So, what is the 80/20 rule? You may have heard this before. The 80/20 rule is, for example, in the piano, how spending 80% of your time on 20% of the score will benefit your practice. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the 80/20 rule doesn’t apply to the piano exactly. Because I would say it’s more like 90/10!
Really, you’ll learn a piece of music and then spend 90% of your time on 10% of the piece.
There’s just a very small amount that really requires almost all of your time and effort. Of course there is great temptation to always go back to the beginning and play the parts you know, because it’s fun and you want to work on those parts to make them better and better. There’s no end to how well you can play something.
But really laser focusing on the small sections, sometimes spending 98% of your practice time on 2% of the music is necessary. Other days you can have a more fluid type of practice where you’re covering more substantial parts of your piece. Particularly when you’re getting ready for performance, you want to be able to get the sense of playing complete pieces, playing half a program, then playing the whole program is how to prepare for a concert. But certainly in the formative parts of learning music, you want to focus your attention on the parts that need refinement to be productive. I see so many people who spend hours and hours at the piano and don’t seem to accomplish what they are after and this is one way to increase your productivity tremendously. So, in your practice, don’t just keep going through the things you can already play well, even though you can always refine further.
Put your attention where it’s needed early on.
You may feel like you’ll never get through the piece if you spend so much time on a small section. Maybe it’s a four or eight measure phrase, and you’re thinking, my gosh, if I spend an hour or an hour and a half on this, I’m never going to get through the piece! Here’s the epiphany you will have. Spend that time on the front end on some of those hard sections and you will be rewarded because you’ll find that almost all pieces of music have repeats of different themes and technical challenges. And by delving into those sections head-on, you’re going to be able to accomplish so much more as you go further with the learning of the piece.
So yes, the 80/20 rule applies and maybe even it’s even more extreme than that. I’d love to hear from all of you how you feel this applies to your practice and keep the questions coming in. I’m so pleased to have so many subscribers! If you haven’t subscribed yet, you’re welcome to! There’s even more content on my Patreon page. Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPIanos.com , Your Online Piano Resource. Thanks again for joining me.
Hi, I’m Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com. Thanks so much for joining me. The question today is how the 80/20 rule applies to the piano. How it applies may surprise you! So, what is the 80/20 rule? You may have heard this before. The 80/20 ru
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!
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
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!
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 t
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we have a piano quiz! You can take this quiz below. It should be a lot of fun! It’s not very long or very difficult. There are just five questions. I’m going to ask all five questions, then go back and give you the answers. You can see how well you’ve done on this. Also, you can email me and let me know any thoughts you have about these questions.
The first three questions are true or false.
1. If you buy a new Steinway piano, it will go up in value. True or false?
2. Concert pianists practice scales and exercises for many hours every day. True or false?
3. If you see the Yamaha name on a piano, you can be assured that it is a good quality mid-range instrument. True or false?
The next two questions are multiple choice.
4. Why are there repeat signs in music? A.) They provide performers with flexibility of timing for programming.
B.) It saves paper!
C.) They help composers increase their output without having to do extra work.
5. Ideally, how often should your piano be tuned? A.) Twice a year is perfect because of seasonal changes.
B.) Having your piano tuned once a month keeps it in tune best.
C.) Your piano should be tuned constantly, every time you play it.
Here are the Answers!
Now we’re going to go back and see how well you did on these questions. Here is the first question, once again:
1. If you buy a new Steinway piano, it will go up in value. True or false? This is a really tough question. If I just had a choice of true or false, I would say true. Now, you might wonder, how can this be? Let’s think about this. My grandfather bought my father a brand new Steinway baby grand in 1939. He paid $900 for it. That same model Steinway now sells for around $80,000. So yes, if you keep it long enough, it’s going to go up in value. But one thing to consider is inflation. Of course, condition is of paramount importance. I rebuilt that particular Steinway of my father’s, so it’s worth quite a bit. But if a Steinway is completely thrashed over the years, if it’s been subjected to the elements, it can have very little value. So, it’s really kind of true or false, depending on the conditions.
Here’s how it can be false.If you buy a brand new Steinway piano, and then just a few years later you want to sell it, you’re going to take a loss because it takes a long time for the yearly increases in the list prices and the sale prices of Steinway pianos to overcome the new versus used value. Like when driving a car off the dealer parking lot, you know that it’s going to lose a tremendous amount of value immediately. The same is true with pianos. But if you keep the piano long enough, the new ones keep going up, so you could be in pretty good shape, provided you take good care of it.
2. Concert pianists practice scales and exercises for many hours every day. True or false? A lot of you are going to be really surprised about this one. The answer is false. You might think concert pianists practice scales, arpeggios and exercises relentlessly. At some point in every concert pianist’s life, they have spent countless hours working on scales, arpeggios, octave exercises, thirds, trills and other technical studies. This goes on for years. But with touring concert pianists, they are so busy learning repertoire. They get such precious little time to practice. So when they’re practicing, they’re going through their programs, their concertos, their chamber music. Sure, they’re going to spend some time with scales, arpeggios and exercises, but the vast amount of the time they spend is rehearsing and practicing for upcoming performances. They don’t have vast amounts of time to practice exercises and scales every day.
3. If you see the Yamaha name on a piano, you can be assured that it is a good quality mid-range instrument. True or false? This is false. Yamaha is a very large music company. In fact, they’re the largest music company in the world! They have pianos on every conceivable level. Most Yamaha pianos you find out there are good mid-range pianos like the U series uprights and CX series grands. They’re good quality pianos for the money with a sweet spot of price and performance, so they’re very popular. But there are also Indonesian-made Yamahas that are entry-level, promotional-level, bare bones instruments. They are well made, of course, but they are far from what I would call fine instruments. On the other end of the spectrum, there are SX and CF series of Yamaha pianos that can be more expensive than Steinways. These instruments are meticulously crafted to the highest possible standards. So, the name Yamaha doesn’t tell you much about the level of piano you’re looking at.
4. Why are there repeat signs in music? Believe it or not, the answer is B.) It saves paper! Now, you might wonder if that’s serious. It is. Here’s the thing about repeat signs. Sometimes you’ll have one edition of a piece with repeats and you’ll have another edition of the same piece with the repeated music printed out in the score. If you saw the repeat notated, you wouldn’t think of leaving it out. But with repeat signs, somehow people get the feeling they are optional. Repeats are an intrinsic part of the composition and composers do it not only to save paper. Think about composers back when they had to write with duck quills. That was no easy task. Anything to save time was a godsend for them. I’m a firm believer in taking repeats. If you find a piece of music where the repeats don’t make sense and it seems too long, consider that maybe your tempo is too slow. The repeats are put in there for good reasons and they make the structure of the piece gel.
5. Ideally, how often should your piano be tuned? I consider twice a year to be the minimum. My father always had his pianos tuned once a month, and yet, by the end of the month they were out of tune. Believe it or not, the answer is C.) Your piano should be tuned constantly every time you play it!
Think about going to a concert featuring a guitar player. Between each song they tune the guitar because it’s going out of tune little by little. Well, so is your piano! It’s just not practical to tune it constantly. At my father’s recording sessions, as well as many other pianists’ recording sessions, the tuner is there. When they hear any notes going out of tune, which can happen at any time, there will be a break in the session, and the tuner will touch-up the few unisons that are out of tune. In a perfect world your piano would be tuned every day! That might be a surprise to some of you, But in recital halls at music conservatories, it’s not unusual for pianos to be tuned daily.
How well did you do? Do any of you have different ideas about these subjects? I know a lot of these questions are subjective in how you answer them. I hope this has been enjoyable 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!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we have a piano quiz! You can take this quiz below. It should be a lot of fun! It’s not very long or very difficult. There are just five questions. I’m going to ask all five ques
Throughout the centuries, there have been period styles with varying degrees of obvious emotions. For example, listen to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet or Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. While there may be some people who are put off by the sentimentality of this music, it’s hard to not at least appreciate the rises and falls of phrasing in an attempt to elicit strong feelings of longing, desperation and passion in this music.
But is the emotion in the music?
They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In fact, art itself is subjective. Everyone has their own interpretation of what they see and hear. So, how universal emotions are felt in music is one question. But there’s more to this subject.
While there are certainly works of Johann Sebastian Bach which are extremely emotional in nature, such as his B minor Mass, or his Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, there are also works that are masterpieces of counterpoint which primarily hold great intellectual interest. Flash forward to the 20th century with composers who explored 12 tone serialized music which exhibited extreme ordered complexity in works of composers like Anton Webern and Karlheinz Stockhausen and the intellectual demands of listening to this music are predominant. Does this mean that people don’t feel emotion when listening to this music? Not at all! In fact, much atonal music can have a dark mood.
Another aspect to all of this is, how do we as performers address the implied emotions of the musical scores we play? Some people may play even the most blatantly emotional music with reserve so that listeners can take their own cues from the scores. Listen to Sergei Rachmaninoff play his 3rd piano concerto and you will be amazed at how straight he plays his music unlike so many obviously emotional interpretations out there. Performers succumb to emotions to one extent or another.
When I was at the Manhattan School of Music, I had the opportunity to study with a great pianist and teacher, Constance Keene. She described emotions in music like this:
You must play with the memory of the emotion.
She felt that it was self-indulgent to be gushing with emotion while performing music. There are other performers who completely let themselves go with total abandon. Keith Jarrett comes to mind. So, is one type of performance better than the other?
When listening to some of the greatest musicians of all time, there are those who are reserved in their playing allowing the music to speak for itself crafting jewel-like performances of pieces like the great pianist, Josef Lhévinne. Others allow the music to take them to new places every time they perform.
Listen to various recordings of Vladimir Horowitz in concert playing the same piece and you will be amazed at how unique each one of his performances were.
Each performer must find their own balance of emotion versus intellect. I sometimes describe it as the part of you looking down on yourself as you perform making sure you don’t go too far. While performers who let themselves go in performance may hit high points unimagined in practice, it can also lead to disaster!
You can listen to a musical example which demonstrates emotion in music. In the accompanying video, there is original music with unabashed emotions for you.
So, while emotion in music is subjective since music is a language and everyone has their own interpretation of what they see and hear, some composers and performers prioritize control and structure while others allow their emotions to inflict itself one way or another in music. How you feel when you listen to music is a personal thing. Ultimately, the most important thing is to be true to yourself when composing or performing music.
I hope this has been an interesting exploration for you. I welcome more questions and am happy to hear from each of you personally. Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com. Thanks for joining me.
Hi, this is Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource. Today’s topic is emotion in music. Does Music Have to Have Emotion? There’s a lot to this subject, so let’s dive in! Throughout the centuries, there have been perio
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!
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’
