingers and hand in this position is much more natural than trying to play with them outstretched like this:

While this hand position might make it easier on long fingernails, playing the piano like this would cause a lot of unnecessary strain and make playing rapid passagework cumbersome.

So can you play the piano with long fingernails? Sure, but if you’re serious about playing, you need to trim them to a length that allows you to play the piano without creating extraneous noises with your nails and maintaining an ideal hand position.

This is an incredibly common question for many parents who are starting their children with piano lessons. After all, a keyboard has the same number of notes as a piano (as long as it has 88 keys); how different can it really be?

Before we get into the finer details of the differences between keyboards and pianos let’s first examine the cost – which is the driving factor for most parents. Like pianos, there is a large selection of keyboards available. They range from a few hundred dollars well upwards of $15,000 for some very advanced models. If you plan on getting a decent keyboard you could be looking at thousands of dollars.

Most piano teachers will agree that the bare minimum for a beginning student is an 88 key weighted action digital piano. In case you might not have heard the term weighted action before, this refers to a keyboard or digital piano that has weighted keys – which replicate the weight of keys on an actual piano. If you’ve played a regular keyboard you might notice that the keys are incredibly easy to push. If you’ve played a piano you know that the keys take some force in order to generate a good sound. So if a digital piano (keyboard) can replicate this, will this be enough? Not really. An actual piano action has hundreds of moving parts on each key and while a weighted action keyboard has weighted keys, it’s impossible to replicate the feel of an actual piano.

The keys on a keyboard are also very short. On a piano, the keys extend far behind the fallboard. On a keyboard, this is impossible to replicate. If you play on a keyboard it’s like pushing down on a see-saw close to the center when playing black keys and between black keys. On a grand piano, the force necessary to push down the keys is more equal from the front to the back of the keys.

The action on an upright piano is an improvement over a weighted action digital piano or a keyboard but it still isn’t as good as a grand piano action. Here is another video where I explain the differences between uprights and grand pianos. Eventually, every pianist who continues to play will outgrow the action of an upright piano and must eventually practice on a grand or baby grand piano because an upright action isn’t fast enough to keep up.

One of the biggest reasons parents decide to buy a keyboard in lieu of a piano is that they are worried that their children won’t continue to play. There is truth in the idea that the interests of children change rapidly – but starting them off on an inferior instrument is really only a recipe for failure. Investing in a suitable instrument will not only reinforce the interests of the player, it will actually help them develop much more quickly. Having an actual piano to play on will do wonders for the development of any musician.

So is it OK to start with a keyboard? Sure, it’s far better than nothing. But if you plan on actually playing the piano, prepare to make an investment at some point in the future and get yourself an actual grand or upright piano.