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As a musician or other person in the arts, it is necessary to work countless hours to master your craft. Yet, sharing life experience is intrinsic to artistic expression. You can look at this on the macro level of your life as well as how you deal with your career as a musician.

Like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, you must never push yourself to the point of destroying your love of music in your quest to develop a virtuoso technique on an instrument. Yet if you don’t practice enough, you won’t have the means of expression. So then how do you achieve such a high level and still have something of value to share with your audience? This is a timeless question.

Every person must find balance in their lives. No one can force you to become an artist. It has to come from within. It is necessary to have discipline, but the playful, spontaneous nature is intrinsic to the creative spirit. It is an amazing fact that people who have mastered piano technique are not rare in this world, yet an artist capable of conveying deep emotions to their audience provides a profoundly memorable experience.

You must make practice joyful work. But more than that, you must also let yourself live carefree at times, never losing the playful fun, interaction with people, and enjoyment and appreciation of living life to its fullest in order to be the ultimate, expressive artist you are capable of being.

Thanks for joining us, if you have any questions or comments about this subject or any subject at all please contact us directly: info@livingpianos.com (949) 244-3729

The Life of the Artist: Balancing Work & Play

Welcome back to our ongoing series of piano exercises. These are meant to be quick techniques you can practice with just a few minutes each day to help develop your strength. The first part in the series dealt with a Broken Triad Exercise and the second was Practicing Major Scales with C Major Fingering. This week we will be covering Broken Seventh Chords.

As long as you know all your seventh chords, you can play them in all keys as arpeggios. Why would you just play major and minor triads as arpeggios? Not only is this is a wonderful way to develop your technique but when you come across broken seventh chords in your music you will already know how to approach them.

The order I play them is:

– Major seventh chord
– Dominant seventh chord
– Minor seventh chord
– Half diminished seventh chord
– Diminished seventh chord

Why this particular order? If you play them this way, there is only one note that has to change between chords. Simply keep playing the chords one by one and go through all twelve of the keys. The video included with this article will show you a great example of this.

Here is the key on how to transition from chord to chord:

– Major seventh chord: Lower the 7th a half-step
– Dominant seventh chord: Lower the 3rd a half-step
– Minor seventh chord: Lower the 5th a half-step
– Half diminished seventh chord: Lower the 7th a half-step
– Diminished seventh chord: That’s it!

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com

The Best Piano Exercises (Part 3) – Broken Seventh Chords

Welcome to the second part in our series on Piano Exercises. Last week we discussed The Broken Triad Exercise. This week we will cover a very unique practice exercise that might sound a little crazy but is highly effective in developing your skills as a pianist.

If you’ve ever played complex counterpoint like Bach fugues or other selections you will find yourself having to use complex fingering that’s not very intuitive. Normally you will want to find fingering that would be easy to achieve – like avoiding using your thumbs on black keys (unless on octaves and chords) – and most of the time you will have the luxury of breaking down fingering to make it as simple as possible. This is not always the case and you must prepare yourself for having to deal with more difficult passages.

One great way to practice this type of non-standard fingering is by playing all major scales using the fingering for the C major scale. In the video provided with this article I demonstrate this technique using the D-flat major scale using the fingering of the C major scale!

While this might look and feel silly it will really help you develop strength and flexibility in your hands and fingers.

Thanks again for joining me and stay tuned for the next piano exercise. Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com

The Best Piano Exercises (Part 2) – Playing Major Scales with C Major Fingering

Welcome to my multi-part series of piano exercises. This is a great exercise I learned in conservatory that provides a wonderful way to build strength in your technique.

Sometimes you don’t have a lot of time to practice but you want to get the maximum amount of production out of your time – this is great exercise for this exact situation. It’s something you can easily do with just a few minutes every day.

Rather than playing an entire series of scales or arpeggios and without having to learn an entire etude, you can perform this exercise – which is based on a pattern of chords – relatively easily and frequently as a great way to improve your strength.

The exercise goes from a major triad, to a minor triad, to a diminished triad, to an augmented triad. If you’re unsure of what these mean we will have a series of videos explaining them in the near future.

The best way to learn this exercise is to watch the video included with this article, if you can’t watch I’ve included a link to download the exercise right here.

When you start with the C-major triad, you simply play the top two notes in the right hand and the bottom two notes in the left hand. From here you simply go back and forth through the scale notes. You’ll want to use all five fingers – this is a crucial step for the exercise as it’s all about building strength.

After you play the major, you simply move on to the minor, the diminished, and finally the augmented. When you actually perform the exercise you will want to go in a seamless line between each form of the triads and you will do this is every single key moving up chromatically.

This whole exercise takes only a few minutes and it’s an incredible workout for your fingers. There is no phrasing or dynamics to worry about; it’s simply a way to improve your strength. Over the years I’ve found this to be an incredibly helpful exercise and something I can do when I simply don’t have the time to sit down and practice for an extended amount of time.

Thanks again for joining me, there will be a couple more exercises for you in the next coming weeks, so stay tuned! Robert@LivingPianos.com

The Best Piano Exercises (Part 1) – Broken Triads

Welcome to my multi-part series of piano exercises. This is a great exercise I learned in conservatory that provides a wonderful way to build strength in your technique. Sometimes you don’t have a lot of time to practice but you want to get the max

Practicing slowly is essential in order to develop and maintain a high level of piano playing. There are actually several different components I’m going to discuss when it comes to the magic of slow practice. Even pieces that you have polished and are on performance level will benefit from the reinforcement of going through slowly. This means playing the piece slowly and definitely looking at the musical score, using no pedal and most often using the metronome. Practicing like this will help solidify your memorization and your fingers. I find this is the best thing to do in the final practice for a performance you are well prepared for.

There is another form of slow practice that you might not have heard about before. I find this to be incredibly important; in fact, I discussed this with my wife www.FlorenceFlutist.com and she had the same exact perception of this concept. Let’s say you sit down to practice and have a whole piece to work out. Perhaps it is partially learned but the piece is not up to performance level yet. You could try to power through and keep working trying to improve it. However, a much better approach is to not worry about the whole piece at all at this point. Simply start at the beginning of the piece; the first phrase. Play it slowly – slower than you are used to – until you have complete comfort and satisfaction with that section.

If you do this you will undoubtedly spend a lot of time working out that first section. You will probably wonder how you will even get through the whole piece learning so slowly! You will be very tempted to move ahead to the next section before you should. However, if you stay with it, the results will be remarkable.

Continue working slowly on the first section of the piece until it is absolutely perfect and it feels very comfortable. Then begin working up the tempo with the metronome one notch at a time. The good news is that most sections of the piece will not require such intense practice and you will get them on a high level without spending much time at all. However, there will be a few sections that will definitely benefit from this slow practice routine. It comes down to the 80/20 rule:

You should spend 80% of your time on the hardest 20% of the music!

Most pieces are not written with equal difficulty throughout. By taking sections that are difficult and practicing them slowly until they become comfortable (and then increasing the speed), your practice sessions will become much more productive. Slow practice is an incredible tool to advance your piano playing. Just practicing a piece slowly and definitely without incrementally speeding it up will be tremendously beneficial. Try these techniques out and see how it works for you. I would love to hear your comments.

Why is slow piano practice so important? Piano Lessons

The metronome is much maligned by many musicians for its incessant ticking which can be like a form of Chinese water torture! Many teachers are insistent upon using the metronome and students have questioned whether or not they need this ticking box.

The metronome really is one of the two most important tools at your disposal (the other being an audio recorder) and you should be practicing with it regularly – whatever your skill level. Today we are going to discuss three reasons why the metronome is so important as well as some great applications on how to use it.

The first reason why you need the metronome is that nobody has a perfect clock in their brain. When you start to learn a piece of music and you encounter tough sections, you will naturally slow down a bit to compensate for the difficulty. You might think that once you work them out and get things up to speed, there should be no problem. But you may overcompensate and actually play these sections even faster! The only way to be sure is to play with the metronome.

Don’t make the mistake my mother used to make by putting the metronome too fast and trying to keep up with it. She would drive herself crazy with frustration trying to match an impossibly fast speed of the metronome. Find a speed you are comfortable with and work your way up to an appropriate tempo.

The second reason you want to use a metronome is that it provides an essential practice tool for difficult sections of music. Start by playing at a slow speed accurately with comfort. Then, incrementally increase the speed notch by notch gaining confidence at each new tempo until you get the passage mastered up to tempo. This is an indispensable tool for developing a refined technique on your instrument.

The key is to use this technique by zeroing in on specific sections of your music – not the whole piece. It will not take as much time as you think and you will master tough sections of your music much more quickly.

The third reason you want to use a metronome is because it will help you improve as a musician. The pulse is one of the most important aspects of music and developing a consistent beat will make you a better musician. This aids in playing with other musicians with a tight ensemble.

These are three great reasons to use the metronome and I’m sure many of you have more suggestions as well. Please leave us some comments or email me directly Robert@LivingPianos.com