Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you why all beats are not created equal. Did you know that typically in 4/4 time, the strong beats are the first and third beats? The weaker beats are the second and fourth beats. In particular, the fourth beat is not as strong.

The way you count should reflect the feel of the music.

Instead of counting rigidly, you end up counting with accents on the first beat or the first and third beats. I’m going to demonstrate this with a Haydn sonata in D major, so you can hear for yourself. First, I’m going to play it with all the beats absolutely equal to hear what it sounds like, then I will play it with accented beats.

Watch the video to see the demonstration!

When you play with all the beats equal, it doesn’t have a bounce. It doesn’t have a pulse. It just kind of plods along. By playing with accented beats, you give your music a pulse. This isn’t only for 4/4 time. How about 3/4 time? You certainly wouldn’t play a waltz with all beats equal. It would lose the feel of the music.

You have to figure out where the strong beats are.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about the magic of fractal practicing. Fractals are when one part of something is the same as the whole. No matter how small you go, it’s just a replication of the bigger part. You’ve probably seen pictures that are fractals. No matter how much you zoom in, you keep seeing the same patterns. Your music could be thought of in the same way.

Watch the video to see the demonstration!

I’m going to demonstrate with a little piece of Kabalevsky called Fairy Tale. I’m going to start at the beginning and play a little bit, delineating each phrase for you. Then I’m going to do it again, but this time I’m going to put those two phrases together as one long phrase and see what that sounds like.

You could take a whole section of music and think of it as one big phrase.

Ultimately, the entire piece is one statement. As Rachmaninoff said, “The bigger the phrase, the bigger the musician.” Now, here’s where it gets really interesting. If you’re playing a program with several different pieces, for example, you play a sonata, which has three or four movements. At first, each movement is its own concept, its own large phrase. Eventually, the whole sonata becomes a coherent whole thought—one big phrase. Then half a program can become one musical statement. And then the entire program can be one big phrase.

If you start thinking about these larger units in your music, it becomes true storytelling on a personal level.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you how you can use tempo as a practicing tool. This is incredibly valuable for you! It could save you a vast amount of time by making your practicing more efficient.

You all know that practicing slowly is incredibly valuable.

For example, I’m working on this Liszt Sonata in B minor. There’s a section in there that goes quite fast. Practicing slowly can help you get each note absolutely secure. But sometimes, you’re working on all these different passages, and you wonder where you should focus your attention. Maybe you can already play most of it pretty well, but you don’t know where the trouble spots or potential trouble spots will be in a performance. During a performance, you might be a little bit nervous. Maybe your hands are a little sweaty. Maybe you’re playing on a piano that’s unfamiliar. Maybe you’re taking a tempo slightly faster than you realize because of the excitement of the moment.

Try to play your piece faster than usual and see how much of it you can get through securely.

Take a faster tempo, and wherever you can’t play up to that tempo, that’s where you focus your attention. See how much of it you can play accurately and cleanly, and then take it from there. This helps you figure out which parts are weaker than the rest. Then, once you find the areas that need attention, flip it and go back to that slow practice. Slow practice is one of the most valuable tools you can use in your daily work at the piano. Even with something you can already play up to tempo, going very, very slowly with the score, and using the metronome, and without the pedal, is one of the best ways to secure your piano playing. Then, as a test, take things fast. Take things too fast, so you can see which parts are weaker than the rest! This way, you can maximize the effectiveness of your practicing at the piano. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you why you must front-load your practice. What am I talking about here? Sometimes you sit down to practice the piano, and you have certain issues. You get it pretty good, and you go on to the next part. And you keep working through it in this manner. Well, let’s erase that whole idea. Instead, with the first issue you have, go to extraordinary lengths to resolve it!

Spend as much time as you can correcting issues early on.

Go as far as you possibly can with your corrections. This is great when you’re starting a new piece. Maybe there’s something early on in the piece that isn’t gelling. You might think you can just skip it for now and get to it later. Well, here’s the secret for you: It’s okay for you to spend an inordinate amount of time on small issues. It may feel like you’re never going to get to everything else, but what you learn from taking something to the nth degree early on in your practice will have tremendous benefits for the rest of the piece.

All pieces of music evolve from the motifs that are introduced early on.

These motifs develop throughout the piece. So if you don’t solve those issues early on, as you go on with the piece, the problems compound themselves. That’s why you should spend a tremendous amount of time early on resolving issues that you have. You want to really solidify things to the maximum degree. By doing this, later you will be able to go through vast amounts of music without having to spend nearly as much time. That’s what I mean by frontloading your practice.

Put the time in during the early part of your music and the early part of your practice to get things really refined.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. I’ve made so many videos about scales, arpeggios, and exercises. But here’s one for you that I’ve never shared, and I think you’re going to enjoy it. The subject today is about practicing your scales in contrary motion. One of the biggest challenges when you’re playing scales is making sure your two hands are landing squarely together. When playing with both hands, it’s hard to hear the differentiation of each hand separately. Maybe one hand is louder than the other, or there could be unevenness.

When you play your scales in contrary motion, you hear everything clearly.

I learned all major and minor scales this way in conservatory. It’s a great way to practice scales! You play your scales with both hands going up. Then, once you get to the two-octave point, you come back down with your left hand while your right hand continues up. Then both hands come down two octaves at which point they go in opposite directions again. Then they come back together and when they reach the middle of the keyboard they go down again. You can watch the video to see how this is done.

Keep in mind that you should always practice your scales with a metronome.

There’s never a good reason to practice scales without a metronome. You want to measure your work and strive for evenness. When you are practicing scales, it isn’t music; it’s strictly technique. Finger work is all about the evenness—the evenness of the attacks, the evenness of the releases, and the evenness of the volume. By playing your scales in contrary motion, you can hear things more clearly. Try this with your scales! Let me know how it works for you here in the comments on LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to share with you a technique for balancing your hands on the piano. One of the great things about the piano is the fact that you have different parts with your two hands. But that also makes balancing the hands difficult. I’m going to demonstrate using Fairy Tale by Kabalevsky. Watch the video for the demonstration. You’ll hear the balance of the hands with the melody above the accompaniment, which is sometimes difficult to achieve. I’m going to show you some techniques to achieve this. I have a secret technique for you that I bet you’ve never tried before!

You can use different articulations in each hand.

You can play a gentle finger staccato in the left hand to be able to differentiate the two different lines. When you do that, you get a totally different feeling in each hand. One of the simplest techniques, by the way, is to simply lean more weight on one hand than the other. Make your right hand heavy and your left hand light. Now, that sounds really easy, but it’s not always that simple. Sometimes, when you’re playing, it’s really difficult to even hear what the balance is like. Not only that, you can practice hands separately, but when you put the hands together, it’s a whole different story. How can you control the melody while also playing the accompaniment and hear everything clearly?

Try playing with one hand on the keys and the other following along on top of the piano.

By playing one hand where you absolutely hear nothing, it gives you a chance to listen to the melody. You can also reverse the hands and do the same thing to make sure you’re getting the appropriate balance out of each hand. First, play just the melody by itself without encumbering yourself by playing on top of the piano. Then, try it with one hand on top of the piano and see if you get the same sound. You can check your work by listening to each hand independently on the piano, then adding the other hand on top of the piano so you can hear if you can get the same sound when you are coordinating both hands.

Using this technique, any little deviation becomes obvious to you.