Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is. about focusing on corrections instead of your mistakes. This may seem counterintuitive. Don’t you have to find your mistakes in order to find the corrections? It’s true that you need to find where your problems are. But beyond that, you don’t want to hunt for what you did wrong. I know a lot of students desperately want to find their mistakes. What’s worse is when they not only want to find the mistakes, but they want to replay them to see exactly what they did wrong. This reinforces the mistakes! You want to learn and cement the corrections right from the get go. This might seem like an arbitrary distinction. But think about when you play a concert, you obviously want to put on a good performance. You want to have the performance securely memorized. You don’t want to go out there thinking, “I hope I remember everything. Am I going to remember the third movement?” If you start thinking that way, it’s a downward spiral, because whatever you think about tends to manifest itself.
Visualization can be extremely valuable in a concert situation.
Conceptualize and see things the way you want them to be in your performance. Imagine yourself on stage in front of an audience. Imagine your performance going well and you’re much more likely for that to happen. But, if in preparation for your concert you’re thinking about the mistakes you might make, it can be crippling. Those thoughts keep percolating in the back of your mind. Then when you get out on stage, it’s going to undermine your performance. It’s the same thing with searching for your mistakes. You don’t want to concentrate on your mistakes. You want to concentrate on the corrections! And that is what is going to assure a good performance for you.
So instead of asking, “What did I do wrong there?” Find out, “What do I need to do right there?”
This is an important distinction that will help the productivity of your practice tremendously. And it’s a lesson for life as well. Remember, you believe what you tell yourself. This is an important fact. So take this to heart, in everything you do and everything you think, because it has a profound effect upon what happens to you in life, and in your music.
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is. about focusing on corrections instead of your mistakes. This may seem counterintuitive. Don’t you have to find your mistakes in order to find the corrections? It
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is, “Tempo Must be the Lowest Common Denominator.” What does this mean? You may hear a performance that starts at a nice fast tempo and everything’s going great. Then the performer gets to a section they don’t know quite as well as the rest of the piece, so they slow down in order to make accommodations. Maybe they’ll speed up again when they get to a part they know better. This is a a terrible way to perform, but I understand the temptation. If you know a piece and you can play most of it at a nice tempo that sounds great, but there are one or more parts that you can’t quite play up to tempo, you might want to play everything up to that point at a good tempo and slow down for the sections you are struggling with. But, in a performance, you never want to do that. So, what can you do in order to correct this?
If there are just a few key sections of a piece that you can’t quite play up to tempo, work on those sections!
Zero in on the parts of the piece you can’t play up to tempo and work with a metronome. Set the metronome at a tempo you can keep up with, then slowly increase the tempo to get those sections up to the speed of the rest of the piece. Better yet, work until you can play them even faster than the rest of the piece! Then the weakest parts of your performance become the strongest parts. But if you ever find yourself in a situation where you don’t have parts of your performance up to speed, you must take a tempo at which you can play the whole piece, including those parts. This is very important if you are performing. At a piano lesson, or something of that nature, it’s not really necessary to do this. A teacher will understand if you haven’t quite gotten everything up to speed yet. But in a performance, be sure to lock in the right tempo!
How do you find the right tempo for your performance?
Think of a piece you’re playing where you have a couple of sections that you have really put work into, but your performance is still not secure. Listen to yourself play it. Then find the speed at which you can play those sections comfortably and make that the tempo of your piece. You will give a much more convincing and satisfying performance that maintains tempo throughout, rather than changing tempo to accommodate parts you can’t play as fast. You might think that it makes you sound less impressive because you can play some other parts so fast. But believe me, it will be much more enjoyable for the listener and they will be more impressed with you for giving a more cohesive performance.
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is, “Tempo Must be the Lowest Common Denominator.” What does this mean? You may hear a performance that starts at a nice fast tempo and everything’s going g
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to share with you three tips for practicing scales. I’ve made quite a few videos about scales. But, Truth be known, I spend a minimal amount of time practicing scales to achieve the desired results, which is to have clean finger work, and to have mastered all the fingering of all major and minor scales and arpeggios. However, no matter how far you go with scales you can always go further. It’s endless what you can do with scales! Today I’m going to give you three tips to improve your scales. Maybe you’ve gotten in a rut. You’ve practiced your scales and you don’t know where to go next. Maybe you’re not totally happy with your finger work and you’re wondering, is there any other way to practice scales that will help to clean up your technique? Here are three techniques you can try. First of all, most of us practice scales just going up and down the piano in four octaves, an octave apart, as referenced in Hanon’s 60 Selected Exercises for the Virtuoso Pianist. That is a prerequisite for developing a good technique on the piano, particularly for playing classical styles or anything that’s technically oriented. It’s kind of like having a bag of tricks in your back pocket that’s always there when you need it, because you have scales in music pretty much all the time, in one way or another. So, what about practicing with different articulations or phrasings?
Instead of playing all legato, you could play with detached fingers in a staccato manner.
The reason this practice technique is so incredibly important is that the evenness from note to note isn’t just about the down strike of the key, but the release of each key as well. If you were to slow down a sloppy scale performance, you might hear that notes are striking together, but some notes are holding longer than others. You’ll hear haphazard lengths of notes, most likely where the thumb or finger crossings happen. By playing in a staccato manner you can hear things more clearly. You can play with staccato fingers, or the notes can have a little bit more length than that, and still be detached. Not really staccato fingers, but not smooth and connected the way you might think of playing scales usually.
Play one hand legato and one hand staccato.
In a recent video, I talked about how playing the hands two octaves apart when practicing scales can help you to hear things better. Well, here’s another tip for you. Play one hand legato and one hand staccato. This technique really allows you to hear what’s happening. Try playing the right hand legato and the left hand staccato. This can be reversed, playing the left hand legato and right hand staccato. This is just the tip of the iceberg! You can try this technique with two-note slurs or four-note slurs as well. And you could start on the second note of the scale and do the same thing. The whole idea is that it helps you to identify where the hands play together. It solidifies your scales in a way that just playing them the same way over and over again will never achieve for you. It could be a tremendous time-saver. So, what are some other ideas? That’s just one of three tips I’m giving you today. This can keep you busy for the next six months!
Do what solves problems.
The trick is not necessarily to do every articulation on every scale. If you find you have an unevenness in an F major scale descending scale, focus on that and start working on various techniques that solve that problem on that scale. Then you’ll find that this technique will translate from one scale to other scales.
Put your scales into a musical context.
We’re all used to playing scales loud, soft, medium. What about playing scales very, very loud? Or perhaps very delicately. You can play one hand loud and one hand soft, but it doesn’t just have to be that. You could make a crescendo up, a crescendo down, or you could start at the bottom loud and make a decrescendo all the way up and all the way down. The key is not to look at scales as an abstraction completely, but to put it into a musical context. After all, when you play music you’re not playing everything straight. So, you can explore this with your scales and make them more interesting and more musical. Always strive for a beautiful sound at the piano. This is really important in your music, anyway. You can also do all these techniques or many of these techniques with your arpeggios.
Play your scales at different speeds.
I am a firm believer in playing scales to a metronome. It’s very important that you practice your scales slowly and get progressively faster, increasing the speed of the metronome one or two notches at a time. This is what assures really clean, even scales. This is an incredibly useful technique. There’s no substitute for that sort of practice!
These are some musical things you can do with scales at home to enhance your technique on the piano. I hope this is helpful for you! Let me know how these tips work out for you and feel free to contact me with suggestions for future videos! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to share with you three tips for practicing scales. I’ve made quite a few videos about scales. But, Truth be known, I spend a minimal amount of time practicing scales t
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is, “Should You Learn to Play The Piano One Hand at a Time?” I have seen elementary piano method books that go on and on with just right hand alone, then the left-hand alone. So the question is, is this a good way to learn the piano?
I would say with very few exceptions this is not a good approach.
What are the exceptions? First of all, very young children. Let’s say you have a four-year-old champing at the bit to learn piano, but they’ve got tiny hands and a short attention span. You don’t want to say, “No, you may not play the piano.” So maybe you show them how to do some simple things with one hand to let them see what it’s like. But anybody who’s really studying the piano, unless they have hand problems which is another issue, must delve into playing hands together from the very beginning of studying the piano.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t practice hands separately.
As a matter of fact, it’s an essential technique on the piano. That’s how you learn music, mastering a small section at a time hands separately, then putting the hands together. It’s kind of like if you want to learn how to ride a bicycle and you try with one leg. You miss the whole point of the experience! The most intrinsic difficulty of the piano is being able to play the hands together. Therefore, you must not avoid it. You need to face it! How? By practicing intelligently. Take small chunks, practice each hand separately and put them together slowly until you get the feel for it. If the music is simple enough, you should be able to play hands together. And as you mature, you’ll be able to play more and more complex music hands together, always relying upon hands separate work when necessary. So, that’s a simple answer to this. Hands separate on the piano doesn’t have much relevancy in my opinion beyond being a valuable practice technique in order to put the hands together more easily.
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is, “Should You Learn to Play The Piano One Hand at a Time?” I have seen elementary piano method books that go on and on with just right hand alone, then the left-ha
This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. The question today is, “Should You Practice Scales in Contrary Motion?” What does that even mean? Contrary motion is where your hands play in opposite directions from one another. How can you play in contrary motion? Wouldn’t your hands overlap? I’ll explain the value and we’ll talk about whether this is something important for you to practice on the piano. You can go through your scales up and down as you normally would in four octaves. Then, the hands go in opposite directions! Now, why would you ever want to do that? Is this written in music? Not very often.
The reason for this is to hear the independence of the hands more clearly.
When you’re playing hands together, whether the hands are precisely together or not is hard for you to hear because you’re playing the same notes in both hands. But when they start going in opposite directions, you can really hear better. Not only that, but your hands can then develop the ability to play independently from one another. You can really hone in your scale technique this way. So, of course learning all your major and minor scales and arpeggios is a very important skillset to have in your back pocket, particularly if you’re a classical pianist. But for any type of pianist, I think it’s incredibly valuable. Once you can do that, as well as scales in intervals of thirds, sixths and tenths, there’s no end to what can be done with scales.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the end all is scales, arpeggios and exercises.
Nothing could be further from the truth! It’s important to remember that the whole reason for exercises is in service of the music so that you can play repertoire on a high level. So spend only the time necessary playing scales to hone in your technique and devote most of your practice time to music. It’s more enjoyable and rewarding and you’ll get more out of it. At the end of the day, you’ll have music you can play! So put a fraction of your time into scales, arpeggios and exercises, but the majority of your time into learning and refining music. You will be richly rewarded!
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos.
This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. The question today is, “Should You Practice Scales in Contrary Motion?” What does that even mean? Contrary motion is where your hands play in opposite directions from one another. How can you pla
This is Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com with a question, “What Is the Right Fingering on the Piano?” Fingering is such a deep subject on the piano that I could give courses on it and have guest artists to share their ideas because, truth be known, fingering is not a one size fits all proposition.
Are there any fundamental fingerings that all pianists follow?
There are some essential fingerings that all pianists must learn. For example, unlike the violin and other string instruments which do not have standard fingering for scales and arpeggios, on the piano there is standard fingering. I should mention a little aside here. There is another school of thought for a tiny percentage of pianists called, “mirror fingering” in which the thumbs always play the same notes in both hands in scales and arpeggios. But that is a subject for another video.
Most pianists learn proper fingering for scales from “Hanon 60 Selected Studies for the Virtuoso Pianist.”
You can get the Hanon book on Amazon or most sheet music stores. It is the Bible of fingering for scales and arpeggios on the piano. All pianists must learn the correct fingering for scales and arpeggios, but what about in your music? If you’ve ever had sheet music that has fingering in it, and then you see another edition of the same piece, you might be shocked to discover that the fingerings are different! In fact, fingerings are different in various editions! So how do you know what’s right?
Fingering is as much art as it is science.
My father, Morton Estrin, was a concert pianist with enormous hands. I have relatively small hands. Just think of that alone. Something that might lie right under the fingers of somebody with big hands would be impossible for somebody with smaller hands to reach. We must accommodate our hand size. Even the thickness of the fingers and the stretch between the thumb and the other fingers, all of these things affects us. Here’s the key: You must practice to find the fingering that works for you. Does that mean that anything goes with fingering? Far from it!
It takes many years to learn how to find the right fingering.
There is no substitute for a good teacher, as well as having authoritative, well-edited, fingered editions. I use that in the plural because there’s nothing better than having multiple resources of fingering suggestions. When you’re running through a problem with a passage, one of the first things to look for are new fingering solutions. Sometimes the fingering, even though it seems like it should be perfectly good, might not work for you. You have to discover what fingerings work for you.
There are some hard and fast rules in fingering.
I mentioned scales and arpeggios, but there are other fingerings you must follow. For example, rapid repeated notes with one hand. If you try to do that with one finger, you’re never going to be able to get it up to speed. But, by using three fingers you can go much faster. So, there is one thing that is certainly a rule. You must change fingers when playing rapid repeated notes with one hand. In fact, I like changing fingers on repeated notes even when they’re slow because of the legato quality you can get. When you play a repeated note without changing fingers, it is difficult to get a smooth sound. But by changing fingers, one finger is going down while the next finger comes up, so you achieve smoother, more connected repeated notes.
If you have technical problems in a passage and you’ve worked and worked but you never can get it, try experimenting with new fingering. Get another edition with fingerings and try them out. You will be rewarded! It is one of the things that will come to you after you’ve studied piano for a long time. You’ll start to understand fingering in a way that allows for solutions to technical and musical challenges on the piano.
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos.
This is Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com with a question, “What Is the Right Fingering on the Piano?” Fingering is such a deep subject on the piano that I could give courses on it and have guest artists to share their ideas because,
