Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about grace notes that aren’t grace notes. Sometimes students think that they’re looking at grace notes and they’re not grace notes. What am I talking about? Well, first of all, what are grace notes? Grace notes are the little tiny notes with diagonal lines going through them just before other notes. You typically play them very quickly. They can be played either on the beat or before the beat. It depends upon what works well. Sometimes it’s easier to play them on the beat. Sometimes it’s easier to play them slightly before the beat. The key is to play them quickly.

When are grace notes not grace notes? How do you know?

Sometimes you will see these little notes that look like grace notes, but they aren’t grace notes. For example, the beginning of Mozart’s Alla Turka movement from his famous Sonata k331. Those are not grace notes! Believe it or not. Look in your edition. They may be written as grace notes. But if you have an authoritative urtext edition, they’re written as appoggiaturas. Appoggiaturas look almost exactly like grace notes, but there’s one key difference. Grace notes always have little lines through them. They’re crossed out. Whereas, appoggiaturas are little tiny notes, but there are no lines through them. They are different in the way you play them. You don’t play them like grace notes. I mentioned two ways to play grace notes, either before the beat or on the beat playing very quickly. Both are wrong in this context, because these are appoggiaturas. Look in your edition. There should not be a line through them. If there are lines through them, this is not accurate.

What are appoggiaturas?

Appoggiaturas are long expressive non chord tones that resolve. They’re played on the beat with some time attached to them. In this case you play them as 16th notes followed by dotted 8th notes instead of grace notes, which are not appropriate for Mozart. It’s not what Mozart wrote! There are some editions out there that are just wrong in this regard. Listen to the beauty when you play them long, the way they’re supposed to be played. Look at all your music now for any places you think you have grace notes. Make sure they are grace notes. They might be appoggiaturas!

There are times when grace notes are not grace notes at all, but they are appoggiaturas to be played long and on the beat. That’s the lesson for today! I’m sure all of you are going to check your scores now. Let me know what you discover! Tell me in the comments here at LivingPianos.com, as well as YouTube. Thanks so much for joining me. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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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 I’m going to discuss a musical stress test. What am I talking about? You practice, and practice, and practice, but you wonder if you really know the score. How do you know if you have security with the music? Are you ready for a performance? Are you ready for a lesson? Are you ready to accompany someone? How do you know when you’re ready? You don’t want to wait until the moment of truth comes to find out you weren’t prepared! How can you know? Because as you well know, you can play something by yourself in your home perfectly, and then when you try to play it for somebody else, it goes haywire. What can you do to test things out?

Try playing faster.

There are a lot of things you can do to test yourself. You can try playing things faster to see if you can still hold it together. Because when you get nervous, one of the first things that happens is your physiology speeds up a little bit. Your heart rate, your breathing, all of that speeds up. So guess what happens to your playing? You go faster! You don’t even think you’re going faster. I’ll never forget many, many, years ago, listening to recordings of myself as a child, playing in my dad’s student recitals. I couldn’t believe how fast I was going! I was playing faster than I ever played those pieces! It could be a disaster if you’ve never tried your pieces faster, and the first time it happens is during a performance. I’ve had times where I would keep my fingers crossed hearing my students perform in recitals taking outrageously fast tempos they had never tried before, hoping they had some reserve in their playing.

Another great thing you can do is record yourself.

Psych yourself up like it’s an actual performance. Set up a device, and go through your music and make yourself a little bit nervous. Make yourself feel like you are performing. The key is not to stop! Even if you mess up right at the beginning, keep going. Because that can happen in a performance, and you don’t want to start over. Nobody wants to hear you start over. First of all, it’s as much as announcing to everybody that you’ve messed up. But more than that, it destroys the continuity of the performance for the audience. Speaking of which, there’s no better way to create stress than to play for an audience. If you regularly play for people, play for more people. The more people you play for, the more nervous you’re likely to get. That’s the ultimate stress test. And if you c witanhstand that, then you’re ready for anything.

What I recommend is ratcheting up little by little.

Start with recording for a device. Then play for a family member or a trusted friend. Then play for larger and larger numbers of people until you’re ready for an audience. If you can withstand that and you can withstand playing faster than you usually play, you should be ready for a performance. You can also try playing on different pianos as a musical stress test. Play on a piano you’ve never played and see what happens! Right from the get go, without even trying the piano first, just jump right in. Play on as many pianos as you can. It’s a great way to improve your preparedness, because you can’t take your piano with you. Usually, you have to play whatever piano is wherever you are performing. So playing on as many different instruments as possible is another great way to get ready for your performance. Make sure you’re in the best shape possible to withstand anything in your playing. I hope this is interesting 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. Today the subject is about learning the hardest part of a piece first. I’ve talked before about learning a new piece from the beginning and working in sequence. You should read through a piece a couple of times to familiarize yourself with it, then get to work bit by bit learning each phrase hands separately, then put the hands together and connect the phrases. So what’s this business about learning the hardest part first? I talked about starting from the end of a piece also, as one pianist once suggested to me.

I find that learning a piece sequentially generally makes much more sense.

It helps you to understand the whole evolution of thought and the mathematical materials and motifs of a piece of music. Sometimes, though, there’s a piece that has such a monstrously difficult section later on that if you don’t tackle it early, it will hold you up later. Something like a coda to a Chopin Ballade is going to take you a long time to really get polished and solid. If you just start with the coda first, by the time you get there, you’ll have the whole piece together! Because that coda is going to take you so much longer to be able to get up to the level of the rest of the piece.

In certain instances, you want to zero in on the hardest part of a piece first.

Does that mean that you shouldn’t start at the beginning? No. Quite the contrary. You take two approaches at once. You start the piece from the beginning in the manner I described earlier, while dividing part of your practice for working on the hardest section. Just working on the hardest part the whole time when you’re starting a new piece can be very discouraging. After all, you have a piece that you love the sound of, for example the Chopin G minor Ballade. The coda is hard. It will require special attention. But you might want to play that beautiful first theme. That’s something that you can get on a high level much sooner than the coda. So it keeps you engaged, working from two fronts. By the time you get to the coda, you’ve already learned it! You don’t have to learn the whole coda before you even start the piece. But you can work concurrently on the beginning, as well as the coda, and perhaps a couple of other key sections. So when you get to them, they’re not in their infancy. They’re already starting to gel. It is a tremendous benefit in your practice to zero in on some of the hardest sections while going through sequentially from the beginning. That way when you get to these hard sections, they’re already mature. They’ve started to coalesce for you. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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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 what to do with a piece you have learned. There are so many things you can do with it! The first thing is the most obvious thing in the world: Play it! You’d be surprised how many people learn pieces but never play them and they forget them. There are so many benefits to playing the pieces you have learned. One, it’s fun! What’s all the work for anyway if not to be able to play music? Secondly, it keeps the pieces fresh. If you play your pieces every day it gets to the point where you can just whip them off without any problems. So if you ever have a performance opportunity, you’re so used to playing it that it’s almost automatic.

Playing your pieces keeps you physically and mentally in shape on the piano.

A lot of people spend hours a day on exercises to keep their fingers in shape and their muscles moving. You know what? There are many pieces of music that can accomplish the same thing. Now this isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for exercises. There certainly is. Scales, arpeggios, octaves and other exercises are a vital part of piano practice. But in regards to just keeping your fingers limber and the muscles in good shape, playing through your music can accomplish that. You also have the ancillary benefits of developing fluidity and reliability in performance. But like anything else, if you play them over and over and over again, there could be minute changes along the way.

It’s important to periodically reference the score of pieces you have memorized.

In the olden days of analog tape recording, if you ever made a tape of a tape of a tape, the sound gets pretty awful. Each successive generation has a little bit of loss of quality, unlike digital recording today. Another example of this is the old game of telephone that we all played in school, where you whisper a message to the person next to you who then whispers it to the person next to them going all the way around the room. At the end, you have a completely different message! Well, you can end up with a completely different piece of music if you just play it over and over and over again without ever referring back to the original score!

How do you approach reviewing your pieces with the score?

The best way is to take your score out and find a tempo at which you can read it. Now that tempo is going to be far slower than the speed you’re probably playing it. If it’s a piece you have played hundreds of times, you have a tempo that’s much faster than the tempo at which you can actually read all the details of the score. Slow way down, find the appropriate speed on the metronome, and take your foot off the pedal so you can clearly hear everything you’re doing. Then exaggerate everything as you play, delineating all the notes, phrasing, fingering and expression. For example, let’s say you learned the Moonlight Sonata and you want to refresh it. You’ve been playing it and playing and playing it and you want to make sure you’re playing it accurately. And you want to solidify the performance. You want to know exactly where all the rests are, whether chords have two notes or three notes, where the crescendos start and end. There are so many little details. It’s not just the notes and the rhythm and the fingering, it’s every single detail you want to cement and re-cement.

I guarantee this will help you with any piece, no matter how well you play it and how well you’ve learned it.

If you slow it down and play with the score, with no pedal, and with a metronome, you will find little things you had forgotten. You’ll cement your performance and make it much stronger. So the lesson for today, what do you do with pieces you’ve played before that you’ve learned? Keep playing them so you don’t forget them, number one. Number two, review with a score, playing slowly with no pedal, with a metronome to make sure you keep an honest performance. There are other practice techniques you can also employ in strategic parts that need the work, but these are the basics for what to do with pieces you already know. I hope this is helpful for you! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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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. The subject today is about how to finger octaves. Octaves have a very simple fingering solution the vast majority of the time. Unless you have very large hands, the simple solution is to use your first and fifth fingers on white keys and your first and fourth fingers on black keys. Now, this is great for legato octaves, but it also divides the load of the hand when playing rapid octaves from the wrist. Using the fourth finger on the black keys divides the load a bit on the hands.

Move your arms in to reach the black keys.

There’s another technique I want to show you that is really vital. The wrists accomplish octaves, but the arms have an essential role in getting over the keys. You want to think of going in and out of the keyboard for black keys to accomplish those octaves without having to reach with your fingers. Move your arms in for black keys and out for white keys. It makes it so much easier. By moving your arms in you don’t have to use so much finger strength to hit the black keys. This is a great technique for you in conjunction with using the fourth finger on black keys. Remember to get over the keys by moving your hands closer to the fallboard for black keys, and closer to you for white keys.

Those are the tips for octaves today!

I’ve made a lot of videos about octaves. You can enjoy all of them here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube as well. We welcome your comments! Thank you for subscribing. 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

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Supplemental Content:

How to Play Legato Octaves

The BEST Piano Exercises pt 4

How to Develop Brilliant Octaves in Your Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is why looping sections of music doesn’t work in piano practice. It seems counterintuitive since you want to repeat things over and over to solidify them. Many times, I see students struggling, looping something over and over again, and not getting anywhere. Why doesn’t this work? Well, it comes down to the simple fact that practicing has some physiological component to it, but primarily:

Practicing is a thought process.

Take the time to stop and listen. Let’s say you’re working on a piece of music. Everything’s going fine, but then you get to a section that you can’t play up to speed, or it’s sloppy, or uneven. So you start practicing it. You just keep looping that section hoping to make it better. The problem with this is you’ve turned yourself into a robot! You’re just a machine playing it over and over again, without giving yourself the time to listen to what you’re doing. You’re not stopping long enough to make a judgment. Listen closely, then stop and ask yourself if that’s the way you want to play it. If the answer is yes, great! See if you can do it that way again. If the answer is no, decide specifically what you want to do differently next time.

Looping a phrase doesn’t give you time to listen.

When you loop a phrase, your mind can be anywhere. It’s not a thought process anymore. It’s just a mechanical motion. You might get a little exercise for your hands, but are you going to get any real value? Are you going to clean up your playing? Are you going to make it more even? No, you’re just repeating the same thing again and again. So if it happens to be exactly the way you want to play it, great! But if it isn’t, you’re cementing a poor performance. Your hands now know how to play it the way you don’t want because you never stopped to listen. You have to listen each and every time you repeat the phrase so you can determine whether it is what you want. And if it’s not what you want, you need to know exactly what to listen for the next time and find a solution.

Give yourself the time to listen to each repetition of a phrase rather than mindlessly looping it over and over again, because that accomplishes very little.

You’re not really refining your music when you’re just repeating things over and over in a loop fashion. So avoid those loop situations, unless it’s so perfect that you want to loop it again and again, perfectly. At that stage, there’s nothing wrong with looping. But make sure it’s the sound you’re after, because you’re going to cement it into your hands and your ears. If it isn’t exactly what you want, it’s going to be 10 times harder to undo what you have learned. Motor memory is very strong! It takes great intentional work to undo motor memory that’s ingrained in your hand. So looping can be dangerous! Be sure you are mindful taking time between repetitions when you’re practicing sections of music. That’s the lesson for today! 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

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com