Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to play with two hands on the piano. Now this may seem like the most basic thing. But I bet you there are people searching for answers about this. This can be particularly perplexing for those of you who have played other instruments where you play only one note at a time. You might wonder, how the heck do you play with two hands and play all those notes? So it is really a valid question, and the answer may surprise you!

The secret to learning how to play with both hands is to practice hands separately!

That might seem like a contradiction, but it is far from it. The hardest part about piano playing is putting the hands together. Practicing small sections at a time, hands separately, really breaks things down. It makes it easier for you to play hands together. If you try to play hands together immediately, and that is the way you practice a piece of music, it’s going to be tough to get all the details straight. You will struggle to get the phrasing and fingering. There’s just so much information to amass when you’re looking at a score. So that is the secret to playing hands together.

When you first start learning a new piece of music, read through it really slowly, hands together, to get familiar. You’ll probably have to play incredibly slowly at first, because it’s hard! But once you do that a couple of times, you can start from the beginning, just taking a very small section. Figure out the right hand. Learn all the details of the right hand. Then do the same thing with the left hand. Then put them together. You repeat this process one small section at a time. I’ve talked about this process many times before. I was so fortunate to study with my father, Morton Estrin, who showed me this at my first lesson as a young child. I have taught this to countless people. It really works!

If the piano was played with only one hand, it would probably be the easiest instrument there is!

Trying to get a sound out of a clarinet or a flute is an arduous task. Basic tone production on a piano is as simple as pressing down a key. You can get a sound the first time you try it! But put those hands together and it becomes exponentially more difficult. So the secret to playing hands together is to work out your music section by section, hands separately. Get each hand really flowing and then slowly put them together. Then increase the tempo. You can connect section by section working through the piece this way. Before you know it, you can play hands together on the piano! I hope this is helpful for those of you who are afraid of the piano because of having to play with two hands. 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 I’m going to talk about why an okay hand position is ideal at the piano. Now what do I mean by this? Wouldn’t you want a great hand position at the piano?

I don’t mean an okay hand position, I mean the okay hand position.

You probably know this gesture. Your thumb and index finger are touching, forming a circle, while your other three fingers are gently outstretched. This hand position, believe it or not, is the ideal hand position on the piano!

Why would you want your second finger curved like this?

By having the second finger curved more than other fingers, you actually are in an ideal position for octaves and chords. If you just take your hands and drop them on the piano without using any muscles at all, you’ll find they naturally will go into this position. So this is the position you want to be in on the piano. An okay position is the ideal position on the piano! You can use that as a little reminder as to how your hands should be placed on the keyboard.

It’s not a tight position.

You’re not trying to keep your hands in that position with force. In fact, your hands will automatically stay in that position if you just let them come down naturally on the keyboard. With no force at all, your hands will fall into that position. Because it takes no effort to maintain, it is the best position on the piano. What’s great about this is by rounding your second finger more than the others, you can accommodate chords and octaves with much greater ease. I hope this little tip is 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. 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

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is about how much you should mark up your piano music. There are a lot of reasons to write on your score. Maybe you missed something in your music and you want to circle it, or you need to put fingering in. After a while your whole score could be marked up making it difficult to see the notes!

I have an interesting story about this.

Years ago, when I was at the Manhattan School of Music, I had a friend who was a piano major. She had the Henle edition of the Beethoven sonatas, which are very authoritative and expensive. I was helping her with a particular Beethoven sonata. She opened up the score of this incredibly expensive, thick volume of Beethoven. She turned to the sonata she was working on with her teacher, and it was marked up with several different colors of ink! There were so many markings, you absolutely could not see the score anymore! Things were circled, and there were big blotches of red, green, and blue ink on the score. Can you imagine the injustice of this? Her teacher destroyed her score! There’s no way you could possibly see the notes and Beethoven’s markings anymore. That’s an extreme example of what to avoid.

Only use pencil in your scores.

When I tell my students to mark something on the score I first ask, “Do you have a pencil handy?” That’s rule number one. My father used to have this really cool mechanical pencil. I haven’t seen anything like it that exists anymore. It was a pencil that had four different colored leads in it. He could mark scores with red, green, blue and black. It was such a great way for him to mark scores in a coherent fashion. Yet because it was pencil, the markings could be erased. Why is this so important? Let’s say early on you didn’t see a flat in the key signature, so you put the flat in front of the note. Then maybe later there was something else in that same measure, like a fingering or a phrase marking you missed. You can start making so many circles and marks that before you know it, it doesn’t get your attention anymore.

You want to be able to erase marks you no longer need, and only have the ones that are pertinent.

At a later stage of learning a piece of music, you might want to record it to see what kind of shape it’s in. In doing so, when listening back to the recording, you might want to gently circle the places you want to review. But maybe the mistakes were just one-offs. Maybe you just wanted to reference them after listening to the recording. Your markings are not always something you want to call to attention every single time you’re looking at the score. Fingering is a really critical example. You may work out a fingering and think it’s good. But later, when you’re playing the piece up to tempo, you realize that fingering isn’t going to work at all. As long as it’s in pencil, you can erase it and put new fingerings in. So that’s the most important thing.

Retain the clarity of your score.

Use a pencil! Don’t obliterate your score with too many markings. Erase the markings you no longer need so you have clarity of the actual score. After all, the score is what you need to see and digest. You don’t want to obscure it with too many markings. I’m interested in how you deal with markings in your scores. What do you find helpful? 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. 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

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to take your piano playing to the next level. This is a really fascinating subject. This transcends piano. It even transcends other musical instruments! With almost anything anyone wants to master, it really comes down to a critical mass of practicing. What do I mean by this? The term critical mass is typically associated in physics with radioactive material. You put enough of it together and it starts a chain reaction. But you could have plutonium and it would never start a chain reaction, no matter how much you have, unless you put enough of it in one space at one time. That’s what causes the chain reaction. It’s the same thing with your piano practice or any other endeavor you want to master.

There has to be an extended period of time where you’re spending just about every waking moment at the piano.

Anyone who’s really mastered an instrument has gone through this process. Once you go through that process, you will be forever changed. You will be on another level. You can depend upon what you have given yourself with that experience. Another example of this, since I’m into physics, is something called escape velocity. For example, if you were to go into a rocket, and just keep going and going and going straight up, you will never go into orbit. In fact, the way to go into orbit is not by how far you go, but how fast you go. You have to reach a certain speed to escape the force of Earth’s gravitational pull. There has to be enough speed generated. You have to have enough energy to be able to get your piano playing on that level.

You can practice for your whole life one or two hours a day and never reach that pinnacle of achievement of a true virtuoso technique.

To be a really accomplished concert level player, you have to go through this process. There is no substitute for that. Now that I’ve made this bold statement, since a lot of people watch my videos, I’m interested in your feelings about this. It doesn’t have to be just piano, any field of endeavor. Are there any of you who feel you’ve mastered painting, or physics, or anything, and you haven’t gone through that process of total absorption for an extended amount of time? I want to hear from you! I want to know if it’s possible, because my feeling is that it’s not possible. I believe that’s what it takes, and there is no shortcut to that. You can grow. You can become better. But you’re never going to be on that top echelon level without going through this process. Talk to any friends you have who have mastered their instrument or their craft, and ask them if they’ve gone through this process. I’m really interested in the comments on this one here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.