Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is. about focusing on corrections instead of your mistakes. This may seem counterintuitive. Don’t you have to find your mistakes in order to find the corrections? It’s true that you need to find where your problems are. But beyond that, you don’t want to hunt for what you did wrong. I know a lot of students desperately want to find their mistakes. What’s worse is when they not only want to find the mistakes, but they want to replay them to see exactly what they did wrong. This reinforces the mistakes! You want to learn and cement the corrections right from the get go. This might seem like an arbitrary distinction. But think about when you play a concert, you obviously want to put on a good performance. You want to have the performance securely memorized. You don’t want to go out there thinking, “I hope I remember everything. Am I going to remember the third movement?” If you start thinking that way, it’s a downward spiral, because whatever you think about tends to manifest itself.

Visualization can be extremely valuable in a concert situation.

Conceptualize and see things the way you want them to be in your performance. Imagine yourself on stage in front of an audience. Imagine your performance going well and you’re much more likely for that to happen. But, if in preparation for your concert you’re thinking about the mistakes you might make, it can be crippling. Those thoughts keep percolating in the back of your mind. Then when you get out on stage, it’s going to undermine your performance. It’s the same thing with searching for your mistakes. You don’t want to concentrate on your mistakes. You want to concentrate on the corrections! And that is what is going to assure a good performance for you.

So instead of asking, “What did I do wrong there?” Find out, “What do I need to do right there?”

This is an important distinction that will help the productivity of your practice tremendously. And it’s a lesson for life as well. Remember, you believe what you tell yourself. This is an important fact. So take this to heart, in everything you do and everything you think, because it has a profound effect upon what happens to you in life, and in your music.

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about the importance of setting goals in your piano practice. There are 3 distinct ways of practicing the piano depending upon what you’re trying to achieve. I have an extended video about this on my Patreon channel, which you’re all welcome to join. But I’m going to give you a little taste of it because it’s so important!

Knowing what you’re trying to achieve is a prerequisite for getting anything accomplished when you sit down to practice.

Whether you’re learning a piece of music to memorize it, or you’re trying to develop your sight reading, or perhaps you are working on improvisation skills, these are all important skill sets. So, here are some tips from my Patreon channel for you.

Piano music is extremely complex compared to almost any other instrument.

You have to have a unique way to approach learning music on the piano. For example, if I were to recite a series of twenty random numerical digits, it would be difficult for you to remember all of them. Even if those numbers were repeated several times, you would still struggle to commit all twenty digits to memory. But if I gave you only three digits, it would be very easy to remember them. Then, I could give you three more digits, and three more after that connecting as you go, you could learn those twenty digits in just a few minutes! Because, there is only a certain amount of information your brain can assimilate at one time. That is the secret to memorizing piano music, or anything else!

Look with your eyes, not your head.

When sight reading music, if you need to glance at your hands, do not move your head. It takes too long. Just look down with your eyes instead. Your eyes are quick! Trust your feel and and your ears when sight reading rather than trying to look at your hands.

Keep Your Eyes on the Score

When I was much younger, my father was performing the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor Piano Concerto at Carnegie Hall. One day he asked me to accompany him in his studio, since he had two pianos. He put the music in front of me and I felt overwhelmed – all those flats and so many notes, a whole orchestral score reduced for the piano! At that time I could barely sight-read anything. But, I just kept my eyes on the score. I missed more notes than I got, but I got through it! I never lost my place in the score. From that moment on, I knew I could read anything, and I’ve been getting more and more of the notes ever since! So, that’s the secret, keeping your eyes on the music. The best way I’ve discovered to have the discipline to do that is playing with other musicians.

This is just a taste of what’s available on Patreon.

I hope this has been enlightening for you! It’s so important to utilize different methods of practice depending upon what you want to accomplish. That’s a really important subject that I wish all teachers would show their students. If you enjoy exploring pianos and piano playing, you may want to join my Patreon family which offers you even more videos and the opportunity to be part of the creative process. These videos are for you!

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how important it is to double check your work when practicing the piano. If you’ve ever seen any of my videos on how I practice, you know I break things down to the smallest parts. I take small sections and study the notes carefully, just in the right hand. I figure out the rhythm. Then I count to make sure everything is secure and figure out the best fingering. Then I study all the other details, the expression, the slurs, the staccatos. I look back and forth dozens of times until I have it securely memorized. Then I do the same long process just with this tiny phrase on the left-hand part until that is secure, going back and forth, double and triple checking. Finally I play both hands together. That’s the hardest part! Naturally, there’s a lot of back and forth in that process making sure it’s right. Then I go on phrase by phrase until I have the whole piece memorized connecting phrase by phrase as I go. After all of that, I go back and study the score agan! I take my foot off the pedal and play through really slowly to double-check my work. And yet, with all of this, I still discover things I didn’t catch in the score!

I recommend going back and forth a great deal, particularly in the formative phase of learning a piece.

As I’ve said so many times before, unlearning is much harder than learning. So you must constantly reference the score at every stage of your practice. Even when you think you have a piece beautifully memorized on performance level, go back to the music and play excruciatingly slowly. I bet you will find things you didn’t know were there. After all, there are tens of thousands of details in even a short piece of music. When you consider notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing, and expression, it’s mind boggling that we can learn music at all! That’s why I recommend the method that I just described.

Try it for yourself!

So, any of you who have pieces really solid, go through your score as I just mentioned. Go slowly, using no pedal, reading every detail, and see what you discover in the process. I think it will be richly rewarding. Better than that, be sure to double, triple, quadruple check your work as you learn so you don’t have to unlearn things later. It will save you vast amounts of time in the long run.

I hope this is helpful for you! If you enjoy exploring pianos and piano playing, joining my Patreon family www.patreon.com/robertestrin. It will offer you even more videos and the opportunity to be part of the creative process.

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. Today’s question is, “How to Solve Your Piano Fingering Problems.” Fingering on the piano is one of the most important aspects of developing a secure technique. So what I’m going to do is tell you my personal story of how I solved my fingering problem.

Did I have fingering problems on the piano?

When I was a child studying piano with my father, my fingering was atrocious! First of all, I had weak fingers. And truth be known, I didn’t practice nearly as much as many of my father’s other students. I had little hands, I didn’t practice a lot, my hands were weak and I had terrible fingering. My father struggled with me to correct all the fingerings. I took a look at some of my scores from my early teen years, and this is where the solution came in for me. I’m thinking this might be helpful for some of you as well. I got to a point where I though, “I want to solve this problem.” I had fingering problems for years, and it was always a nightmare at lessons.

I didn’t know how to solve the fingering problem, so I just wrote in the fingerings for almost every single note!

That was the only way I could know that I was going to play the right fingering. Looking at some scores from that period of time, it looks ridiculous. There are fingerings all over the place! Fortunately, my father was smart enough to always have his students use pencil, so the scores are not destroyed. That is what I went through! But after doing this for a period of time, I got to a point where I stopped writing in fingering. I almost never write in fingering anymore. It sounds like a total contradiction, but I transcended fingering such that I understood fingering in a way that I didn’t have to write them in. Now it’s not to say that I never write in fingering, but it’s really rare that I need to write in fingering anymore. I will certainly try fingering that’s printed in the score, with the editor suggestions. But if I have a fingering problem, I will try many different solutions. The vast majority of the time, I just develop a sense of fingerings that work. Truth be known, I don’t always use the same fingering in pieces I play. Because I got to a point of understanding fingering in such an intrinsic way, I don’t need to write them in anymore.

How many of you have gone through this same process?

I’ve never talked to anybody about this. I’m wondering how pianists out there who’ve had fingering problems overcame them. Has anybody gone through what I went through? It worked for me, but I don’t know if it’s working for anybody else. That is a real key. Writing all the fingerings in, being meticulous, and then getting to the point where you just understand it on such a level that you understand what fingering should be. I hope this is helpful! I would love to hear from all of you about your experiences!

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Please feel free to contact us with any piano related questions for future videos!

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

This is Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com with a question, “What Is the Right Fingering on the Piano?” Fingering is such a deep subject on the piano that I could give courses on it and have guest artists to share their ideas because, truth be known, fingering is not a one size fits all proposition.

Are there any fundamental fingerings that all pianists follow?

There are some essential fingerings that all pianists must learn. For example, unlike the violin and other string instruments which do not have standard fingering for scales and arpeggios, on the piano there is standard fingering. I should mention a little aside here. There is another school of thought for a tiny percentage of pianists called, “mirror fingering” in which the thumbs always play the same notes in both hands in scales and arpeggios. But that is a subject for another video.

Most pianists learn proper fingering for scales from “Hanon 60 Selected Studies for the Virtuoso Pianist.”

You can get the Hanon book on Amazon or most sheet music stores. It is the Bible of fingering for scales and arpeggios on the piano. All pianists must learn the correct fingering for scales and arpeggios, but what about in your music? If you’ve ever had sheet music that has fingering in it, and then you see another edition of the same piece, you might be shocked to discover that the fingerings are different! In fact, fingerings are different in various editions! So how do you know what’s right?

Fingering is as much art as it is science.

My father, Morton Estrin, was a concert pianist with enormous hands. I have relatively small hands. Just think of that alone. Something that might lie right under the fingers of somebody with big hands would be impossible for somebody with smaller hands to reach. We must accommodate our hand size. Even the thickness of the fingers and the stretch between the thumb and the other fingers, all of these things affects us. Here’s the key: You must practice to find the fingering that works for you. Does that mean that anything goes with fingering? Far from it!

It takes many years to learn how to find the right fingering.

There is no substitute for a good teacher, as well as having authoritative, well-edited, fingered editions. I use that in the plural because there’s nothing better than having multiple resources of fingering suggestions. When you’re running through a problem with a passage, one of the first things to look for are new fingering solutions. Sometimes the fingering, even though it seems like it should be perfectly good, might not work for you. You have to discover what fingerings work for you.

There are some hard and fast rules in fingering.

I mentioned scales and arpeggios, but there are other fingerings you must follow. For example, rapid repeated notes with one hand. If you try to do that with one finger, you’re never going to be able to get it up to speed. But, by using three fingers you can go much faster. So, there is one thing that is certainly a rule. You must change fingers when playing rapid repeated notes with one hand. In fact, I like changing fingers on repeated notes even when they’re slow because of the legato quality you can get. When you play a repeated note without changing fingers, it is difficult to get a smooth sound. But by changing fingers, one finger is going down while the next finger comes up, so you achieve smoother, more connected repeated notes.

If you have technical problems in a passage and you’ve worked and worked but you never can get it, try experimenting with new fingering. Get another edition with fingerings and try them out. You will be rewarded! It is one of the things that will come to you after you’ve studied piano for a long time. You’ll start to understand fingering in a way that allows for solutions to technical and musical challenges on the piano.

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos.

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. Today’s topic is “Technique vs Musicality” There will be a lot of opinions about this subject. But truth be known, you can’t really separate technique from musicality completely.

What is technique?

In its most abstract form, you might think of technique as being the physical capabilities, how fast, how loud, the control, trills octaves, etc. But in its essence, technique is being able to produce on the instrument what you hear in your head. Being able to create something in the outer world from your inner world. Ultimately, that is the secret of technique.

Is technique more important than musicality?

Pretend for a moment that somebody out there just wants technique. They don’t care about the musicality. They’re just making it into a sporting event. Can you really achieve something with that? You might think that if somebody could play faster and louder, or slower and more delicately, and every nuance of touch on such a high level, that they would probably have a career because they’d be so phenomenal. But the truth is, having tremendous technique on the piano is very common. Believe it or not. I know most people haven’t met concert pianists, but there are so many concert pianists around the world who you’ve probably never heard of. If you heard them, you’d be astounded thinking that they’re greatest pianists in the world because they can play so well.

Now let’s talk about musicality.

Can you be musical without technique? Well, just imagine if you considered yourself to be a writer. You’ve got great stories, but you can’t really write and you aren’t a good orator either. You have to have a command of language in order to be able to express anything in writing! It’s the same thing with music. You can’t have musicality abstracted from technique. It takes a technique to be able to produce music. Here’s the good news: The repertoire for piano is so vast that someone who is a relative beginner, if they have a natural emotion in their music, if a teacher guides them with appropriate level of music, it’s possible to play musically even with a very basic technique.

Even beginners can play with musicality.

There’s a piece by Cuthbert Harrison from the book, “ABC Manuals” that I loved as a kid and taught countless times. Because I taught this piece so many times, I heard a lot of kids play it and nobody did what I did with it, which was to play it very slowly. Usually with kids, the more they get to know a piece, the faster it goes. But so much can be done with this relatively simple piece of music that doesn’t take very much technique. You can achieve a great deal of musicality just with the voicing of the notes.

Technique and musicality are both necessary for any musician.

So, if you want to explore musical possibilities and total control, the secret is choosing a piece of music that you can have total command over. I know many of you want to play certain pieces of music you’ve heard for your whole life and that you love so much. But you’re doing yourself a disservice if you spend all your time with music that is above the level at which you can play what you hear in your head and achieve it on the instrument. Start with that premise. And you will develop a technique in service of the music, which is what it’s all about! You can’t really separate technique and musicality. You need to have both in order to achieve greatness on your instrument. And that’s the lesson for today!

Thanks so much for joining me. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. See you next time!

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729