Piano and Music Videos

This is LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin asking the question: What is the most productive practice routine? I’m sure this is important to many of you. If you spend a lot of time during the week practicing the piano, you want to get as much accomplished as possible. People often ask me, “How much time should I spend on this or that? Should I be doing exercises?” People sometimes feel lost deciding what to practice. They don’t know if they’re spending the appropriate amount of time on each discipline. I’m going to give you things you should be doing in your practice daily, or almost every day. Certainly, the ones at the beginning of this list are going to be things you should do every day, and towards the end of the list are things you should do every week. I’m listing them in order of importance of how much time you should spend on the following tasks:

As a pianist, learning music is of paramount importance.

You should spend the vast majority of your time memorizing music, or if you’re a collaborative player, learning scores of accompaniments or chamber music. This is the hardest part of practicing, and you have to spend the majority of your practice time doing it. There’s no shortcut to this. I wish there was some way the works of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Ravel, Debussy, Chopin, Liszt, and others could be embedded in my head and in yours! But there isn’t. You have to just painstakingly practice bit by bit assimilating music. That is the primary thing you should be doing in your piano practice on a daily basis.

Refine the music you have learned on previous days.

Whatever you’ve learned the day before isn’t solidified yet. As a matter of fact, when you first sit down to practice, you might think, “Did I even learn this yesterday?” It may seem quite foreign. Mostly, you’ll find that when you’re reading through the music, it will come back to you quickly. But a lot of times it doesn’t. You’re not alone! There’s nothing wrong with you. If you have to relearn the music you just learned the day before, welcome to the club! It happens. But don’t fret, because when you just go through the same steps of relearning, it comes back much more quickly than the first time you learned it. Just go through the memorization steps again, and the second time you learn it, you will retain it much better.

Review your pieces.

What else is there besides memorizing new material and reviewing the music you learned days before? Well, there’s always review pieces you should work on. If you don’t work on review pieces, you’ll never have the familiarity of something that you’ve lived with and played many times. Reviewing your pieces keeps them at a high level. Then, at any time, you’re ready to play at least two or three pieces on a high level because you play them nearly every day. From time to time, you should take out the score. Take your foot off the pedal. Look at the score carefully, and play slowly. Use the metronome, reinforcing your memory. But at the very least, you should play through a few pieces every day. It’s of tremendous value keeping your music in shape and simply moving your fingers. It provides good exercise for you as well, which seamlessly leads us to the next topic:

Play through exercises regularly.

What exercises should you do? Primarily scales and arpeggios. If you’re not up to scales and arpeggios yet, you can do simple Hanon exercises just to strengthen your fingers. When playing exercises, slow practice is vitally important. You actually get more physiological benefit from slow practice than you do from fast playing. Plus, it trains your fingers. You will feel which fingers are down and which fingers are up by exaggerating the finger motion. You get clean releases of the notes so you avoid muddiness in your playing. You should use the metronome when practicing Hanon exercises, as well as scales and arpeggios. Always practice slowly with raised fingers first. Then playing two notes to the beat, and finally four notes to the beat staying close to the keys, and playing lighter. Play at four notes to the beat many times so that you’re used to playing a lot of notes quickly and evenly. It’s a godsend for your technique!

There’s also wrist exercises. At the beginning, I like to teach simple exercises in thirds. Once again, use the metronome. Make sure you identify your wrists separate from your arms. You don’t want to move your arms up and down when working on wrist technique. You want your arms to place your hands exactly in the right position over the keys. Why? Because slow practice is preparation for being able to play faster for articulated staccatos and such. Eventually, you’ll be working on octave technique which also comes from the wrist. I have a little octave exercise you can reference. You can even work on scales in octaves! You can work on fingers all day long, but If you don’t work on wrist exercises, you’re not going to develop your wrist technique which is essential for piano playing.

Sight reading should be a part of your daily work as well.

It can be fun exploring new music or playing different styles of music that you like but don’t ordinarily play. Just pick up the sheet music and read through it! Find music on your reading level. It’s not going to be the same level of pieces you’re studying. Pieces you’re breaking down bit by bit, hands separately, then putting them together, and working through methodically, are going to be far more complex than pieces you can simply read accurately after playing them through maybe two or three times. If you can’t play the music you’re sight reading perfectly after two or three times slowly, then it’s not the appropriate level for you to sight read. Your reading level will grow if you do it every day. Better yet, find people to play with. When you’re forced to keep going, that is the best way to develop your reading abilities.

Improvisation is awesome!

If you’re not fluent with improvisation, just do anything, even if it’s just abstract chords. You can experiment with various styles of improvised music, whether it’s blues, jazz, or new age. Just come up with anything. Have fun with it! You’ll be developing your ears while you’re doing this. It provides great value. You don’t necessarily have to do this every day, but it can’t hurt. Experiment with it. It not only helps you to improvise better, but it’s a lifesaver when you develop a connection between the keys you play, and what you hear. If you ever have a memory slip in performance, you can feel your way back because if you have improvised a great deal, you will know what sounds are going to be created from the keys you play. You develop a connection with the keyboard. So do a little improvisation. Even just a few minutes a day can help your piano playing tremendously.

Take some time for theory.

What are you going to do with theory? Well, your teacher might guide you, and you can also simply study your music. If you have a piece, you can take time to study the score and figure out what it’s all about. For example, you can figure out what the harmonies are doing. Or if you’re doing a sonata, you know it changes keys in the second subject since all sonatas do. Determine where it changes key. Look at the accidentals to be able to figure out where the piece is going to the dominant (the key starting on the fifth note of the key of the piece). Study your scores. It will help you to learn them better and avoid taking wrong turns in performance.

Are those all the things you can do in practice?

No. Make practice an exciting journey! You can sing. You can improvise while singing. That’s an excellent test to know if you are hearing what you’re playing. If you can sing what you’re playing, then you know you’re hearing it. That is really key to being able to solidify memory in your classical playing. This is just the tip of the iceberg. These are fundamental things you should be achieving in your daily work. Remember, learning new music is number one. Refining what you did the day before is number two. Number three is playing review pieces. Enjoy them! There’s time for scales, arpeggios, octaves, wrist exercise, things of that nature as well. Then reward yourself with some sight reading for fun and just make some music up with improvisation. Then delve into some music theory. Study the music that you’re learning or music you want to learn. These are all great things you can do on a regular basis to keep your practicing productive, rewarding, and engaging, which is the most important part!

Whatever you do, make sure you’re not just going through the motions.

Be sure you’re actually involved in the process. After all, practicing is a mental activity. If you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing, it really isn’t practicing no matter how long you sit at the bench. Make sure you’re getting something done with your time. Thanks so much for joining me. 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

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to practice with a metronome. The metronome is one of the most valuable tools for your practice. It is perhaps the most valuable tool other than the instrument you’re playing on. The metronome is something that should be on your piano whenever you practice, to check your work, and to work out passages.

How do you use a metronome to work through a section of a piece?

Let’s say you’re working on the famous Alla Turca movement of the famous Mozart Sonata in A major K.331 no. 11. You get to the F-sharp minor section that has some tricky finger work, and it isn’t gelling for you. Some people might think you should go through the whole piece with the metronome. There is value in doing that to check your tempo, and the consistency of speed throughout a movement. It’s important to make sure you’re not speeding up or slowing down. But what I’m going to show you today is how to use the metronome to be able to solidify a passage like this. So let’s say you aren’t happy with your playing in the F-sharp minor section. It’s not as even as you would like. What can you do about that?

Find a speed on your metronome at which you can play the trouble section evenly and beautifully.

Taking too large a section to do progressive metronome speeds can sometimes be counterproductive. If you work on smaller sections, and then string the sections together later, you might have more success. Not only that, but maybe there’s a section you can already play up to tempo, but the next section still needs improvement. It’s unnecessary to work all those metronome speeds on both passages.

There are metronome applications for your phone that allow you to simply tap in the tempo. That’s a real help. If you are using a traditional metronome, you just start tapping or clapping along with your music as you sing or play mentally, so you can match the speed on the metronome. Make sure that it’s a comfortable speed for you. The most important thing is finding a speed at which you can play it perfectly. Once you can play the passage absolutely perfectly, and repeatably, you’re ready to increase the speed. But make sure you find the speed at which you have absolute security first.

The first time you do this, you’re going to find it to be really difficult to play perfectly at any tempo.

Here’s the key: Spend the time on the front end. Play it perfectly even with comfort. If you find you can’t do that, slow the metronome down further until you find a tempo where you can. Make sure you can play without feeling you’re getting off from the metronome at all. Make sure it’s rock solid, steady, and repeatable. You should be able to get it at least three times in a row, perfectly. It should not only sound perfect, it should feel comfortable. Then once you have it at one speed, take the metronome up a notch.

Physical metronomes actually have one benefit that digital metronomes don’t have. On physical metronomes, each notch goes up multiple numbers instead of having every number. For example, 60, 63, 66, 69, 72, 76, 80, et cetera. Notice how the speeds progress from going up by three, to going up by four beats per minute. If you double the speed, 60 to 63, at 120, the next notch on the metronome is 126 which is double the slower speeds. It doesn’t just go up by three throughout the range of speeds on the metronome. So the progression of speeds on a metronome is calculated correctly. You don’t want to go from 69 to 70 to 71 because the increases in speed are infinitesimally small. But one notch on the metronome, or maybe two notches at most, provides just the right amount of challenge to speed up a passage. Once you can play it successfully and repeatably with comfort at one slow speed, go to the next notch on the metronome. So if you’re at 60, play the passage at 63. You may only have to play it once to feel that it’s perfect and keep going notch by notch. But anytime you have any issues where it doesn’t sound right or doesn’t feel comfortable, keep doing it at that metronome speed.

This is one of the greatest practice techniques for developing speed, fluency and evenness in your piano playing!

I recommend doing metronome speeds on a regular basis with anything in your music that isn’t up to a high standard. If you feel that there’s some passage work or any sections of your music that aren’t even, or aren’t reliable, find a speed at which you can play it perfectly, repeatably, and comfortably, and go through metronome speeds notch by notch. You can solve almost any technical problem this way. Try it out! Let me know how it works for you! You can leave comments here at LivingPianos.com or YouTube. Thanks so much for joining me. 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

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to share an important tip with you. More motion equals more volume and less motion equals less volume and more speed. It’s as simple as that. This applies not just to finger work, but to wrist technique as well. I’m going to illustrate both for you today!

The answer is, it really depends upon the context.

Sometimes you want to be able to play delicately and quietly. For example, in the B flat minor Nocturne of Chopin. If you play it with a lot of finger motion, not staying close to the keys, with raised fingers, you will hear a great deal of sound generated from the sheer motion. But if you want to achieve a real pianissimo, you’ll use less motion and stay close to the keys. You don’t even need to use the una corda pedal, the soft pedal! You can get so much control when you’re close to the keys! You get a really soft sound. Now the converse of that, if you want more volume in your playing, simply use more finger motion. Raise your fingers higher. It’s very simple physics really. If you want to bang a nail into the wall, you’re not going to strike from right next to it. You’re going to give some momentum and strike from above. Well the same thing is true with chord technique on the piano.

How does this apply to wrist work?

Let’s say you want to be able to play light and fast chords in the Military Polonaise of Chopin. If you try to use a lot of motion, it’s going to be very loud, but it’s going to be difficult to play fast. You get a lot of volume, but you can’t achieve much speed. Speed is related to how much motion you use in your playing. Staying closer to the keys, using less wrist motion, you have more control, more speed, with less volume.

The amount of motion affects the volume and speed of your playing.

This applies to the wrists as well as finger technique. So remember: when you want to play a true beautiful pianissimo, stay close to the keys. The same is true of anything with staccatos. If you want light action from the wrist, staying close to the keys is going to give you a crisp light sound, whereas more motion is going to give you more power. For fast playing, stay close to the keys and use a minimum of motion in fingerwork or wrist action.

So now you know how to get power and how to get lightness and speed. Staying closer to the keys enables quieter playing and quicker response. To achieve greater power, use more motion. That’s the tip for today! Try it out in your piano playing! Let me know how it works for you in the comments below here on YouTube and LivingPianos.com. Thanks so much for joining me. 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

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to know when to move on in your piano practice. This is one of the most important aspects of working at the piano productively. After all, you don’t want to shortchange yourself and give up before you solve problems. Yet, you don’t want to bang your head against the wall and spend hours on something that isn’t progressing. This will leave you frustrated. You won’t even want to touch the piano anymore! So, what is the balance? Well, in a nutshell, it’s:

Realizing where you have reached the point of diminishing returns.

What do I mean when I say, “the point of diminishing returns”? I remember the first time I ever heard that phrase, I had no idea what it meant. I was a young child. I asked my father and he described it this way, which I think is a really good description. Imagine there’s a building going up in Manhattan on a very valuable piece of real estate. Building a house on that property would never make sense, because the land is worth millions of dollars. There’s no way a house is ever going to be worth that much. Not even a 10-story building will be worth enough no matter how elaborate. So you have to have enough stories to lease or sell in order to make the building profitable. But at a certain point, it gets more expensive to build higher and higher. You have a certain amount of costs involved per story, but anything above 50 stories starts to get extremely expensive. Eventually, you get to a height where it’s absolutely the point of diminishing returns. There’s no way you could possibly lease space or sell condos on that many floors to overcome the tremendous costs of building a structure so tall. That’s an example of the point of diminishing returns.

Understanding how this relates to your piano practice is essential.

What makes it tough is knowing when you should give up and when you should keep plowing ahead. I think you want to give things a good shot. For example, if you’re working on a difficult passage and it just isn’t coming, you try playing hands separately, you put them back together, and it doesn’t quite do it. Is it time to give up? Not necessarily. You might try going very slowly with the metronome and doing progressive metronome speeds. If you get to a certain point when you can’t get any faster, do you give up? Well, maybe not. Maybe you try to squeeze out a few more notches. Sometimes, you get to a point where you think you’ve taken the metronome as far as you can, then you lighten up your touch or something else, and boom, you get a few more metronome notches! But, then you get to a point where you’re spending so much time getting one more notch, maybe that’s the time to leave it for another day.

Oftentimes, when you are learning a new phrase or phrases you are assimilating into your memory, it becomes really difficult to get things beyond a certain point of refinement.

You might get the music really refined once or twice. Maybe you get it three times in a row way under tempo, and that’s all you can do with it. Well, try to squeeze a little bit more out of that. If you got it perfectly at least a few times in a row, even if it’s way under tempo, it’s very likely the next day, when you refresh your memory on it, you’ll be able to play it faster right from the get-go just from sleeping on it. So, you must know when to move on. The key is to not give up right away. Try a couple of different techniques. Try slowing down. Try hands separately. Try using the metronome. Try stopping at strategic points. You can also try playing very strong or very light. You can try accenting different notes in a passage, or you could even alter the rhythm. If you have straight eighths, you could make them into a dotted rhythm, then reverse the dotted rhythm.

There are many, many different techniques to try before abandoning something altogether. However, you don’t want to get stuck and spend so much time on so little music that at the end of a week, you have very little to show for your work. Sometimes just plowing through something, getting it perfectly two or three times in a row under tempo allows you to learn more music. Because the next day you can take all of that music up to a higher level and push forward in the score. So, you have one part from the day before that’s starting to come along, the part from two days ago is getting quite secure, and the part from before that is already at performance level. You’re working on all these different sections simultaneously.

Try to push to the point of diminishing returns in your practice!

Try many different techniques before giving up, but don’t feel that giving up is necessarily a bad thing. It allows you to move forward and amass more music in your daily practice. I’m wondering how this all works for you. Try it out and let me know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks so much for joining me. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is, are pickups measures? Let’s say a piece is in 3/4 time, and it starts with a quarter note. Is that a measure? For example, in the Beethoven Sonata Opus 49 No. 2, the famous G major Sonata, the second movement starts with a dotted 8th and 16th. Then there’s a bar line right after that. Are those first two notes, the dotted 8th and 16th, a measure? They’re in a box. Well, the movement is in 3/4 time. 3/4 time tells you there are three beats in each measure and the quarter note gets one beat. Since you only have one beat total with a dotted 8th and 16th, this can’t possibly be a measure. This is a pickup, sometimes called an anacrusis.

A pickup is simply a beat (or beats) before the first measure (or other measures).

After the first bar line comes the first measure. The pickup notes are not a measure. When learning a piece in 3/4 time that starts with pickups, each phrase starts on the third beat and ends on the second beat. The whole piece is kind of juxtaposed starting with the third beat. An interesting thing that you may have noticed in most pieces that have pickups is that they almost always end on beat that make up the time from the beginning. So indeed, if you look at the end of the movement of this Beethoven Sonata, it only has only two beats in the last measure !And yes, that is considered a measure even though it only has two beats. This is because it starts with a pickup on the third beat and ends on the second beat. You could actually loop it back to the beginning. Now this doesn’t repeat. Although sometimes, you will have repeated sections with da capos or repeat signs that will repeat with pickup. You’ll have a partial measure at the end and the pickup at the beginning. It all works seamlessly! So that’s the way pickups work.

Remember, pickups are not measures.

The first measure comes after the bar line. If you don’t have a complete measure, even if it’s two beats out of four, those would be two beat pickups. If you don’t have a complete measure at the very beginning of a piece after the time signature, that is considered a pickup. Take a look at the last measure of a piece that starts off without enough beats, and nine times out of 10, it’s made up for in the last measure. That’s an interesting little fact for you! You count that note at the beginning backwards from the first measure. That’s why the first note of this movement would be counted as three, not one. You never have two first beats in a row. You know that after the bar line is the first beat. So the beat before the first beat of the measure must be the third beat.

That’s everything you need to know about pickups!

I hope that’s cleared things up for you! I’m sure a lot of you are already well aware of this, but I thought I’d make this video in case there’s any confusion for anybody. Thanks so much for joining me. 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

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.

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