Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about major scales. What is a major scale? I’m sure most of you probably already kind of know what it is. But for those of you who know what a major scale is, you might want to stop right now and see if you can put it into words. You might find that you’ll be stumbling a bit if you’ve never asked yourself this question. You kind of intuitively know what it is, but how do you define it succinctly?

A major scale is a series of whole-steps and half-steps.

I want to define whole-steps and half-steps for any of you who are searching for this because you don’t know anything about what a major scale is at all. A half-step is any two keys next to each other with no keys between. That’s black or white keys. It can be two white keys, or it can be a black and white key. Two keys together with one key between is a whole-step. A major scale is a series of whole steps and half
steps.

Major scales contain eight notes.

The first and eighth notes are the same. They are spelled diatonically. What does that mean? It means it has all the letters in order without skipping or repeating any. For example, an A major scale would contain some form of A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A. It has to have all the letters in order without skipping or repeating. Spelling counts, and there’s a good reason for it. When you look at the music, you see the notes on consecutive lines and spaces. All major scales will go from line to space to line to space, or from space to line to space to line. That’s essentially what a major scale is.

Where are the half-steps?

As I mentioned, there are eight notes. They are all whole-steps except between the 3rd & 4th and the 7th & 8th notes. That’s why on the piano, because you have some white keys that are a half-step apart, the C major scale contains all white keys. All other major scales contain either sharps or flats, but never both.

How can you figure out scales?

You can take any note on the piano, and remember that the notes are going to be in the order of the alphabet. So if you have a D major scale, it’s going to have some form of D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D. It must be spelled diatonically with all the letters in order. But those notes don’t form a major scale because the half-steps are not in the right place. So you use accidentals, either sharps or flats, never both. It just happens to work out that way! You can count the numbers of the notes. Remember to move by whole-steps except between the 3rd & 4th and the 7th & 8th notes. Of course you can hear when a major scale is correct, because you know what it’s supposed to sound like. So that is how you can figure out all your major scales, simply by spelling them diatonically and arranging them with all whole steps, except between the 3rd & 4th and the 7th & 8th notes. You can start on any key on the piano and you can spell a major scale.

It’s not always quite so simple.

I’m going to do a G-flat major scale. We start with G-flat. Then we move up by whole-steps to A-flat, then B-flat. Now we move up by a half-step. You may be tempted to say “B”, but I already said it can’t be B, because you have to have all the letters in order without skipping or repeating any. So the fourth note has to be called C-flat! You might think that’s crazy, but if you saw it in the music it would be much more logical to have all the letters on consecutive lines and spaces. So indeed the spelling makes it more logical visually because a scale will always go alternating between lines and spaces. This is why a C-flat makes much more sense than a B-natural in this case. Having that C-flat keeps it diatonic, makes it easier to read, and it’s more logical. If you enjoy this little tutorial, I can offer you more! If any of you wonder about key signatures, let me know in the comments below here on LivingPianos.com and YouTube.

With music theory the fundamentals must be solid for you to be able to understand more advanced concepts.

This is akin to mathematics. Imagine trying to do algebra if you were rusty on your multiplication tables. Everything builds on everything else. It’s the same with music theory. If you have the fundamentals down, you can get to really advanced harmonic analysis and structural analysis of compositions. It will be as easy as reading notes became for you early on. Everything builds on everything else with such beautiful logic. It also makes your music easier to learn, to digest and to read. 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

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrinContact 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 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. The subject today is about the importance of reading music. Do you have to be able to read music to play the piano? Many of you know that I have a deep background in classical music. I am a second generation concert pianist. My father, Morton Estrin, taught me and my sister piano from a very young age. We were taught how to read notation, music theory, and all the rest of it. So you would think my answer would be yes, you must read music to play the piano. But I’m going to surprise many of you by telling you that, no, you do not have to read music in order to play the piano!

There are many pianists who can’t read music.

There are many accomplished players of country, folk, jazz, rock, blues, new age, and other styles, who can’t read music. Maybe they just read a lead sheet, which I’ll talk about in a moment. You’ll never be able to play the blues convincingly reading note for note. First of all, the rhythms are really hard to read with syncopated music like jazz, rock, blues, country and other styles like that. Secondly, the way that kind of music is created in the first place is with an improvised form. You are coming up with your own arrangements and playing by ear.

What about classical music?

I would never have wanted to believe this, but I have encountered quite a number of people who have become quite accomplished at playing sophisticated repertoire, learning note for note, following somebody else on the keyboard. They go on the Internet and watch videos of notes coming down on the keys like a video game. Does that really work? Well, it works to an extent. To get through a piece? Sure. Naturally, that technology doesn’t offer all the nuance of the notation, exactly how long notes last, the phrasing, how they’re connected and detached, and a myriad of other things. But talented musicians who don’t want to learn how to read music sometimes have good ears. They can watch the video, figure out where the hands go, and do a reasonably good job at recreating those pieces of music.

For anybody who wants to play classical music at a really high level, notation is a must.

For anyone looking to play classical music at a concert level, you will need to be able to read scores. But for those of you just wanting to play music and not be encumbered by the complexity of reading scores, particularly those of you who are interested in other styles of music, you can embrace it! I’ll go so far as to say that this is something that’s sadly neglected in conservatory training.

There are so many concert pianists who can’t improvise the simplest tunes by ear, because they’re never expected to.

As soon as they graduate, they discover that most of the gigs out there are not playing Beethoven sonatas and Chopin etudes. It’s really hard to find venues that are going to pay you to play that kind of music. So even if you are a classically trained musician, you owe it to yourself to explore improvised types of music. It’s good to be able to play music without necessarily reading it. A lead sheet is what most musicians utilize and most gigs expect you to be able to read. A lead sheet is just the melody line and the chord symbols. You come up with the arrangement. That’s the way so much music is created in this world! I’ll talk more about that in the future. Express your interest so I know how much of these videos you want to see! 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. What is a chord? That’s the question for today. Is a chord just any notes played together at the same time? Well, yes and no. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s have a little primer.

Chords are typically built in intervals of 3rds.

Simply put, chords are built upon every other note of a scale. For example, a C major scale has all the white keys from C to C! If you play every other note of the scale, playing C, skip D, play E, skip F and play G, you have a C major chord, C – E – G! (It consists of a root, a 3rd, and a 5th.) You can keep going adding B, D, F and A. to form a 13 chord (adding the 7th, 9th, 11th, and 13th). Once you get to A, if you went up one more 3rd, you get back to C, your original note. So, that’s the total number of notes you can have in a chord. Now, here’s the interesting thing. There are 7 different notes in that chord C – E – G – B – D – F and A. And how many different white keys are there? Also 7. When you play a 13 chord, you’re playing all the notes of a scale! But if you just play all the white keys at the same time, it doesn’t sound like a chord? It sounds more like a cluster of notes. You may wonder why this is. Well, this has to do with voicing.

Voicing is everything in chords.

Voicing is how the notes are arranged. It was Rameau in the 1700s who theorized that by putting the bottom note of a chord on top, it’s just an inversion of the same chord. So even though it has a 4th in that arrangement, it’s still a chord. It’s just an inversion of a chord. Now, when you get to 7th chords, it gets more complicated. When you get to 9th, 11th, and 13th chords, you’re generally not going to play all the notes.

How would you voice a 13 chord?

If you voiced it with 4 notes, you would have to have the root and the 13, because otherwise it’s not a 13 chord. The important notes are the 7th and the 3rd. For nice voicing, you want to have the notes closer together on top and more distance between the bass note and the rest of them. So you can take the 3rd and put it up an octave. Now you have a nice voicing of a 13 chord. C – B – E – A. (If it was a more typical dominant 13 chord, the B would be B-flat.)

There are some exceptions to the idea of 3rds being used in chords.

First of all, 3rds can be augmented or diminished. (They can be raised or lowered.) So, for example, in a dominant chord, you could have a lowered 5th. That’s still a chord, even though you have a diminished 3rd instead of a minor 3rd. You could have other types of chords built on different intervals, like quartal chords. Quartal chords are built on fourths! So there are other possibilities. But generally, chords are built on intervals of 3rds, and voicing is what makes them work. Otherwise you would have tonal chaos! We should be thankful that composers craft such beautiful music, utilizing chords primarily arranged in 3rds so creatively. I hope this is interesting 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. 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 I’m going to talk about the differences between baby grands and grand pianos. You might just think one’s bigger than the other. That is an intelligent observation. But really, there are 3 fundamental differences between baby grand and grand pianos. I’m going to break it down for you today.

The 3 basic differences are: String Length, Soundboard Area, and Action Geometry.

Let’s talk about each one of these aspects and the significance of them. Then you can determine what might be the right piano for you. Baby grands are typically around five feet long. That’s measured from the edge of the key slip to the farthest part of the lid. Whereas grand pianos are more like six feet in length. These are only approximate measurements. Some baby grand pianos may be 5′ 1″ or 5′ 4″. Grand pianos can be 6’3″, 6’4″, even 6’6″. When you get to 7-feet, that’s considered a semi-concert grand, which is another class of piano.

What’s the difference between a baby grand and a grand piano in regards to string length?

The physics of sound is such that a doubling of frequencies creates an octave. When something vibrates twice as fast, it creates an octave higher in pitch. Therefore, something twice as big will produce sound an octave lower. If you think about how short the top strings of a piano are, if you went doubling each octave, you would have a piano that stretches out way farther than your room! So how do they compensate for that? Even on a 9-foot concert grand piano, the strings aren’t nearly long enough in the bass to be twice as long for every octave in the treble. It’s compensated for by making the strings fatter in the bass. You notice the copper wound strings in the bass get thicker and thicker. Even the steel wound strings have different gauges from the top going down, getting progressively thicker. This way the piano doesn’t have to be ridiculously long in order to have the range of pitch that it has. The sound created by thicker strings that aren’t as long, have many strong overtones. Overtones, or color tones, exist in all vibrating objects that create pitched sounds, whether it’s a piano, or a bell, or anything that produces a pitched sound. If you blow through a seashell and create a pitch, it has overtones in it! That’s what gives the vibrancy of tone, and the differences in sound from one instrument to another.

The shorter a piano is, the stronger the overtones are and the less fundamental frequency you have.

When you’re playing a low note, particularly on a small piano, you’re actually getting more overtones than fundamental pitch. I remember as a kid I used to love to play with tape recorders. One time I recorded the lowest note of the piano. Then I played it back three or four times as fast. It sounded almost like a chord! The overtones are so strong. This makes it very difficult to tune smaller pianos, because the overtones can conflict with fundamental frequencies of higher notes. The purity of the sound is one benefit to having longer strings. And the longer a piano is, the truer the fundamental tones are, and the overtones are less prominent. So that’s one aspect of the sound of a larger piano. That’s a benefit because of string length.

The larger the soundboard, the richer the sound.

Sound systems that have bigger speakers tend to have more bass and a richer sound. It’s very difficult to get good bass out of small speakers. There are some technologies that can come close with baffles and tubing and subwoofers. But with just one diaphragm, like a piano soundboard, a bigger one is going to have a richer sound overall. Also, the placement of the bridges on the soundboard can be more centralized when you don’t have to cram everything into such a tight space as in a baby grand. The scaling of the piano design on a larger piano can be such that you can get better vibration of the whole soundboard from any of the registers. You get a more even sound from top to bottom on a larger grand piano than on a baby grand. So those are two sonic benefits of grand pianos.

What about the action?

Earlier, I mentioned action geometry. On a small piano, in order to fit everything into a small space, and to have the strike point in the right place, that is the point of the string where the hammer hits, the keys must be shorter. Not the part of the keys you see, but the part that is behind the fallboard. So when you’re playing on a baby grand, your fingers are very close to the central pivot point. Therefore, the key travel is far shallower, particularly when playing black keys, as well as white keys close to the fallboard. Whereas on a grand piano, these parts of the keys move much more, giving you better control with your hands on the keys when you’re not playing on the edge of the keys. This makes it easier to control with soft playing in particular.

So those are some of the benefits of grand pianos compared to baby grands.

These benefits multiply as you get to semi-concert and concert grand pianos. A 9-foot concert grand is the ultimate piano in terms of scale design, with the way the strings get larger and longer from the treble to the bass, as well as the placement of the bridges on a larger soundboard, and the action geometry giving you such an even feel, even when playing close to the fallboard. It is the ultimate playing and sonic experience! However, another aspect of piano size is that generally, larger pianos produce more volume. So this is another consideration for you. I hope this has been 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