Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to share with you the magic formula for key signatures. Many of you know your key signatures. But maybe you don’t quite understand them or you’re not fluent with them. Do you need to memorize all that stuff? Surprisingly the answer is no. Why not? There are formulas you can use to figure them out!

You never have to memorize your key signatures.

Believe it or not, I have never memorized my key signatures, but I can name them. F, C, G, D, A, E, B. How did I do that so fast? I’m actually thinking through the intervals that fast. I’m going to show you how to do exactly the same thing so that you don’t have to memorize them. You can understand them and figure them out. You might not be able to figure them out as quickly as I just did, but you will be able to figure them out. You will get faster with it over time.

The interval of a fifth is critical in key signatures.

What is a fifth? The fifth, simply put, is the fifth note of a scale. So in C major, G is the fifth note of the scale. This interval is what’s called a perfect fifth. It’s a perfect fifth because G is the fifth note of the C major scale. You can invert this and put the C on top. It’s still a perfect interval, but now it becomes a fourth. So fourths and fifths are essentially the same. That’s one of the reasons they’re perfect intervals. Inverted, they remain perfect. Incidentally, octaves are also perfect intervals, as well as primes or unisons. If two people are playing the same note on different instruments, that’s called a prime. Once you understand fifths and fourths, the rest is easy!

If you have a key signature with sharps, the first sharp is always F-sharp.

You have to memorize that F-sharp is the first sharp. Once you memorize that and a couple other small details, the rest is seamless. So you have F-sharp. From there it goes up by fifths. You can either count with your fingers or you can do it on the piano. Count out five notes, F, G, A, B, C. C is the second sharp. From here you count out the next one, C, D, E, F, G. G is the next sharp. You can keep counting this way. D is the next sharp, then A, then E, and the last sharp is B. So these are all the sharps, F, C, G, D, A, E, B. You don’t have to memorize them. You just have to be able to figure them out.

How do you know what key you’re in?

If you go up a half step from the last sharp to the right, that’s the major key. So if you have one sharp, an F-sharp, go up a half step to see you’re in the key of G major. If you have two sharps, F-sharp and C-sharp, you’re in the key of D major. If you have three sharps, F-sharp, C-sharp, G-sharp, you’re in the key of A major. If you have four sharps, F-sharp, C-sharp, G-sharp, D-sharp, you’re in E major. If you have five sharps, F-sharp, C-sharp, G-sharp, D-sharp, A-sharp, you’re in B major. With six sharps you end on E-sharp, which means you’re in the key of F-sharp major. And finally, all seven sharps mean you’re in the key of C-sharp major.

That’s just half the story, because now we go to flats!

The first flat, if you only have one, is going to be B-flat. From here it goes down by fifths. I mentioned earlier that fifths and fourths are the same thing reversed. So you might as well go up by fourths because it’s easier to count up than down. So B-flat, E flat, A-flat, D-flat, G-flat, C-flat, F-flat. That’s the order of the flats. This is exactly backwards from the order of the sharps. The patterns are unbelievable!

Finding what key you’re in is even easier with flats.

There is one that you must memorize. The key with one flat is F major. It has the B-flat in it. You just have to know that. From there, the second to last flat is the key you are in. Because all flat scales, with the exception of F major, begin on a flat. So if you have two flats, B-flat and E-flat, you’re in the key of B-flat major. If you have three flats, B-flat, E-flat, A-flat, you’re in the key of E-flat major. If you have four flats, B-flat, E-flat, A-flat, D-flat, you’re in the key of A-flat major. And it goes on and on that way.

So all you have to look for is the last sharp on the right and go up a half step to find your major key. Or look for the second to last flat to the right to find the major key. I hope you enjoy these theory primers! Let me know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube. Thanks again 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. Is it okay to re-divide the hands in piano playing? That’s the question today. There are many schools of thought on this subject. With Beethoven in particular, there are many people who feel that it’s very important to play the music exactly as it is written and not to redistribute the notes between the hands in a way that Beethoven didn’t write. Other people think as long as it sounds good, what’s the difference? Is there a difference? Should you divide the hands or not?

It really depends upon how you execute the music.

The question is, can you make it sound the way it is written while re-dividing the hands, or is it going to sound different? If it sounds choppy then that’s no good. If you know the sound that the composer intended and you divide the hands in a way that sounds the same, but it’s easier to negotiate, in my opinion there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing that. As long as the integrity of the sound is maintained based upon how the composer wrote the music, there’s nothing wrong with re-dividing the hands to be able to negotiate passages more cleanly and faithfully.

If somebody can hear the difference in the way it sounds, you should avoid dividing the hands.

Re-dividing the hands can be a lifesaver in a lot of instances. It can make the music sound better. It can help you play more cleanly. Just always keep in mind the intent that the composer had in the way they wrote the score. That’s my opinion. Let me know in the comments how you feel about this! 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 share with you the ultimate wrist exercise for your piano technique. Wrists are so important in piano playing! Everyone knows that you need to use your fingers in order to play the piano. But the fingers don’t do you much with fast chords and octaves. It’s very hard to play octaves with your fingers with the exception of legato octaves. But when something is fast, there’s no way the fingers can keep up. You have to use your wrists! If you use your arms, it’s cumbersome. You can’t go fast enough! The wrists are also incredibly important for chord technique. There are some chord techniques that are slower and bigger where you use your arms in order to get maximum power. But in most instances, the wrists must be utilized. The arms are just too big and slow.

How do you develop the wrists?

Developing the independence of the wrists so you use them separately from your arms is a major difficulty for some people. For others it comes quite naturally. Some people struggle to avoid arm motion when utilizing the wrist. Your arms have too much mass to go fast enough in many cases. But your wrists can go very fast! Here is a very simple exercise for you.

It’s how you do the exercise that makes all the difference.

It only utilizes the second and fourth fingers in both hands. Using only your wrists, you just go up on white keys starting on C and E in both hands ascending in thirds. You just go eight times on C and E, then you go up eight times on D and F. You go up as high as you want diatonically (by white keys), then come back down again eight times on each third. Do this with the metronome set at 60.

When you do this exercise, your arms should not be going up and down at all.

You want to use only the wrists. But the arms are very important! They must guide the hands over the right keys. So after the eighth time playing C and E, the arms move right over D and F. If you’ve never done this exercise before, you’re going to feel it in your forearms, because these are muscles you don’t ordinarily use. If you are a tennis player you might have very well-developed wrists. But other than that, there are not a lot of times when you use your wrists independently from your arms. The first time you do this you might not keep the wrist motion separate from your arms and have both of them working together. That doesn’t do much to strengthen your wrists when using your arms.

Keep your wrists up the entire time, except for the brief moment when they play.

Another problem you might face is letting your hands fall back down on the keys when you’re not playing. It may seem fine when practicing slowly, but this is a hyper slowed down version of what you need to be able to accomplish playing fast later. There won’t be time to go back down. You must strike from above. It has to be one motion.

There’s one more problem to watch out for. You have your wrists raised, but then your arms get lazy and start lowering. Before you know it, you’re playing in a terribly uncomfortable position with your wrists bent way up. Even when you’re playing the notes, they can still be bent. This isn’t good. It can be destructive, as a matter of fact. You don’t want to flex too far because you have nerves that can be stressed. So it’s a gentle slope of the wrist. At the moment the keys are struck, your wrists should be straight.

Go through this exercise once every day. You’ll be amazed at how the independence of your wrists helps you to develop strength, and speed!

The wrists are so important, from octaves to chord technique to delineating staccatos. Utilizing the wrists for staccatos gives you a crisp sound. When using your arms for staccatos, you would get a limp, heavy sound. The wrists play an incredibly important part in piano playing! This exercise can help you develop the independence and strength of your wrists. Thanks again 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

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. The subject today is about having a pulse in your music. Your music must have a pulse or it dies! Now that’s an intense statement, but it’s true. Sometimes you listen to seasoned concert artists who become so self-indulgent in their playing that they lose the beat of the music. It really loses its whole energy and purpose when you don’t have the pulse to guide everything and hold on to the structure.

This happens oftentimes in slow pieces.

People think they’re playing very expressively by having so much freedom. A great example of this is in Clair de Lune of Debussy. You might hear somebody start really slowly, but then they lose the pulse! You’re left with this wishy washy wandering sound that isn’t anchored in the music anymore. There’s nothing about it that is implied in the score. Debussy wrote this piece, and it has a beauty that is revealed when the real rhythm is played. The secret then is figuring out what note value the pulse is. If you look through the score, you’ll see eighth notes, since it’s in 9/8 time. So if you have eighth notes ticking, it becomes very difficult because you have tuplets. So you have to fit in two notes to 3 ticks of the metronome which is very difficult.

The pulse needs to be slower.

In the case of Clair de Lune, the pulse is actually the dotted quarter note! When you get down to a reasonable pulse rate, you can feel the music. It’s the same tempo, but with a pulse only ticking on the dotted quarter notes instead of on every eighth note. You have this nice, relaxed pulse. Within that framework there’s so much freedom! You feel the pulse. Then you have the liberty to nuance the notes within that pulse of the larger beat. That is the secret.

Sometimes you can have a pulse so slow that it gives you tremendous freedom.

For example, in Chopin’s Nocturne in B-flat Minor. Play it at a tempo of 90 to the quarter note, and you’ll see how constrained it feels having to fit the notes into that many pulses. This pulse is pretty darn fast! It’s not very relaxing. It sounds very regimented and robotic by quantizing everything to that exact beat. Because it’s not really the beat. The beat should be felt as the unit of six eighth notes. If you take the metronome down to 30 (on a metronome application on your phone), you have a tick for the dotted half note. It’s very slow, but there’s a pulse there. There is a freedom that you have in your playing when you have a slower pulse. Rachmaninoff said, “The larger the phrase, the greater the musician.” And I believe that the slower the pulse, the more control you have. It’s easier to maintain tempo. This is true of everything, particularly fast movements. If you try to play a fast movement while you’re thinking of every eighth or sixteenth note, maintaining tempo is difficult.

Now, for initially getting the music under your fingers, having the pulse on the faster note can be beneficial. It helps you to be absolutely sure of the rhythm and that you’re playing honestly. Playing this way is actually very instructive. But once you have the piece moving more, thinking the longer beat as the pulse can give you freedom within the beat and makes it easier to maintain your tempo. Try it for yourself with your music and let me know how it works! I hope this has been helpful for you! Thanks again 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. The subject today is about whether you should look at your hands when you play from memory on the piano. This is a really insightful question that someone asked me recently. There are two distinctly different ways of playing the piano. One is playing from memory and the other is reading the music.

When playing with the music, you should strive to keep your eyes on the score the entire time.

You only want to have brief glances at the keys. When you do look at the keys, it must be just your eyes moving. If you play the piano and you are looking at the music ,you can’t look away. You can’t read what you’re not looking at! When playing from the score, you absolutely must keep your eyes on the music.

What About Playing From Memory?

Oftentimes I have students memorize music. At the very first lesson I show my students how to memorize. This is something that almost nobody ever teaches. You think it’s magic that pianists could assimilate all this music. Are pianists some kind of geniuses? No. You just have to know how to memorize. You have to take little chunks of music and build the whole composition bit by bit. When you hear somebody play, it seems like a miracle. But really, if you see what’s behind the curtain, it’s just a lot of little steps that go into it.

I have my students play from memory. The first time they do it, a lot of times they’ll be looking up into space. I always tell them to look at their hands. One of the reasons to memorize music is so that you can look at your hands! When you have leaps, how are you supposed to land in the right place without looking at your hands? Having said that, there are some blind pianists who defy all reason bouncing all over the keyboard. They don’t rely upon looking. That’s great for them. But for everyone else, you have your eyes to utilize so you might as well take advantage!

Looking at your hands is another way to reinforce your memory.

By looking at your hands you see the connections of the keys. You know where to look if there are leaps. A lot of times what you want to do when you’re playing the piano is look at your thumbs rather than the extreme outside fingers. The thumbs can line up everything and they’re close together. When you have leaps, you tend to want to look at the inner part of your hand. That’s one little tip for you.

Does this mean that you should never try to play without looking?

No. The time for that is when you memorize a piece of music. That doesn’t mean you’re done with the score. Far from it. It’s exactly the opposite! The way I learn music, and the way I teach my students to learn music is to read through it a couple of times the first day, then get down to work and start memorizing. The first thing you do is memorize your music, instead of the last thing. Then what do you do? You go back to the score and reinforce the memory by reading the score and keeping your eyes on the music. That’s the time for not looking at your hands. Read from the score to see all the little details that maybe you didn’t catch the first time. Maybe you forgot where a slur ends or a crescendo begins, or the voicing of a chord. You have to constantly go back and reinforce your memory.

Interestingly, you can play the piano without any instrument or anything visual at all.

I have a video about playing the piano from your mind. You can just sit in a chair and play through your music mentally, thinking through every nuance of sound and touch. That is the ultimate practice. You can try it with a piece you know really well. You want to make sure you reinforce that memory. There is no better practice. You don’t have the benefit of finger memory. You don’t have the keyboard to look at or the sound to go by. It’s all in your head. Interestingly, there have been tests of people playing the piano while having their brains scanned. Then they get people to think about playing the piano while doing the same brain scan on the same people. There is zero difference in the brain whether you are playing the piano or thinking about playing the piano. Now, what does this reveal? It tells you that you can practice away from the piano effectively and get all the benefits. You can reinforce the score just using your mind.

How Do You Play the Piano with Your Mind?

I hope this has been enlightening for you! Thanks again 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 why slower means louder on the piano. Now, you might think I’ve gone off the deep end! Obviously, composers write things that are slow, things that are fast, things that are loud, and things that are soft. How can I say that slow means loud?

The piano is a percussion instrument. Hammers hit strings, and the notes die away as soon as you play them. So, longer notes have to last longer. The only way for that to happen is to play them louder! If you were to play equal volume with one hand that’s playing faster than the other, the hand that has the faster notes will sound louder.

Accentuate the melody, especially if it’s slow.

Say you are playing a piece where the melody is very slow. You want to accentuate the melody tremendously for two reasons. First of all, the acoustics of the piano are such that longer notes have to be louder to balance with the other notes that are faster. Secondly, the melody is usually on top, and you want it to be louder anyway. You always want the melody to be louder. You want to play the melody substantially louder than the accompaniment in order to make it come through. Even though the right hand may be drastically louder than the left hand, it still can have a piano quality to the sound.

Use the weight of the arm so you get smooth volume from note to note.

If you just punctuate each note separately without using the weight of the arm to get a natural, beautiful legato, you get an ugly, harsh sound. It can sound lifeless! You will hear a bunch of separate notes, but no line. It’s such a challenge on the piano to form a phrase that has a rise and a fall that’s smooth, which is the analog of the breath of the singer or the bow of the string player. That’s where the weight of the arm comes in.

Higher notes on the piano have less sustain.

There’s one other reason why slow notes have to be articulated so much more than fast notes. The higher up you go, the problem is exacerbated! The higher notes on the piano don’t last very long at all. In the bass, the tone keeps going and going. But most of the time on the piano, you’re playing the melody in the treble and the accompaniment in the bass. The accompaniment usually has more notes than the melody. But the melody should be louder. The notes in the treble don’t last as long, so you have to play them much louder to create a pleasing balance of sound.

So, that is key for the acoustics of the piano! Slow notes have to be played louder than fast notes. That’s the way to achieve a good balance on the piano. Use the weight of the arm in slow melodies. Exaggerate the difference between melody and harmony when the melody is higher than the accompaniment or the notes are longer than the accompaniment, which is so often the case. Let me know how this works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube! Thanks again 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