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
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 th
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.
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. 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
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.
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. 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 pi
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.
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. 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
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.
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 l
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we’re going to discuss the three worst piano practice habits. These might be things that you do in your piano practice. Maybe you’re scared I’m going to bring something up that you do! Maybe you’re not aware of these destructive habits that are part of your practice routine. But it’s better to find out now than to continue on the wrong path.
1. Hesitating before a tricky passage
Hesitation is a habit that I constantly work with students to eradicate. It’s such a bad habit! You get to a difficult part and you can’t quite get it, so you hesitate just for a moment, then you get it and go on. This is a very bad habit because it ingrains stopping into your playing. The more you do it, the more you will continue to do it. It’s self regenerating. So how do you break that habit? We’re going to get to that, but first I’m just going to list the three habits so you can see how they apply to you.
2. Starting over from the beginning after making a mistake
The second bad habit is, when you make a mistake you get frustrated and you go back to the beginning. I’ve talked about this many times before. This is such a destructive habit. In a performance, if you find yourself having difficulty, what are you going to do? You can’t just go back to the beginning. The audience doesn’t want to listen to all of that again just so you can get past that point.
3. Changing speeds in your performance
Maybe there are some parts of a piece that you can play really well, so you play them at a nice fast tempo. Then you get to the parts that are a little harder and you slow down to accommodate them. Once again, you lose the whole flow of the music. You might think that to play everything slowly is tedious for the audience, so you might as well play fast where you can. But that doesn’t make for a fluid performance.
What can you do in your practice to eradicate these bad habits?
1. Hesitating before a tricky passage: You’re going along and you pause for just a moment, and then you go on. This is incredibly disturbing to the audience. Maybe they are tapping along to the beat and then suddenly it hesitates. It’s off-putting. With something that’s lyrical, anytime there’s a hesitation it just doesn’t feel right. I’m going to tell you what you can do. First of all, make sure you’re choosing the right tempo so you can play through the piece without hesitation. But suppose that just doesn’t cut it. Suppose you’d have to play the piece at half the speed just to avoid a couple of hesitations. That seems like a brutal solution. Indeed there are more effective ways of dealing with hesitations, unless you’re hesitating every bar, in which case you obviously need to choose a much slower tempo. But if it’s just a few key places where you are hesitating, and you can’t quite eradicate it, I have a solution for you.
When you are practicing, get in the habit of stopping whenever there’s a hesitation. Stop immediately and find your place in the score. Find an appropriate place in the score just before that hesitation where you can start to get past the point of hesitation. You might have to start slowly and increase the speed. Maybe even do metronome speeds if you can’t quite get through the hesitation by playing it several times. Then after you’ve played through the trouble section several times in a row perfectly at a comfortable tempo, go back to the beginning of the piece, or the beginning of the section to pass that hesitation.
Interestingly, you may find that even though you can play it many times in a row perfectly starting at the previous phrase before the hesitation, once you go back further, you may still hesitate there. So you may have to go back a little bit further to get it fluid. Then go back to the beginning of the section or the beginning of the movement to finally eradicate that hesitation. You can work all your key hesitations out that way. I sometimes refer to this as the band-aid approach of practicing. It can be very effective, because if you just have three or four places in an entire piece where you’re hesitating, to take the whole piece painfully slowly will feel quite tedious. And it’s not the most productive way to solve the problem. So hopefully this solution works for you!
2. Starting over from the beginning after making a mistake: It’s so tempting when something goes wrong to just start over and try again. Well, the problem with this is if you get in the habit of doing that in your practice, when you get out to perform you’re going to do the same thing. More than that, it doesn’t solve the underlying weakness in your playing. So what you must do is find exactly where you had the problem, and study the score to figure out the solution. Then, much like I described before in avoiding hesitation, start just before the point at which you had the problem, pass that point several times, increase the speed, and use the metronome if necessary. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It’s a very valuable technique. You may have to go back a little bit further to finally be able to start from the beginning and pass that point without starting over. So the key here is to reference the score and nail down the correction. Be very deliberate with this. Find the specific correction so that you don’t just play on automatic pilot with your tactile memory. You don’t want to rely upon that because obviously, whatever made you miss it that time, will undoubtedly happen again. So you want to really focus on the correction. A lot of people want to know what they did wrong, but that’s of no value. Find the correction! Whatever you focus on is going to be apparent in your playing. If you’re focused on the mistake, you’re going to make the mistake. Focus on the correction and forget the mistake. This is a life lesson too!
3. Changing speeds in your performance: I have a student who’s extremely talented. He likes to play everything really fast and it’s pretty dazzling. He hasn’t been playing very long, and I’m constantly impressed by him. But being able to get through an entire piece or even an entire movement at the speed at which he starts is oftentimes all but impossible. So going faster and slower really isn’t the answer.
Here again, you want to focus on the parts you can’t play up to speed. The answer here is to work with a metronome. Once you get to the part you can’t play up to speed, find a speed you can handle and set your metronome to it. Then start from the beginning and play the whole selection at that speed. If you really want to play a faster tempo, zero in on the parts you can’t play faster and work with progressive metronome speeds and other practicing techniques in order to get them up to speed. Then you will be able to play everything at the tempo you want. But starting off at a tempo faster than you can play the difficult sections won’t work.
So these are three tips for you! You’ve probably noticed there are similarities in the solutions. Focusing in on the correction, going back, speeding things up, working with a metronome, going back a little bit further, then going back to the beginning. These are tremendous practice techniques that come into play in solving these common problems in piano practice. If you can break these bad habits, I promise you, you’re going to take your playing to a higher level! You’ll really have security, and you’ll be able to play through a piece from the beginning to the end at one speed without stopping, without going back, without hesitating, and without changing speeds. I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me! 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
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we’re going to discuss the three worst piano practice habits. These might be things that you do in your piano practice. Maybe you’re scared I’m going to bring something up
