Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about the importance of practicing with raised fingers. Playing the piano with raised fingers is a completely different scenario from practicing the piano with raised fingers. I want to qualify this right out of the gate so you don’t get scared that I’m telling you to do something that could lead to injury. This is a technique used judiciously to help you solidify your technique, but certainly not something you do in performance. You may wonder why you would do something in practice that you would never do in your performance? Well, there are very good reasons for this which I will explain now.

The physiology of the hands is such that it’s much easier to push fingers down than to lift them up.

If you want to prove this to yourself, just put your hands on a flat surface anywhere, and then just try to lift only your fourth finger. It’s hard to do because the tendons and the nerves are shared among those fingers. So it makes it tough to gain independence.

Why is it a good idea to practice with raised fingers?

Well, there are actually two reasons for this. One is that it helps to strengthen the independence of your fingers so you can practice the release of notes. If you’ve ever heard somebody play sloppy scales, one aspect is the evenness of the attack. But the other aspect is the evenness of the durations of notes, the space between notes. If I played a scale with all the notes hitting evenly, but don’t release some of the notes the same length as others, it would sound sloppy because some notes overlap and some don’t. It’s haphazard. And as I mentioned, lifting fingers up is so much more difficult than pushing them down. Also, it teaches your hands and your head which fingers are down and which fingers are up. So in slow scale practice, by raising fingers, you identify which notes are down and which fingers are up. So when you go faster you have the control of releases, not just attacks of notes.

The stretch you get is akin to the warm up of an athlete.

Stretching is so important! This is a great way you can stretch your fingers while at the same time teach yourself the release of the notes in slow practice. Naturally, when you play up to tempo, you abandon this because it’s not possible or recommended to raise fingers when trying to play up to tempo. It’s not only impossible, but it would not be good for your hands to do such a thing. But it’s a tremendous technique, not just for practicing scales. You can use this technique anytime you want to identify which notes are down and which notes are up so you can achieve a clean sound. With this kind of practice everything is exaggerated. So whatever sloppiness you have is eradicated because you really get to dig into the keys and feel every key that’s down and keep other fingers up and out of the way. And this is why slow practicing with raised fingers can be incredibly valuable for you!

Always be aware of how you feel and never do anything that causes you pain!

This applies not just for raised finger practice, but everything you do on the piano. How you sit at the piano, the relaxed nature of your shoulders. You must be aware of all these things because you want your hands to last your whole life because it is the lifeblood for playing the piano!

I hope you find this practice technique to be helpful for you. Try it out and see how it works for you! And when practicing with raised fingers, you don’t want to use a lot of arm weight. You want to just use the fingers. Teach your fingers which notes are down and which notes are up and you will have a cleaner technique to show for it! Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’ll be addressing a question from a viewer. Raymond asks, “On an 88 key piano, the lowest note is A and the highest is C. Why aren’t keyboards divided into an even number of octaves starting and ending on C or A?” This is actually a very good question because it seems so logical. In fact, if you ever look at five octave synthesizers and other portable keyboards, they almost always have an even number of octaves. From C to C, typically four or five octaves. So why aren’t pianos built that way?

Before the piano was invented, there were harpsichords.

Harpsichords had different numbers of keys and even different starting and ending points on the two keyboards, which is a whole story unto itself. The earliest pianos had a limited range of keys, typically around five octaves. You might wonder why. Well, it’s because those are the sounds those early instruments were capable of producing.

If you look at all the works of Mozart and Haydn, for example, they never really exceed that approximate range. It’s remarkable to think that all of the music they wrote was confined to this number of keys, because the piano just didn’t have more keys than that!

Beethoven worked closely with instrument builders expanding the range of the piano.

Expanding the range of the piano was no easy task! As you get higher, the tension of the strings becomes cumulatively enormous. So they started reinforcing the frame of the piano with metal, which eventually led to the full cast iron plate like we have today. Beethoven never reached the full 88 keys in his lifetime. But it’s interesting to see how the evolution of his music was affected by the capabilities of the instruments. Early Beethoven compositions had a much narrower range of keys than later Beethoven works.

How did the piano end up with 88 keys?

Late in the 19th century, most pianos ended at the highest A, and yet they went down to the lowest A. So there was a symmetrical keyboard in terms of the number of octaves! Eventually the high C became more and more common until it became the standard. So why doesn’t it go higher or lower? Well, to answer that question, there are a couple of instruments out there that do explore lower notes. The famous Bosendorfer Imperial Concert Grand, for example, goes all the way to C below the low A! It’s hard to discern pitch there, which is one of the reasons most pianos don’t venture below that low A. The lowest notes on the Bosendorfer Imperial Concert Grand sound a bit unearthly because the vibrations are so slow. You start hearing the separate vibrations instead of the pitch. Our brains almost don’t perceive it as pitch anymore! There is another instrument that also goes down to that low C and that is the Stuart and Sons from Australia.

Those instruments have those low notes, not just for those rare times when you want to take advantage of a lower octave. I know there are a couple of places in the literature where it would be really nice at least to have that low G or F. But it’s also because whenever you depress the sustain pedal all the dampers are released allowing those strings to sympathetically vibrate, giving more richness to the overtones of the sound.

What about the other end of the spectrum, going higher than the highest note of the piano?

Well, Stuart and Sons actually has a piano that goes higher than the high C. It goes all the way up to the high B, almost an octave above the highest C! Naturally the big hindrance with those really high notes, even the highest notes on any piano, is that they just don’t last that long. The notes die out in a matter of a second or two. Even the second to highest C on a piano doesn’t last very long. That’s why pianos don’t even have dampers for all those high notes. Dampers end on pianos somewhere in the D sharp to G range. Yamaha’s have dampers up to G. On Baldwins and Steinways, typically the last note that has a damper is D sharp. Do you need dampers on those high notes? Well, it does ring quite a bit. And you’ll find on different pianos, the dampers end in different places. But those extremely high notes have limited value because they don’t last long enough to use them melodically. They’re really just percussive little pecks of sound.

You can hear for yourself why they’ve settled in on A to C.

It’s a musically useful range of tones for the technology brought to bear. That’s the simple answer to your question, Raymond! Thanks for that very insightful question, I hope you’ve enjoyed this! Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why you should be playing the piano with your hands crossed. Now what do I mean by that? There are a lot of places in music where the hands cross in order to accomplish a certain sound or texture in the playing. But what I’m talking about today is entirely different. The physiology of our hands is just wrong for piano playing in one fundamental way. Your strongest fingers are in the middle and the weakest fingers are on the ends. Yet you want to bring out the treble, you want to bring out the bass. But you have these big, heavy, strong fingers, right in the middle obscuring everything!

If you were to play the piano without compensating for this weakness, you’d end up with a pretty awful sound.

Imagine just letting your thumbs be and letting the balance come out the way it naturally would with the hands. It wouldn’t sound right because the thumbs are just really strong and your pinkies and fourth fingers are weak. So you have to learn how to lessen the thumbs and bring out top notes and bottom notes. This is one of the most difficult aspects of playing the piano! It’s not easy to balance notes because your hands are designed exactly the wrong way to accomplish it! Crossing your hands corrects that imbalance, but obviously presents a whole other set of problems. So I’m not actually recommending you do that. But in a perfect world, there would be some way of achieving this.

So how do you learn to balance?

One terrific way to learn how to balance is to play with different articulations. Underplay the notes that are accompaniment and play legato for melody notes. Playing inner voices with a gentle finger staccato teaches your hand which notes to bring out and which ones are less important. You can do this with virtually any music you play. Interestingly, you don’t have to restrict it to just the top line and the bottom line. When you’re playing counterpoint, for example, you can bring out whatever line you choose. And not just in counterpoint. This is a phenomenal technique for developing the ability to bring out whatever you want within a polyphonic texture. Until we have some way of compensating for the fact that our hands are built backwards for the piano, this is a technique I recommend for you! Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Hi, I’m Robert Estrin, this is LivingPianos.com. The question today is about musical conservators. What is a musical conservator? Have you ever heard that term before? I hadn’t, until a few years ago when I met a musical conservator in Los Angeles. It was an enlightening experience! I didn’t understand the process until I experienced it for myself and I thought you’d be interested in this. Now, of course, there are people who restore instruments. There are piano rebuilders, technicians who take older pianos and try to make them fresh and new again. They’ll put in new pin blocks, they’ll refinish cases, they’ll put all new parts on the pianos they restore. They actually rebuild all the thousands of parts of the pianos, getting high-level performance out of old instruments. What a conservator does is quite different, even though the end result can be similar.

How is a piano conservator different from a piano rebuilder?

When a conservator is working on an old instrument, instead of just putting new parts in it, they will go to painstaking lengths to preserve as many original parts as possible. For example, if the pins are loose, usually, a rebuilder will remove the strings, remove the plate, and craft a new pinblock for the piano. The pin block is the piece of wood underneath the plate that has holes for each tuning pin. The holes are drilled to tolerances of thousandths of an inch at precise angles. So when the pins are banged in and twisted, they’ll hold. But a conservator will do something dramatically different. If they’re meticulous enough, they’ll torque each and every pin to see how much strength it takes in order to turn the pins. They will record the torque of each and every one! There are 220+ strings on a piano. Each pin is labeled to identify which pin came from which hole. And then they go through hole by hole, filling in the holes with the precise amount of wood to be able to get the proper amount of torque out of each pin rather than just putting a new pin block in.

What about the finish of the piano? How do you preserve that?

Believe it or not, they will scrape the finish off and then liquefy it and reapply that same finish! There are all sorts of techniques. If the hammers are worn out, typically you can just get a new set of matching specification hammers. But a conservator will take felt and rebuild each and every hammer one by one, putting the missing felt back on each hammer. This just gives you an idea of the absolutely tedious process a conservator goes through in restoring instruments. Why would they go through such a process? It would be far easier to replace these parts, wouldn’t it? In truth, yes, it would be much easier to simply replace the parts. Is the purpose to save money on those parts? Absolutely not, because the labor is so intensive.

The point is to preserve the past!

If nobody ever goes through the intense process I’ve described for an older piano, say a 1912 Steinway, painstakingly bringing that instrument back to its original state, at some point in the future, we won’t know what a 1912 Steinway was! In museums particularly, when you see historical keyboards, obviously you don’t want to rip out those irreplaceable parts and put in new parts because it wouldn’t even be that historical instrument anymore!

So that’s what a conservator does. It’s a completely different methodology from typical instrument rebuilding. It requires a different mindset! It has a different purpose. Yet, either one can get great results in the hands of masters! I thought this would be interesting for you to know. I know I was flabbergasted when I learned about this.

Keep the questions coming in! I give preference to my Patreon subscribers, but all of you are welcome to contact me any time! 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 subject today is about how practicing the piano is different from practicing on all other instruments. I majored in both piano and French horn in conservatory. In fact, all through my childhood I was completely obsessed with both instruments. I think what I loved about the French horn and the piano was how completely different they were from each other. And in regards to practicing, it’s a completely different experience. Practicing the horn is about tone production, intonation, being able to play at any volume, with any articulation, at any register with control, and getting a beautiful sound.

Basic tone production on the piano is the easiest of just about any instrument!

On the piano, you push a key and it sounds pretty good. With flute, getting a sound out at all is really tough! Just holding a violin correctly is incredibly difficult. Other instruments have tremendous challenges. For example, double reed players like oboists and bassoonists spend a tremendous amount of time crafting reeds, either making their own reeds or refining reeds they get from others. This requires meticulous carving with knives to get just the right response out of the reeds. Vocalists have to study languages and diction. Think about the hours spent doing that, yet there is only so long you can practice singing before you will tire your voice. But there is a tremendous amount of research that goes into understanding what you’re singing in other languages, and being able to express content appropriately. You also have to stay healthy, because you are the instrument! Every instrument has challenges. The big challenge with piano is the music.

The piano is fundamentally easier to play, but the music makes up for it with its great complexity.

As a classical pianist, the vast majority of your time is spent learning scores. On French horn, there’s a tremendous amount of warmups involved in practicing. Things like long tones on wind instruments are essential. My wife is a flutist and she doesn’t miss a day of doing her long tones. What are long tones? Long tones are slow swells from very, very soft to very, very loud, back to very, very soft on every single note on the instrument. This is a great way to develop control on a wind instrument. So if you have a decrescendo, you can maintain the pitch and beauty of the sound by practicing each and every note consistently. On the piano, of course, we don’t have those issues. We don’t even have those capabilities!

With French horn, a great deal of time is spent on the instrument itself developing the physiology of the lips. There’s an old saying about French horn, “Skip a day and you know it. Skip two days, your section players know it. Skip three days, everyone knows it!” After a break from French horn, it can take weeks to get back into shape! The muscles of the lips are so delicate. You can’t just practice and practice until you’re back in shape, because you’ll blow your chops and then you can’t play anything! Your facial muscles become fatigued. So you have to really baby your lips and keep them in great shape. After a break from the piano, at first your fingers feel kind of mushy and lack strength. But just keep playing. Make sure you don’t tax yourself too much. After a day or two, you should be right back in shape. Everything should come back pretty easily.

What is so different about piano practice?

With piano you’re learning scores, and it is a meticulous process. One of the reasons I loved practicing French horn so much is that I could concentrate on pure sound, the beautiful rich tone of the instrument. The sound you get out of each note becomes a trademark of your own personality. On the piano, this just isn’t the case. Practicing the piano, if you’re doing it right, requires tremendous mental effort. You’re assimilating notes and scores and music. You must be able to think through complex arrangements that have polyphony and counterpoint and bring out different lines. Now, it’s true that other keyboard instruments have some of the same challenges. As an organist, you even have the pedals! However, you don’t have to balance notes and lines within a texture. For example, if you’re playing a four part chorale, you have four different lines. You can bring out the soprano line, the alto line, the tenor line or the bass line. You can do this simply by reaching with your fingers. The most obvious is to bring out the top line. But you can emphasize any of the four lines, each one calling attention to different lines within the score.

But balancing isn’t necessarily just bringing out one line, it’s being aware of all of the lines and controlling them.

In order to get that kind of control, you have to really know the scores. You have to study the music to develop that level of control. Are there techniques or exercises that can help with that? Somewhat. But there’s no substitute for spending a great deal of time really learning scores. You want to know the score so well that you have control of all the notes literally under your fingertips! And that’s what makes piano practice unique! I’m interested in your opinions on this subject. If you play other instruments, as well as the piano, let me know how you feel about practicing those instruments compared to practicing the piano and how it feels different to you. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to address a question from a viewer. The viewer asks, “Can you comment on finger staccato and how this interacts with the wrists and staying closer to the keys as speed increases? I’m referring to the technique of flexing the fingers toward a more closed fist with each staccato note. The action requires suddenly scratching the keys or sliding the finger pads on the key tops. This is described as feeling like pulling the notes from the keys. I found this very valuable, but I seek more wisdom on integrating this with other techniques of speed and lightness.” This is a very interesting question. I get a lot of people asking about this idea of rubbing the keys. Indeed, there is something referred to as finger staccato.

What is finger staccato?

I’ve talked a great deal about staccato and how it’s performed from the wrist. Indeed most of the time staccato is performed from the wrist. The wrists are fundamental in playing staccatos on the piano. But sometimes there is an articulation that you want to achieve to get space between the notes, something that’s too fast for the wrists to accomplish. For example, in the Gigue, the last movement of Bach’s French Suite in G major, his fifth French Suite, you can play legato, but playing with a finger staccato creates a harpsichord like tonality to the punctuation of each note. It almost sounds faster, even playing at the same tempo, because of the delineation of each note.

Is this being done by sliding on the keys?

I don’t recommend sliding on the keys for a variety of reasons. First of all, key tops on different pianos are dramatically different from one another. On most pianos today you have composite plastic key tops. Some pianos have ivory. Ivory is a porous material that has more friction than plastic key tops. Also consider the dryness or the moisture on your fingertips. Dry fingers can really slide like crazy on ivory key tops. Sweaty fingers can slide a lot on plastic key tops. But the point is that you have different levels of friction on different key tops. So trying to rely upon rubbing the keys isn’t a reliable technique.

How do you achieve finger staccato?

You achieve finger staccato by staying very close to the keys and getting used to playing with spaces between the notes. You can practice this in your scales. Try practicing at a slower tempo, doing progressive metronome speeds, and keeping it very light. Avoid using the wrists! The wrists can’t go fast enough.

Practicing with staccato fingers is a phenomenal way of training your hand to play fast passagework because each note is articulated.

One of the tricks to getting clean finger work, whether it’s scales, arpeggios, or other types of passagework, is focusing on the release of notes. You want to have note lengths that are uniform throughout. The only way to achieve that is by playing with spaces between the notes. Playing all the notes very short from the fingers makes the maximum space between notes. Which later you can control, so you can have different lengths of spaces between notes. We think of practicing scales as a one-size-fits-all, but why not practice them detached or semi-detached? Ultimately, what makes music sound even is not just the attack of the notes, but the release of the notes as well. You want to have even durations of notes and even spaces between the notes, which can only be achieved by the fingers. By practicing with staccato fingers, it’s an extreme difference from legato playing. Then you can try to fill in all the touches between notes from staccato fingers to legato, so you can get any kind of phrasing you’re after in your playing!

That was a very interesting question! Maybe I didn’t give the answer you expected. I hope this is interesting for you and valuable for your piano playing, as well as your practice. Practicing a piece that has a lot of finger work with all staccato fingers is a heck of a workout for you! And it’s a great way to strengthen your piano playing. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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