Piano and Music Videos

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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Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to start a piece of music. I’ve talked a great deal about how to create tonal balance between the hands. And I’ve talked about using the weight of the arm, transferring weight from note to note in order to create a smooth line. So, instead of just playing a key and having no support, no weight, you actually support the weight of your arm on each key, transferring the weight smoothly from note to note enabling you to get a smooth line where every note plays, no matter how quiet and delicate. That’s the secret to crafting a musical line. But how do you start that first note? How do you get the sound you want out of it?

What’s the analog of diaphragm support on the piano?

To start notes on the horn, you put the breath under pressure and start with the tongue saying, “tu”. On the piano, it’s a little bit different. On piano, you use the weight of the arm to start notes. If you push a key on the piano and you want a certain volume, how do you get the precise volume you want? How can you possibly be assured of that? Well, if you were to lift your arm and your hand, with your wrist bent upward, then bring your hand down while straightening your wrist, you would be increasing the speed your hand hits the keys. But if you do exactly the opposite, it gives you tremendous leverage! You relax your hand letting your hand hang from your limp wrist. And then, as you go down with your arm, you slowly straighten your wrist. So, as your arm goes down, your hand is coming up as you straighten your wrist. By going two different directions at the same time, you can achieve exactly the sound you want. You can start any note at any volume with total assurance! You may want to watch the accompanying video to see this in action.

That is the secret of how to start a piece of music!

Now, of course, there are some pieces that start heroically. If you’re starting a piece like the Military Polonaise of Chopin, there’s no need for lifting. You can just sail right into it. Because when you’re playing with that kind of volume, it will pop just the way you want it to. But starting something like a Chopin Nocturne, this technique will help you get exactly the sound you want. By lifting, letting the wrist go limp, and as you’re going down with the arm coming up with the wrist, you have total control, no matter what piece you’re starting. Even within the piece, sometimes it’s helpful to lift for new phrases. Much like on a wind instrument, when you’re playing each new phrase, you take a breath, put it under pressure, and attack using the tongue. It’s the same thing. Whenever you start a phrase fresh, use this lifting technique. I want you all to try this and see how it helps you to start with precisely the tonal balance you want, right from the very first notes you play. Let me know how this works for you! Thanks so much 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

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why you should be playing the piano with your hands crossed. Now what do I mean by that? There are a lot of places in music where the hands cross in order to accomplish a certain sound or texture in the playing. But what I’m talking about today is entirely different. The physiology of our hands is just wrong for piano playing in one fundamental way. Your strongest fingers are in the middle and the weakest fingers are on the ends. Yet you want to bring out the treble, you want to bring out the bass. But you have these big, heavy, strong fingers, right in the middle obscuring everything!

If you were to play the piano without compensating for this weakness, you’d end up with a pretty awful sound.

Imagine just letting your thumbs be and letting the balance come out the way it naturally would with the hands. It wouldn’t sound right because the thumbs are just really strong and your pinkies and fourth fingers are weak. So you have to learn how to lessen the thumbs and bring out top notes and bottom notes. This is one of the most difficult aspects of playing the piano! It’s not easy to balance notes because your hands are designed exactly the wrong way to accomplish it! Crossing your hands corrects that imbalance, but obviously presents a whole other set of problems. So I’m not actually recommending you do that. But in a perfect world, there would be some way of achieving this.

So how do you learn to balance?

One terrific way to learn how to balance is to play with different articulations. Underplay the notes that are accompaniment and play legato for melody notes. Playing inner voices with a gentle finger staccato teaches your hand which notes to bring out and which ones are less important. You can do this with virtually any music you play. Interestingly, you don’t have to restrict it to just the top line and the bottom line. When you’re playing counterpoint, for example, you can bring out whatever line you choose. And not just in counterpoint. This is a phenomenal technique for developing the ability to bring out whatever you want within a polyphonic texture. Until we have some way of compensating for the fact that our hands are built backwards for the piano, this is a technique I recommend for you! Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how long it should take you to learn a piece of music. There are a lot of people who feel really committed to the piano. And when they are passionate about learning a piece, they don’t care if it takes a year to learn it. They just really want to learn that piece! This is not necessarily the best approach. Let me explain. In the amount of time that it would take in that year to learn one piece of music, imagine instead you focus on pieces that you can master in a couple of weeks. Then you build up a repertoire of pieces you can play on a high level.

Find music on your level.

Focus on pieces you can learn relatively quickly, each one a little bit more difficult than the last. You can expand not only the difficulty, but the style, the range, the mood, the period, all different aspects of music that you can assimilate into your technique. After a year, that piece that maybe would have taken you a year might only take you three or four weeks! The secret is finding music on your level. Now there are certainly exceptions to what I’ve just said. For example, maybe you’re a pretty serious pianist and you’ve just always wanted to study a monumental work like the Brahms Handel Variations, the Beethoven Hammerklavier Sonata, or the Liszt B Minor Sonata. Are you going to learn one of those pieces in two or three weeks? No, not likely. It could take you months to really learn and maybe up to a year to get on a performance level. A major concerto takes time to master as well. But even if you are learning such a work, I would strongly recommend that in parallel you also work on other formative pieces along the way. So at the end of the year you don’t have just that one piece, but maybe you have a dozen or more pieces that you’ve learned over the course of the year, including that one long-term piece that you’ve always wanted to learn.

Always be assimilating new music into your repertoire.

Learn music of different styles, different techniques, and you will grow as a musician far faster and greater than just focusing on one or two pieces that you really want to learn. You will actually be able to learn those pieces far sooner and get them at a higher level if you have progressive repertoire that you’re always mastering on the piano. I hope this is helpful for you and that you don’t find this discouraging. This is actually the fastest way you’re going to be able to learn that piece you’ve always wanted to learn! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to play with a metronome. It can be a really daunting task, particularly if you’re not accustomed to playing with a metronome. The tips I’m going to give you today are not just for those of you who are new to the metronome, but also for those of you who practice with a metronome incessantly and wonder how to stay with the metronome.

How do you set a metronome?

There is some great software out there that can be helpful. You can get apps on your phone that allow you to just tap the tempo and it finds it for you, which can be incredibly valuable. But how do you even establish the tempo? Let’s say you’re playing a piece and you’re wondering how to set the metronome. Well, you can tap your foot along with the music to establish the beat. You have to establish the beat first. Then turn your metronome on and try to match it. Once it sounds right, try playing along to see if it feels right. If it feels too fast or slow, adjust the speed and try again until it feels right.

How do you stay with the metronome?

I’ve seen so many people struggle to stay with the metronome. I’m going to show you a very simple technique that’s going to make a world of difference. When the metronome speeds up, speed up with it. When the metronome slows down, slow down with it. Of course the metronome is consistent, but I bet when you’re playing with the metronome, you could swear that it’s speeding up and slowing down! In reality, it’s you who is changing speed. But it feels like the metronome is slowing down or speeding up sometimes, doesn’t it? All you have to do is follow whatever it seems to be doing. If it seems to be getting faster, you get faster. If it seems to be getting slower, you get slower. And if you do that, you will stay with the metronome.

If you continue to struggle you may want to adjust the speed.

When you’re playing with a metronome and you’re not absolutely precisely with it, make minute adjustments in your playing by going a little faster with it, or a little slower with it to get back on time. But if you ever gain or lose a beat, you should stop and figure out if maybe the metronome is set a little too fast for you. Try a slightly slower speed to see if you can stay with it, because you should never gain or lose a beat. However, if you just nuance slightly behind or ahead, you might just finish the phrase then go back and see if you can do it more faithfully on the beat. Practice a number of times until that ebb and flow around the beat is minimized. The goal, of course, is to stay spot on with the metronome. But you don’t necessarily have to stop every single time you’re slightly off. Instead, get used to adjusting. Follow whatever the metronome seems to be doing. That’s the answer for staying with the metronome!

Once again to recap, establish the speed by tapping your foot or tapping your hand and then finding that speed on your metronome. Or better yet, download an app where you can just tap in the tempo. From there you can adjust further to find exactly the right speed. As you’re playing, if it feels just too fast or slow to be able to play with, adjust the speed. But once you lock it in, whatever the metronome seems to do, that’s what you’re going to do. That’s how you’ll stay with the metronome. I encourage all of you to try this! If you’ve had problems with the metronome, try these techniques and see how they work for you. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to cement corrections in your playing. One of the most difficult things about practicing is when you work on something, you get it right, and you think you have it locked in. And then later the same mistake creeps in again and again. So what can you do if you make a correction, but then still make the same mistake? Today I’m going to show you two techniques that will help you cement corrections in your playing.

You must be able to recognize where the correction has been made!

This first technique is incredibly important. It is crucial for you to know where the correction is. I have a brief story for you:

A young boy is getting ready for school. His mother hands him his lunch and asks him to return a library book on his way home from school. The boy agrees, and his mother hands him a large book. He carries the book to school. He has the book with him all day. It’s rather cumbersome and a bit annoying as he carries the book from class to class. He can’t wait to drop off the book after school. But at the end of the day when the bell rings he excitedly runs straight home. When he comes inside his mother asks if he had returned the book, and there it is sitting under his arm. He had been thinking about it all day long as he carried the heavy book from class to class, yet somehow he still forgot to return it.

This is indicative of what happens when you make a correction in your music and yet, the mistake happens again anyway. It’s because when you’re coming to it from a certain place, you’re used to missing it, even if you corrected it. So how do you alleviate this problem? Once you make a correction, you need to cement that correction by going back and being aware of the correction when you arrive at it. To do this, try going back different amounts of time to approach the correction from different places in the music. This is a really valuable technique.

Slow things way down to fully understand every detail.

There is another completely different technique I want to introduce to you today. You probably know the feeling you get when you say a word over and over until it loses its meaning. You say it enough times, and it sounds like giberish. It almost makes you wonder if it’s even a real word! The same thing can happen in your piano playing. You’ve played something so many times up to speed that at a certain point you approach your music, and it seems completely unfamiliar. How can you eradicate this? If you go extraordinarily slowly on something that you can play up to tempo comfortably, it’s going to feel totally different to you. It’s going to feel almost as unfamiliar as saying a word over and over again. Is that even a word? Is that even a phrase? Am I playing the right chord?

It comes down to intentionality. You must have a musical intelligence, looking down upon yourself, making sure you’re going to the right place. This is absolutely essential, particularly when you’re making a correction in your music. You must know where that correction is, as I mentioned previously. And you must know what the correction is on a deep level. Do this by slowing it way down. There could be something you’ve played a million times, but when you slow it down you realize every single nuance. Maybe you never really thought about it. You just played it and it came right out. Then for some reason you start missing it again and again. To alleviate the problem, play very slowly note by note and study your fingers. You will start to understand it on a much deeper level by this intensely slow practice. Just this in itself may solve your problem.

You can use a metronome to bring corrections up to speed.

Sometimes, it takes progressive metronome speeds to put the correction into context. But just going through the piece slowly can be of tremendous value. One of the most important types of practice you can do on any music you have already learned is to slow it way down, take out the score, take your foot off of the pedal, put the metronome on really slowly, and play everything very definitely. Maybe play a little bit stronger than usual because when you play slower, the notes have to last longer. This is a great way to reinforce your memory and your performance!

These are two valuable techniques to cement corrections in your playing. I hope these are helpful for you! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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