Piano and Music Videos

Hello, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store, with a viewer question. What is the best way to learn to play the piano? This is a very basic question, yet it doesn’t have a simple answer. In a perfect world, you would grow up in a household exposed to music. You would have a beautiful grand piano to practice on. Your parents would be nurturing and loving and find the best piano teacher they can for you. One who is good at dealing with children and is inspiring. Your parents would be encouraging and would have you play for company to showcase your hard work. You would have wonderful exposure and training from a young age.

That is one ideal situation, but one size does not fit all! For example, oftentimes people contact me who have always wanted to play piano their whole lives and finally have time. They are retired and want to learn to play the piano. Is that a good situation? Absolutely!

The key to being able to be successful at the piano is immersion.

You want to immerse yourself into piano in every way possible. Not just practicing playing the piano, but listening to concerts, getting together with other people and talking about the piano, reading about the piano, everything centered around the piano!

The more involved you are mentaly with the instrument as well as physically playing it, the more productive you will be at the piano.

What about this whole idea of finding a good teacher and studying from a young age? Is this really necessary? If you want to be a concert pianist and you decide to start in your 30s or 40s or later, chances are you are not going to achieve a world-class level of supreme technique on the piano. However, I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from trying. It tends to be harder, just like learning a new language later in life, although there are some people who do that amazingly well.

There is a whole additional aspect to this which is the style of music you want to play. If you want to be a classical player, particularly a concert-level player, you absolutely should get a first class teacher to show you the intricacies and stylistic differences of the period styles. They would show you how to deal with ornamentation and how to practice particularly thorny sections. To learn all of that you are going to want to have the help of an accomplished, experienced pianist guiding you. But suppose you just want to play popular music. Maybe you like to improvise or play New Age or Country music. Are lessons really essential for that? Not necessarily.

A lot of people can pick things up on their own.

Some people are able to watch YouTube videos and figure out music. I have seen people do surprisingly well with that method. I’m talking about the type of video that shows you each of the notes you need to play. Some of them are like video games. While I can’t even imagine learning to play the piano that way, I’ve encountered people who can play relatively well who have learned from YouTube in this manner.

There isn’t just one way to learn to play the piano.

If you are learning to play popular styles, learning to play by ear is essential. To give you an extreme example of how playing by ear is necessary and how having a classical background might not help you, years ago we were having a birthday party in my father’s teaching studio. We had a bunch of people over and one of my dad’s former students was there. She had graduated from Juilliard in Piano Performance and was doing her Masters work studying with Sascha Gorodnitzki, one of their top teachers. She was working on Rachmaninoff concertos and was a very accomplished pianist. My father said, “Laurie, play Happy Birthday!” She broke into a cold sweat wondering which note it started on. Can you imagine that?

Somebody who could play virtuoso piano music couldn’t play the simplest song by ear.

There can be a myopic way of looking at the piano in conservatories. It is all about the Classical traditions. For the most part, they ignore all styles of music that you are likely to encounter in the real world. After graduation, most working engagements playing piano involves playing with other musicians, not solo playing. Accompanying is something sought after and can be rewarding if your sight-reading is good. However, playing events, parties, weddings, or other things of that nature involves an entirely different methodology. You’ve got to be able to make up arrangements. You have to be able to groove with other people by listening and playing by ear. It is a lot of fun and can be richly rewarding. You don’t necessarily have to start young. You don’t necessarily need formal training in order to do that.

There is more than one way to learn how to play the piano depending on what your goals are.

That’s the lesson for today. If you immerse yourself in piano, no matter how you go about it, you are going to learn how to play the piano in one way or another. I hope this has been enlightening and helpful as well as inspiring to those of you wanting to learn to play the piano if you have thought you had lost your opportunity. That is nonsense. It is never too late! Give it a whirl. As long as you enjoy it, it is worthwhile for you. Once again, I am Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. Thanks for joining me.

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This is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com with a really interesting question for you: What is an opus? You probably have heard this when you go to concerts and see, for example, a piano Sonata no. 7, opus 10 no. 3 by Beethoven. You may have wondered what this means. You have the number of the piece, the key of the piece, what does opus mean?

Opus numbers started way back in the time of Handel in the 1700s. It is a way of organizing music so generally, lower opus numbers are earlier works, and higher opus numbers are later works. However, it is not quite so simple. If you have sonatas numbered, that already tells you when they were written. Why would you still need opus numbers? Chopin wrote a whole book of mazurkas and an entire book of waltzes. Many of them are in the same key and to be able to identify them, opus numbers can be very handy.

Let’s say Beethoven had three sonatas he wanted to publish. He would go to his publisher with the works. If the last works he published were, “opus 9”, these new compositions would be cataloged as, “opus 10”. If he presents three piano sonatas opus 10, they will be designated as opus 10 no. 1, opus 10 no. 2, and opus 10 no 3. That is a whole body of work. Next time he composes music it will be cataloged as opus 11. It could be piano pieces, string quartets, or a symphony. It depends on what is in that opus. It could be one work or a group of works.

Each opus represents a group of works published together

Here is where it gets a little tricky. Sometimes opuses are out of order. For example, the Opus 49 Sonatas of Beethoven come to mind. He wrote two sonatas that were published pretty late, Opus 49, yet they were written much earlier. While these pieces were composed earlier in his life, he didn’t publish them until later on.

You can’t always go by opus numbers in regards to the date that something was written.

However, they provide a way to clarify what works you are referring to. That is the whole purpose of opus numbers. Why do I bring this all up? It is a little personal story. Years ago, I composed a piece that was a mammoth work for synthesizers, digital pianos, and a whole host of other technologies. I called it “Opus 1” because I thought it was a cool name. I just did an improvisation in my living room after visiting my daughter in Portland, Oregon. I hadn’t touched the piano in a few days and I just came in, hit record, and sat down. I’m calling it “Opus 2” for you.

I hope you enjoyed this brief tutorial on what “opus” means. If you have any questions I’m always here for you: robert@livingpianos.com I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for joining me again. This is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com I am Robert Estrin and I am so pleased to have a return visit from pianist and novelist Jack Kohl. Today we are going to discuss, “Can You Play the Piano with 4 Hands?” Truth be told, I can’t, at least not by myself! However, there is a whole genre of 4 hand piano music. You are going to get a taste of it today and there is a wealth of literature as well as people who specialize in collaborative piano. My sister is a member of the Double Digit Piano Duo and we have also played 4-hand piano music together. The other related genre is 2 piano music. Jack has played 2 pianos some, and I have played 2 pianos as well. In fact, my sister and I played a 2 piano concert together a few months ago! We also did some 4 hand piano music as well. They are markedly different experiences. What makes playing two pianos different from performing 4 hand music? What are the special challenges of 4 hand piano music?

Try listening to the Beethoven Sonata Opus 6 for 4 hands. It is played with one piano with two pianists. You’ll be able to get a taste for what 4 hand music is like with this wonderful piece of music. There are also great compositions for 4 hand piano by Schumann, Mozart, Debussy and others.

I’m sure most instrumentalists would be thrilled if they had as much music in their solo repertoire as there is for 4 hand piano!

There are some challenges pianists face working collaboratively. The secondo player who sits on the left side of the bench handles the pedaling. The primo player who sits at the treble end of the keyboard has to make sure the secondo pianist pedals appropriately for them. You really have to work as a team. Sometimes in four-hand piano music, the hands are actually intersecting. The hands will be nesting between one another.

There are some places where you have to work out getting out of each other’s way. Sometimes you may have to lift off very quickly to get out of the way so that you don’t collide!

Beyond that, there is another aspect that is fundamental to collaborative piano and that is the balance you create. You have to think of your duo as being one big pianist. Normally as a pianist, you are bringing out the melody on the very top as well as the bass on the bottom of the keyboard. But, if you are on the top with a 4-hand piano piece, if you play the bass loud, you’re actually playing an inner voice loud! Likewise, when the secondo is playing, if they bring out their melody with their right hand, that is also an inner voice, not the melody. It just steps over everything.

The secondo player must lighten up their right hand and the primo must play their left hand delicately in order to sound like one pianist creating a beautiful balance. Together, you become one instrument.

There is so much to 4 hand piano music. I want to thank Jack for coming here today and if you haven’t read any of his novels they are pretty amazing. “Bone Over Ivory” has just been released. It is a great read, not too long, and I think it is something you’ll really enjoy. He brings to his literature love and a deep understanding of piano because he is a very accomplished pianist and has done quite a bit of piano performing before he centered his career in creative writing. He has degrees in solo piano performance. Rather than getting knocked out of that world, not being a competition type of pianist with the “fastest fingers in the West”, he decided he wanted to stay in piano by becoming a generalist. He has experience playing in theater pits as well as accompanying. The metaphorical implications of all of that have never been wasted on him. He keeps a journal and writes down observations about piano playing. He has written three novels and “Bone Over Ivory” is a book of essays you can enjoy.

http://www.jacksonkohl.com

Thanks for joining us here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

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This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. The question today is “How do you play hands together on the piano?” This is a big subject. After all, playing hands together is what the piano is all about! You might wonder, particularly if you are a wind player or if you play almost any other instrument that plays one note at a time, how piano players play different parts in each of their hands. This is something that makes the piano unique. It’s what the instrument is all about. In fact, all keyboard instruments have this in common. So what is the secret? How do people do this? Even doing something like tapping your head and rubbing your tummy can be confusing for most people! The intricacy of the parts for each hand in piano music can present enormous challenges. You might wonder, how do you approach such a thing? There is an answer!

Of course, the more you practice, spending months or even years at the piano, it becomes more natural for you to be able to play independent parts at the same time. You may even develop the ability to read at sight new music that requires independence of the hands. But that usually takes a very long time to develop for most people. How can you do it right from the get-go?

I’ve been teaching piano for many years and I always introduce playing hands together from lesson one.

Otherwise, it would be like learning to ride a bike with one leg. It misses the whole point! How do you teach how to play the hands together? Even though it seems counter-intuitive, it’s by practicing hands separately. I don’t mean practicing incessantly hands separately. I mean that each phrase you work on, you practice each hand separately first. If you want to learn a new piece, rather than putting the hands together from the start, you break things down. Initially, you may read through the piece hands together a couple times just to get acquainted. Then, you should get to work and and start learning the piece. You should learn a very small section of each hand first while observing all the details.

Anytime you have music that can be broken down into chords, learn it in chords first.

By learning the chords, you are going to find the best fingering. It’s also easier since you only have a few chords to learn instead of so many separate notes. Once you have that learned, then you learn the other hand. Then you put the hands together and get it learned. Finally, you break up the chords and play the music as written.

When learning, you should also avoid using the pedal most of the time. The last step is adding the pedal. By working hands separately, each little phrase at a time and then putting them together, you have the benefit of breaking things down to size so you can master each section. You also can really digest a score and have all of the details learned because you focus on one phrase of music at a time. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of details in each phrase of music. How can this be? Each note has a duration and rhythm. Each note has a fingering. Each note has a phrasing and an expression. So, there are five aspects to each note. There’s only so much you can assimilate at a time!

That’s why learning small chunks of music a phrase at a time hands separately is such a powerful practice technique.

That’s the secret. You hear people playing intricate pieces of music that you want to play, and you wonder how it is possible to learn so much music with your hands doing dramatically different things. The accompanying video shows you how to achieve this with music that is relatively simple. But the same principle applies to learning any piece of music. That’s the secret to playing hands together on the piano. I hope you’ve enjoyed this here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. I’m Robert Estrin.

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You piano playing will be on an entirely new level when you stop using the pedal as a crutch and learn how to connect the music with your hands. I hope this tutorial helps your piano practice and your playing. This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store 949-244-3729 info@LivingPianos.com

This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store with a fantastic tip for your memorization, which is the power of interlocking phrases.

Now, what am I talking about here? Well, if you’ve spent time memorizing music, you know that the most efficient way to do it is to take a small section at a time, because after all, there’s a limit to how much you can learn at once. What can really help you is by watching this video and reading the article on how to memorize:

HOW TO PRACTICE THE PIANO PART 1 – MEMORIZING MUSIC

You take each hand separately a small section at a time, mastering each hand and then putting them together and getting that memorized.

But How Do You Get the Phrases Together?

You learn this section, that section, and you’re going to have a whole bunch of random phrases. That’s where the interlocking phrases come in. For example, in the above video, if you are learning a Mozart sonata like the K545, the famous C-major sonata of Mozart, you start with the first phrase to learn. But instead of doing that, go one note further as demonstrated in the accompanying video. That extra note is where you start learning your next phrase. That way, after you learn the first phrase and get that solid, you have a common note between the two phrases. When you finally get the second phrase learned, you go back to the beginning, and you’ll be able to be on the first note of the second phrase.

Interlocking Phrases Is So Helpful!

Beyond that, when you get into more advanced stages of learning your music, you might find that you have all the phrases learned but you can’t get through everything in a fluid manner. Then you can try interlocking at different points. For example, you do the first four measures, and then you try the second measure to the sixth measure. Then you practice off-setting the points at which the phrases connect because one of the biggest challenges with memorizing music is getting everything smoothly put together.

So, that is the power of interlocking phrases in learning music. I hope this tip if helpful for you. Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. If you haven’t already subscribed to my YouTube channel, go for it, because you’ll get all the fresh videos. Thanks for joining me. Robert@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729