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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about the 3 most important practice techniques. There are hundreds of practice techniques. But the things I’m going to tell you today are quintessentially important. They’re points that I keep making again and again. They need to be cemented in your mind if you want to be productive in your practice. So listen to all three, because they’re all vitally important for taking your piano playing to the next level.

1. When something goes wrong, resist the temptation to go back and start again.

When you’re practicing, sometimes you don’t even have the score. You’re just practicing without the music. But you really should have the score in front of you for reference when you’re practicing. Not that you should play all the time with music. You might want to test your memory to see how things are coming along. But here’s the critical thing: when something does go wrong, resist the temptation to just go back and start again. Maybe it will come out well the next time around, but take the opportunity to check the score! Find your place no matter how painstaking it is.

You may think you could just start back four measures, because it’ll take longer to even find where you are in the music. It will take you longer, but it’s important. Whatever needs to be clarified, you’re not going to be able to understand from just playing the section again. Maybe you will get it, maybe you won’t, but you haven’t really figured out what the issue is. You need to find the solution to that weakness. So when there’s a mistake, study the score! Don’t just try again and hope for the best. By using this technique, whatever confusion you had can be clarified once and for all!

2. Practice slowly.

Any accomplished pianist knows about the importance of slowing down. You must practice slowly, incessantly! Eventually you can get the same level of comfort and security playing at a faster tempo. Playing over and over again just a little bit past your comfort zone only breeds insecurity in your playing. You still want to try things faster to see what they sound like and to isolate the weak parts. It’s very valuable to zero in on the parts that need work. But fundamentally, a great deal of practice is slow playing with the score, reinforcing the memory, and always looking at the score carefully in any place you have insecurities. So read slowly with the music, with the metronome, and without the pedal to cement the performance. This will give you clarity of thought and physiology about what you’re doing at the keyboard.

3. Expand your repertoire!

This is vital! No matter how long you play, if you are just going through review pieces, eventually you’re going to plateau in your playing. There is a vast amount of piano music. Some of the greatest pianists of all time, who learned more music than anyone else, still only scratched the surface. The amount of music that people like Alfred Brendel and Claudio Arrau have amassed is mind-boggling. And yet, it’s only a small fraction of what’s out there. There’s so much great music written for the piano, by composers you’ve heard of and composers you haven’t heard of. So expand your repertoire! You really need to be learning something new every day. You may be bogged down with trying to perfect what you’ve already learned, and that is certainly an essential part of your practice. But take at least a few minutes just to learn something new each day, because you’ll have so much more to show for it.

Why is it so important to learn new music everyday?

Let’s say you want to learn a new piece. But you wait until your current repertoire is perfected before you start, even if it takes weeks. And then all you’re doing is studying a new piece. Do you know how hard it is to learn and memorize something new? There’s only so much you can do at a time before it gets really hard. You get to that point of diminishing returns in how much you can learn in a 10 or 20 minute period. But if you were to do some work each day, when your mind is fresh, you take advantage of that time. Even if it’s only 10 or 20 minutes a day, it’s time that your mind is fresh. You can learn something relatively easily if you’re only learning a phrase or two at a time.

These are the 3 things to remember!

Always have your score handy. When something falters, reference the score. Don’t just try to play it again, study it. Figure out what’s going on. Clarify in your mind and your hands what the correction is.

Slow down. You should be practicing slowly, even with pieces you can play up to speed. From time to time, you must go back and recement the notes, rhythm, fingerings, phrasing, and expression by referencing the score, playing slowly without the pedal, and using the metronome as much as possible.

Be sure to expand your repertoire on a daily basis. You’ll have so much more to show for your work over time if you use these three techniques! I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks so much 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

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to find the weak points in your playing. You want your practice to be productive. You don’t want to use a shotgun approach, working on all the parts of your music equally. Some parts will already be in good shape while other parts might need work. But sometimes it’s hard to know which parts need work.

How do you isolate the parts of your music that are likely to fall apart?

Obviously, if something completely falls apart, it needs work. But suppose you play through a piece and everything is pretty good. You’ve done various types of practicing. You’ve gone through meticulously with the score. You’ve worked with a metronome. You’ve practiced without the pedal. You’ve played under tempo. Yet when you perform, sometimes things fall apart and it seems to be in random places. I have a tip for you: Play the music faster than your normal tempo! You’ll find that you can play perhaps 90% of the piece at a faster tempo. The parts you can’t play at that faster tempo are the weak sections. You can isolate those sections and work on them in innumerable ways. A great way is to find a tempo at which you can play them cleanly, accurately and comfortably, and play the sections with the metronome at progressively faster speeds.

It’s good to have a reserve of tempo in your playing.

When you’re playing a piece of music, knowing that you can play it a little bit faster and still hold it together is incredibly valuable for a couple of reasons. First of all, in the heat of the moment in a musical performance, a lot of times when you’re nervous, you don’t realize that your whole physiology speeds up. Your heart’s beating a little faster. You’re breathing a little faster. That’s from the extra energy you get in performance. And you may just take your music a little faster than you even realize. If there are parts that you’ve never played at that faster tempo, you could run into trouble. So play your music a little bit over tempo and see what happens.

Romantic period music has a certain amount of tempo freedom.

In some styles of music, you may use a certain amount of rubato, the give and take of the tempo, where you rush forward in certain places, then hold back to make up the time. This adds an element of excitement to your music. That’s totally appropriate for some styles of music. But maybe during a performance you decide to use rubato in a place you’ve never thought of using it before. If you’ve never played the piece faster, you can’t pull it off very well if you haven’t practiced that one little part of a phrase faster before. So play your music a little bit over tempo to prepare yourself to allow for some spontaneity in your performance.

Sometimes you can play a piece dramatically faster and get a whole different feel for the music!

Let’s say you’ve been playing a piece and you’ve always felt the quarter note as the beat. For example, in the first movement of the Mozart K 545, C major Sonata, you’re thinking in four. But if you play it faster you might feel the half note as the pulse and give a whole different rhythmic feel. So there are a lot of benefits to playing your music faster as an experiment. First of all, you’ll find the weak points in your playing. You can zero in on the parts you can’t play at that faster tempo. You also have more freedom in a romantic period piece where you can give a little nuance of tempo. And lastly, you might feel the pulse of music differently, a slower pulse at a faster tempo which can open up a different rhythm and feel, even if you don’t end up playing faster. There are many benefits to taking a faster tempo.

Experiment with your pieces!

See what happens when you play your music faster. You may find that some pieces work at a faster tempo. There are innumerable benefits to this. So try it out! Let me know how it works for you. Thanks so much 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

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to give you a really valuable tip for fingering: Always look back, never look forward. If you’re an advanced player, you know that doesn’t make any sense at all, because you have to know what’s coming in order to negotiate a good fingering. That is absolutely true. However, if you’re a student, it’s very different, because the fingering that’s indicated in the score is what you must follow. A good teacher will provide you with good fingering. You must always determine what finger to use by looking back to the last note that has a fingering marked. Put your hand in the position over those notes. Then, whatever finger is over the next note is the finger to use. Because if you look forward, you could run into trouble.

If you want to know what finger to use, always look back to the last printed fingering.

I have a Burgmuller study here called Innocence. It’s a lovely little piece. I want to show you something in the right hand after the second ending. You have your third finger on C, but you have a first finger on the very next C. So if you look ahead you might think you have to have your first finger on the first C. And then the same thing happens again. You have your third finger on E, and then you have another E after that which has the first finger marked. So instead of using the third finger, you may think you need to use your first finger on the first E since the E coming up has a first finger marked. You might think you should use the first finger because you’re going to need it later. But that is not the way fingerings work in music.

So indeed, you would play this passage with the first, second and third fingers, then change your third finger to your first finger on the same E, and then use your second finger on the F. Why? Because the last printed finger was the first finger on E, so you naturally use your second finger on F. You always look back to the last printed fingering to know what finger to use on the following notes. If you look forward, you’ll get fouled up because that’s not the way fingerings are followed in the score.

I hope this clarifies things for you!

If you’re figuring out a fingering because there’s no fingering written, you might want to get a sense of the whole passage to be able to execute a good fingering possibility. But if you’re a student, and you have an edited edition that’s fingered, and your teacher provides additional fingering solutions for you, you must always follow the fingering by looking back to see the last note that had a finger marked. Put that finger on that note and see what fingers are over the next notes instead of looking ahead to see what fingerings are coming. That won’t work. This is something that some of my students have asked about. I hope this is helpful for all of you! Thanks so much 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

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Welcome to www.LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about getting the maximum benefit out of your practice time. That’s the way I like to work. I get a lot of people who are really gung ho to learn the piano. They’ll say, “I’ll work hours a day on scales and exercises. I just really want to get better.” But there is a point of diminishing returns with working on technique for technique’s sake. I always believe in working on music. Learning music will help you solve more technical problems than just focusing on technique, and you’ll get more benefit.

How can you maximize the effectiveness of working on technique?

If the primary time you spend daily on the piano involves technical exercises, including fundamentals like scales, arpeggios, octaves, and things of that nature, it doesn’t leave enough time for what’s really important, which is repertoire. You will grow more from learning music than you will from simply playing exercises. Ten minutes a day of really good scale and arpeggio work is a great warmup. You’ll get the maximum benefit with a minimum amount of time.

The secret is consistency.

If you only work once a week on scales and arpeggios, you’re not going to get much benefit. But if you spend a little time each day you will see improvement. Five or ten minutes a day is all you really need most of the time. There may be times you’re having an epiphany and you feel like you’re finally playing arpeggios well. In that case stay with it or you’ll end up with a hump to cross later on anyway. It’s not an absolute science that you spend X amount of time for maximum benefit. But generally speaking, minimize pure technical work.

Use your music as technical exercises.

When you have a part in your score that you can’t play well, figure it out using various practice techniques. You can turn your music into exercises! If you’re playing a Bach prelude, for example, like the Prelude in C Minor from book one of the Well-Tempered Clavier, it lends itself to exercises. It’s most like an exercise in itself. So how could you practice that? Slow practice with a metronome is invaluable. Use raised fingers, delineating every finger that’s down and every finger that’s up. That’s a great practice technique! Another technique is to use different phrasings. For example, staccato fingers. Or you can play one hand staccato and the other hand legato. You can benefit from this because any weakness will evidence itself in your playing. Or you could just do small snippets at a time. You could also play the music with various rhythms, such as dotted rhythms or you can play the music with different accents. There are countless ways you can turn music into exercises. This way you don’t have to resort to mindless exercises that don’t have the benefit of music you can play at the end of the line.

Musical etudes are your best source.

Whether it’s Chopin and Liszt etudes or Heller or Burgmuller studies, these etudes are richly rewarding music that can solve technical problems while offering you great music that you can play and enjoy. So that’s my recommendation! Utilize minimum time and enjoy maximum benefit for pure exercises. But spend most of your time with music and turn problem areas into exercises where necessary in order to improve your technique on the piano. Let me know how this works for you! Thanks so much 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

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to play for your piano teacher. I’ve been doing a lot of teaching lately, and I’m enjoying it. I’ve been so busy for the past few years I didn’t have time for much teaching. Now I’ve made the time, and through the wonder of video chat, I have students from all over the world! They are amazing, talented, and dedicated students. It’s a real joy! But I’ve noticed something with my students. If you are a piano student you’ve probably had this experience. You work all week long, then you go to play for your teacher and everything messes up! It’s so frustrating! You want to show your teacher what you’ve done, but you can’t play! Everything’s coming out wrong! Things that you never messed up are going wrong and you feel like an idiot! What can you do about that?

You don’t have to try to impress your teacher.

I want to reflect upon this whole notion of performing for your teacher. You have to understand that your teacher is a confidant. Your teacher is someone who really understands you, if you have the right teacher. You don’t have to try to impress them. They are there to nurture you and to help you get the most out of your practice. It’s not the most important thing for you to play your absolute best when you’re first playing for your teacher. Of course, it’s a great frustration if you don’t play your best when playing for your teacher. But how well you perform a piece for your teacher at the beginning of a lesson is really not the most important thing. A teacher can look beyond those things. The things that they’re going to go over with you have very little to do with the quality of that particular performance. Having said that, I know you want to play better for your teacher so I am going to address that.

You want to show that you can play the music. How can you prepare for such a thing?

It’s amazing how you can play something by yourself at home a bunch of times, and it sounds great! But as soon as you play for someone else, you make mistakes. With in-person lessons the classic statement was, “It went better at home.” Now there’s no excuses. You are at home! So what can you do to prepare so that you can play your best? You must prepare by performing. This is critical. A couple of days before your lesson when you feel really confident, set up the same device that you’re going to have your lesson on and record yourself as if it’s a performance for your teacher. If you go to lessons in person, imagine being in the room you’re going to be in with your teacher. Then make yourself play through your music and see what happens. Psych yourself into the reality that this is the moment you are playing for your teacher. You can actually create that same sense. You’ll always learn something from this. You could even record it. Then if it comes out great, you can send it to your teacher to prove to them that you can play that thing that you never seem to be able to play for them at lessons!

Playing for your teacher can be more relaxed than a performance.

Let’s say you’re working on a new piece. Maybe you don’t have the whole piece learned, so you have to take the end pretty slow. Should you take the whole piece dramatically slower to accommodate the end? Well, not necessarily. In a performance situation, whatever speed you can play the whole piece is the tempo you must play from the beginning. But you might have worked extensively on the exposition of a sonata, yet the development you really haven’t gotten into that much. So you want to play the first part up to tempo to work with your teacher to get it on an even higher level. Then at a certain point you can say, “Okay, this part, I don’t know as well, I’m going to play slower now.”

Changing tempo throughout a piece that you’re learning is not in anybody’s best interest. But playing the first section at a tempo that you’re comfortable with, and then slowing down when you need to, can be appropriate at your lesson. If you have only part of a piece memorized, you can reference the score. You wouldn’t do these things during a performance, but these are all valid ways of playing for your teacher!

Remember, your teacher is there for you!

It’s not about impressing your teacher. It’s about being able to show some kind of representation in the course of the lesson so your teacher can help guide your practice techniques for the following week. So it’s not necessarily about impressing them. However, if you take my advice and practice performing, and record your performance as if it’s your teacher listening to you, you may be able to have more satisfaction in that initial performance at your lesson and subsequent playing during the course of your lesson. Then you won’t feel frustrated that you’re not showing a true representation of your abilities.

I want everyone to know I am not judging you! For my students, I am only here to help you. I hope this helps all you piano students out there feel more confident when playing for your teachers! And teachers, remember to be sensitive to your students so they can feel good about coming into lessons and playing their best, which is what it’s all about. We’re all on the same side here! Thanks so much 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

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I’m Robert Estrin, and this is LivingPianos.com. Today’s subject is about how you can improve your sight reading by looking at chunks of music. When you first start out it’s really tough just being able to identify notes on the page! Eventually you get to the point where you start to make the relationship between lines and spaces and keys on the piano. So when you see line to line, you skip the space, and when you see space to space, you skip the line, which means you skip a key when you’re going from line to line or space to space. Chords usually are all on lines or all on spaces because they’re built on the interval of a third which is every other note of a scale. Or if you’re going from line to space to line to space, they’re probably going to be consecutive notes on the keyboard. Now, of course, there are black keys. That’s a whole other issue, but this is one way that you can improve your reading, by identifying distances between notes.

When you have really high or low ledger lines, way above or below the staff, sometimes it’s hard to know what the notes are.

There are some little cheats you can use. For example, when you have really high notes, if the bottom note is on a space and the top note is on a space, that’s not an octave. Because octaves are always space to line or line to space. That’s a little tip for you. If you have never really thought about this before, you can sometimes guess the right note if it looks like around an octave. But it better be line to space or space to line, or it’s not an octave. But what I’m talking about today is something quite different.

The secret of sight reading is to look at groups of notes!

At first, when you’re reading, it’s an arduous task. It took me many years to become a good sight reader. The secret is instead of looking note to note, look at groups of notes. Depending upon the piece, sometimes you’ll look at half measures at a time, taking in the entire thing as a digestible chunk you can comprehend. For example, the famous Bach Prelude for The Well-Tempered Clavier Book One in C major is a great example of this because the whole prelude is just broken chords. So if you’re playing the beginning of this piece, there’s no need to look at every note. Once you see the first chord, you can shoot your eyes to the next measure even before you’re there, because you’re already over the chord that you’re playing. This is an ideal piece to check out this technique for yourself if you’ve never done it before, because the entire piece is broken chords. And the whole measure is the same chord repeated twice, broken. You always want to be looking at the next group of notes, getting ahead of where you are. This is an incredibly valuable technique!

You’re never going to be able to read and keep time if you’re looking at each individual note.

This is one of the most important lessons for learning how to read in a fluid manner. Sometimes you have to surmise what the harmonies are and what the composer’s intentions were. There are some scores that are just so dense with notes and articulations! If you’re sight reading, you can’t always take the time to figure out every little detail. Particularly if you are accompanying other musicians.

Nobody wants you to take the time at rehearsal much less performance!

They’d rather you just flesh it out and get a sense of the music. A lot of times, you can kind of guess what the composer intended by seeing enough of the chord structure that you can play what’s written without necessarily seeing every single note. Now, that’s not an ideal situation. But if you’re reading something for the very first time, particularly if you’re playing with other musicians, sometimes that’s necessary.

Try this in your reading!

I’m very interested in how this works for you! Take a piece like Debussy’s 1st Arabesque or Bach’s Prelude in C Major to start, but you can do this with virtually any music! Some music is going to be a lot more difficult to do this technique with. That’s why a Bach fugue is really hard to sight read, because it doesn’t break itself down this way. You have too many separate lines. So this is not 100% foolproof. But in some pieces of music, it’s a godsend! So try it out for yourself and let me know how it works for you! Thanks so much 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

www.LivingPianos.com
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