Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question is: What is the most important finger for playing the piano? Of course, all of your fingers are important, and they each play a vital role. Imagine playing the piano with less than ten fingers. It would be really hard! It’s hard enough with all ten fingers. But there’s one finger that really is pivotal for playing the piano. Not only that, but it is arguably the most important finger that you have for everything.

The most important finger is the thumb.

Why are the thumbs so important? Naturally, being able to grasp objects with the thumb, because it’s opposing the other fingers, is incredibly important. And it’s in no small part how civilization developed. Our thumbs enable us to utilize tools. The thumb gives you control. In piano playing, there are three aspects that make the thumb vitally important. The thumb is your strongest finger. The third finger is pretty darn strong, but not like the thumb. Instead of having three bones like your other fingers, the thumb only has two. And it has a unique set of tendons and muscles.

How does this impact piano playing?

First of all, when playing scales, arpeggios, or any passages that go up and down the keyboard, because the thumb has the flexibility of being able to oppose the other fingers, you can use the thumb to cross other fingers. It can go under the hand to reach for the next note. Imagine trying to play scales without your thumbs. It’s really hard because crossing over fingers without using the thumb is awkward. Sometimes you have to do that when you’re playing counterpoint. You might have to hold a note with your thumb while other notes are being played on top. If the thumb is already engaged in playing a note, it can be necessary to cross with different fingers.

The thumb is vitally important for playing octaves and other larger intervals.

Unless you have very large hands, you probably can’t play an octave with your other fingers. Even if you had an extra finger like your other fingers instead of a unique finger like the thumb, you wouldn’t be able to get the control and power of the thumb. It’s the magic of the arch! You can get the power of the arch of the whole hand with the thumb. It’s the power of the arch that gives you control when playing octaves as well as chords. This enables you to get the balance you want. You utilize the rocking of the hand from the left to the right to balance the tone from one side of the hand to the other side. You can get a certain amount of that with your other fingers, but because the thumb has unique musculature, it enables you to achieve superior control. So when you’re playing octaves, for example, you can get the balance you want by how you distribute the weight of the hand. That’s also what enables rapid, powerful octaves.

That’s the power of the thumb!

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you how to create beautiful melodies. And what melody is more beautiful than Clair de Lune by Debussy? I’m going to show you how to approach this piece, but this will apply to almost any melodic music you play. There are countless techniques you can employ on Clair de Lune, but today I’m going to show you something I learned from many years of living with my wife, Florence Estrin, who is a magnificent flutist. The way she uses the air in order to capture the phrase and to have a melodic line that carries the listener is something that I’ve literally lived with for decades. I want to share it with you because it translates to piano playing.

Having experience with a wind instrument, singing, or even a bowed instrument can be enlightening for a pianist.

After all, you’re playing a percussion instrument and trying to get a melodic line is a great challenge. You can better understand what’s involved playing a melody on an instrument that’s capable of a sustained line. So I’m going to play Clair de Lune for you now, just the beginning part, and then I’m going to explain what I’m doing to create this beautiful singing quality to the melody.

Watch the video to hear the demonstration!

Clair de Lune is such a gorgeous piece. Being in rhythm on this is vital to capturing the mood. The worst mistake you can make with Clair de Lune is to take too slow a tempo and not holding the long notes long enough. The rhythm is not what you might think it is. If you count it, try to count with the very slow dotted quarter notes as the beat since the beat is divided into three eighth notes most of the time, but sometimes Debussy writes two eighth notes to the dotted quarter note. What I’m going to talk about today is creating a flowing line. It’s not just about giving more energy to higher notes, just like you would naturally do with your breath when you’re singing or playing a wind instrument. It’s also about elongating those top notes just a little bit. It’s like how you use a little bit more air on higher notes if you were playing it on the flute and giving a little bit more time on those notes. I hate to use the word time because it really isn’t a rhythmic technique as much as it is filling up the sound, akin to the air on a wind instrument or when singing.

Without doing this, you don’t get the same feeling of serenity.

Take a little bit more time with those long notes. It’s very subtle because if it’s done too much, it would create rhythmic distortion, which would ruin the melodic line. But instead, it’s visualizing in your mind the sound that would be created if this was played on a flute or was an aria sung by a great singer to get that flowing line. You want to fill up those high notes, like you would naturally do if you sang such a melody.

Try this with all the melodic music you play!

I want you to try this, and not just with Clair de Lune. It’s not just about getting louder towards the higher notes, but making sure you ride over the crest of the phrase. Enjoy those high notes a little bit longer so that they can live on and give a nice expansiveness to your musical line. Let me know in the comments how this resonates with you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to present to you ways of practicing the first movement of Schumann’s wonderful Kinderszenen, or Scenes from Childhood. This is a glorious set of pieces that is accessible to people who are not necessarily on a virtuoso level of technique, and yet it is an absolutely stupendous piece of music! It’s a whole series of small movements, so you don’t have to take months to learn each one, and you don’t have to learn all of them. You can just learn select movements. I’m going to focus today on the very first movement: From Foreign Lands and People. It presents a unique challenge that you’ll find in other pieces. So what I’m going to show you here is not just for this movement. It covers a lot of things you can apply to many pieces of music!

A piece like this can be challenging using my usual practice method.

Any of you who follow me probably already know how I practice and how I teach how to practice, which is to memorize first. After reading the piece maybe 2 or 3 times, I get right to work, taking very small phrases, memorizing the right hand with all the details, memorizing the left hand with all the details, and then putting the hands together, going on to the next section and connecting. A piece like this has challenges when using this approach. First of all, I want to just play it for you so you can hear what the piece is about, and then I’m going to show you what challenges this piece has with the way I’m talking about practicing.

Watch the video to hear the music!

So I usually take two or four measures at a time, learn the hands separately, and then put the hands together. Then I move on to the next phrase. But the problem is, just like with a fugue, you have a middle voice, and it’s divided between the hands. At the beginning, you basically have a melody and a bass part. It’s a nice duet. But then you have a middle part that is divided between the hands. So if you try to learn the hands separately, it doesn’t make much sense. You end up with that middle part being bisected.

It makes much more sense to learn the inner voices as chords.

You really want to learn the melody and the bass, and then the middle part. It’s almost like you have three hands there in those three individual parts. Once you learn the three parts, (melody, bass, and chords), you can play the hands separately. But you want to understand that the three parts are basically a trio. Now I’m going to give you a bonus tip here.

How do you get that middle line to be quiet?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you the secret of rounded fingers. If you studied piano, you probably had teachers who said you must round your fingers and make them into a ball. But that can be painful! So why am I telling you to use rounded fingers? Well, there are different ways of approaching rounded fingers. I’m going to show you the correct way, which takes zero effort, and I’m going to explain why it’s so important in your piano playing. And I’m going to give you examples of it. The first example I’m going to give is the famous Mozart K 545 C Major Sonata. I’m going to explain where the rounded fingers really come into play and why it’s so important for you.

Using rounded fingers is particularly helpful when playing trills.

Why are rounded fingers necessary to be able to execute trills? Think about this. You have three different finger joints. If you only use one joint, that’s a lot of work for that one joint. But you have two other joints. If you use all your joints, you divide the load among many more joints. It’s much easier than moving a whole finger from just your knuckle. That’s the main reason. But how do you do this without stressing? The idea of holding a ball is a terrible analogy.

You never want to be in a position that takes any effort to maintain.

I’m going to repeat that. Don’t go into a hand position that takes effort to maintain. You might think, well, how can you possibly be in a position that’s rounded like that without any effort? You just drop your limp hands straight down toward the keyboard, and let your hands completely relax on the keys. Your hands will naturally be in a rounded position. And it takes absolutely no effort to maintain because your hands naturally go into that position. Try it on your piano. Without any effort at all, just go down, and you’ll be in that rounded position. Isn’t that remarkable? What are the key places where this is really handy? Well, there are several actually, and I’m going to show you. For one thing, you have a short trill right at the beginning of this Mozart sonata. If you were to try to do that with flat fingers, it would be cumbersome. Your fingers are too big and heavy. It’s much easier with rounded fingers. With flat fingers, it’s all but impossible. By the way, three and one are your strongest trill fingers. I know a lot of you like to use three and two. Those are good too. But three and one are even stronger.

You always must know exactly how many notes you’re playing in a trill.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about the power of musical snippets in your practice. What you’re going to learn today is one of the most valuable techniques you could ever use in your piano practice. The amazing thing about it is that you can use this technique with almost all of your music! It’s incredibly valuable, especially for something fast. I’m going to play the beginning of the B minor Scherzo of Chopin. It’s a little rusty, so I can practice it in front of you. You can see for yourself how this technique works in the accompanying video.

The technique of fast playing is sometimes dramatically different from the technique of slow playing.

When you’re working on a fast section like this, you could do the obvious thing and put the metronome on a slow speed and do metronome speeds to work it up. But the problem with that approach is that you might hit a wall where you can’t get any faster. Why is that? Because the technique of fast playing is sometimes dramatically different from the technique of slow playing. This is particularly obvious on a wind instrument because the breaths come in different places. It’s a whole different experience. Even on the piano, fast playing feels different from slow playing. You try to get faster and faster with the metronome, but sometimes you just can’t get any faster.

I’m going to show you a completely different technique using musical snippets.

Just play the smallest possible unit that makes sense to you. Take a tiny number of notes. You can just take the first two notes, then take the next two, and then put them together. Now you might not want to go note by note. You might instead consider note groups that fall under your hands. Some snippets are basically broken chords. You want to get over the next note group as soon as you hit the new hand position; otherwise, you’ll never gain speed. So as you finish one note group, you get your hand in position over the next note group.

You can work through your music this way, gaining confidence and playing with the technique you’re going to eventually use when you play the whole piece.