Piano and Music Videos

Not only that, but you must project out into the room. Remember, you’re not just playing the piano, you’re playing the room you’re in! You must reach every listener in that room. So project your sound. Don’t be afraid to use some energy! As long as it’s a smooth energy, transferring from key to key with the weight of the arm, it will never have a harshness, and it won’t sound forte or even mezzo forte. It will have a tonal quality of piano. That’s the lesson for today! Thanks again 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’m going to show you how to get a singing sound on the piano. Piano is actually a percussion instrument, yet there are such beautiful melodies that evoke the quality of the human voice, as well as other instruments. In fact, the piano is almost like a whole orchestra, with accompaniment, melody, and many other elements all right under your fingertips!

How can you evoke the quality of the human voice in your melodies?

When playing melodies on the piano, you want to mimic the human voice, or at least a wind instrument, or a string instrument with the continuity of the breath or the bow. On the piano, the notes, as I have stated so many times before, are fading away. We’re battling it all the time as pianists! But you want to get a beautiful, singing sound. So, I’m going to show you one technique today that is incredibly important. I’ve shown you in the past how to use the weight of the arm, transferring the weight smoothly from finger to finger in order to achieve smoothness. The weight of the arm is the analog to the breath, which gives your melodies continuity. Instead of calculating from note to note, you just let the weight of the arm transfer smoothly from note to note. What I want to show today is a technique related to that, which you can use in conjunction with the weight of the arm. But instead of just a rise and fall of each phrase, I’m going to provide a tip for you that works so incredibly well that you will not even believe it!

As notes get higher, you play them louder, and as they get lower, you play them more softly.

When you are singing, naturally, you’re going to get louder as you reach higher notes, and softer as you sing lower notes. It’s very difficult not to achieve this when you’re singing or playing a wind instrument. It comes out that way naturally. So if you want to evoke that sound on the piano, you have to play louder on the high notes and softer on the low notes.

Watch the video to see this technique demonstrated!

To demonstrate this, I will play the complete Burgmüller Pastorale. It’s a rather simple piece, so you can get the concept of this. Listen to how I ignore every aspect other than getting louder when going higher, and softer when playing lower, with very few exceptions. Listen to how splendidly it works to bring out a singing tone! If it works on this simple Burgmüller etude, imagine how splendidly it’ll work on other music. Try it on your Chopin nocturnes and your slow movements of Beethoven sonatas. Let me know what you think about this technique. See how it works for you! I’m really interested, so let me know in the comments 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 become comfortable playing the piano for people. It’s imperative that you practice performing, but how can you do such a thing? You probably know if you’ve ever tried to play for someone, that things can go haywire. Why does that happen? You practice a piece, you can play it over and over again perfectly, but when you try to play it for someone, a friend or maybe for your teacher, everything goes wrong! What can you do to keep this from happening?

Preparation is key.

You can’t expect to play something in front of people that you can’t even play consistently on your own. So prepare like crazy! Practicing slowly is a great way to reinforce your memory and secure your performance. You are analyzing everything that’s happening when you play slowly, which is a little bit akin to what happens when you’re performing. Suddenly you’re hyper focused and you notice every little thing that maybe you didn’t really notice before. Have you ever felt that? When you play slowly, it’s more deliberate. That is a terrific way to solidify your playing so you feel more in control when you’re performing.

You can practice performing by recording yourself.

Set up your phone, computer, or any other recording device, audio or video, and record yourself playing. Get yourself psyched up like it’s a performance. The most important thing is that once you start, for better or worse, go through to the end. Make it feel like a real performance! You can always do it again later if you’re not happy with the way it came out. But don’t stop halfway through and start again, because that is not an option when you’re playing for people. Nobody wants to hear you start over. It’s kind of like someone telling a story and in the middle they stumble over a few words and start over from the beginning. You’re going to be really bored with them. So it’s really important to learn how to keep going. It’s one of the most important aspects of performing.

Play for friends and family.

Once you’ve gotten comfortable playing for a machine that records you, it’s time to play for people! Hopefully you have a good friend who likes music enough that they’ll sit and listen to you play something. And once again, even though they’re good friends, and they’ll forgive you if you stop and start again, don’t do that! Take advantage of the fact that you have this performance opportunity and play through for them. Plus they’ll enjoy it more if you don’t stop. Even if you’re not happy with the performance, they will enjoy it more if there’s continuity. Be in the service of your listener – the performance isn’t about you. It’s about your audience when you’re performing. When you practice, you can stop any time and make those repairs that are necessary. When you’re playing for people, it’s all about them. Make the experience enriching for them, which means don’t start over. They don’t want to hear that.

Challenge yourself by playing for more people.

Perhaps when you have company over say, “Would anybody like to hear some music?” Be bold! Give yourself an opportunity to play for more than just one person. In other words, you want to build up. So at first, you start just with the lowest pressure possible, just playing by yourself. Then you record yourself. Then play for a single person who doesn’t make you feel nervous. Then play for larger numbers of people. Then finally, if you’re ever in a place with a piano, particularly if it’s a better piano than what you regularly play on, that is a great opportunity to play through your music and learn how to adjust to another instrument. This is a tremendous challenge. You may discover things about the piece that you never even thought of before, just from hearing it on a different piano. Plus, with all the eyes on you, you’re hyper focused, and that attention you’re giving can really aid in discovering new things in the music. Of course, the downside of that is you might become distracted and things could fall apart. But that can help you to strengthen your performance, because you’ll know what to practice.

Building up from smaller to larger audiences is a great way to strengthen your performance.

Do it as many times as it takes to become comfortable. You’ll find that when you have a new piece, you may need to repeat this process. If you’ve never performed a piece, you want to break it in. My father, who performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center and in Europe, would always have tryout recitals before he played in public. He would invite people over and play through his program. He tried to do this a number of times before the actual event. He would often record himself, and that way he’d know what state the performance was in. It would help him to focus his practice where it was needed.

This is a great idea for anybody on any level!

So remember, practice performing and you will be richly rewarded. It will take your piano playing to the next level. If you never perform your music for anyone, you’ll never have the opportunity to really understand what it’s all about. So go for it – you have nothing to lose! People will appreciate the opportunity to hear you play. You can’t imagine how much people really do appreciate live music. So give it a try! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about the relationship between keyboards and the singularity. This should get a lively discussion going, and the central figure in our discussion is a man by the name of Ray Kurzweil. How many of you have heard of Kurzweil keyboards?

This is a subject very close to me.

In the 1980s, I had in my recording studio, a cutting edge digital audio workstation, the Kurzweil K 250. This was a keyboard with 88 wooden keys that could sound like a grand piano or a whole orchestra. It was one of a breed of digital audio workstations. Some of them were ultra expensive, like Fairlight, which was well into five figures, or New England Digital’s Synclavier Synthesizer System, which cost over $100,000! What made these so expensive? Well, before MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) if you wanted to have a computer hooked to music, you had to have a whole integrated system. So, digital sampling, multitrack recording, and music printing, all of these fantastic features came at a very steep price. Kurzweil was one of the leaders in this technology. How did this ever come to be?

Ray Kurzweil was a great inventor and still is on the cutting edge.

In 1975, he came up with a reader for the blind. It was a text recognition program that could take written text and read it aloud to people with visual impairment. One of the people who appreciated this was a man by the name of Stevie Wonder! He said to Ray, “You should come up with a keyboard that can sound like any instrument, including the piano.” And wouldn’t you know it, Ray did it! That’s when the Kurzweil keyboard was invented. Ray is a director of engineering at Google. Ray has been known as a futurist. If anyone else made the kind of predictions that he has made, I would scoff at them.

What is the singularity?

There are different definitions of the singularity. One of them is where machines become more intelligent than humans. Once that happens, all bets are off. No one really knows what will happen. Some people think it may create a utopia, while other people think it may be a dystopia. There’s no way to really know what will happen, but there are a lot of fears about it. Now, a lot of people are talking about this because of artificial intelligence. Right now we have things like ChatGPT, which can pass the bar exam, write papers, analyze spreadsheets, and can even write computer code. There are other programs like Stable Diffusion and Dall-E that can output works of art and even photorealistic pictures from text prompts. It’s pretty remarkable what’s happening. Believe it or not, there’s even A.I. that can compose music!

All of this is in its infancy and it’s very exciting, but the type of A.I. I’m talking about is artificial general intelligence (AGI).

With artificial general intelligence, instead of just being able to complete a specific task, it’s really more like what humans are able to do. What does this have to do with Ray Kurzweil? Well, he has been predicting thE singularity will occur sooner rather than later. His vision of singularity goes even one step beyond, where man and machine merge. It seems like a scary concept. There are hints of this out there with things like Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company. This technology could have great ramifications for people who have lost limbs, being able to use their thoughts to control prosthetic devices. Already there has been some progress made in this direction. But imagine your mind being hooked to the Internet. Instead of picking up your phone to have all this information, the electrical impulses from your brain are directly connected to everything. This is a frightening concept and an exciting one all at the same time.

Ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity will occur by 2030.

He believes this singularity will occur such that there will be nanobots going through your body repairing cells. So for every year that you age there will be a year of repair, eventually reaching a state of immortality where you’re aging at the same rate at which your body is being repaired by these nanobots. This sounds like science fiction, and we all hope that Ray is right! He’s been correct so many times before, but this is a wild assertion, naturally. I just thought I’d get this discussion going about AI in general, how it’s impacting music, and whether you feel that it will replace musicians. It is perhaps more likely that A.I. will provide tools that musicians can use as bouncing off points for inspiration, much like ChatGPT is doing for writers.

Do you think Ray Kurzweil is a nut, or do you think there’s some validity to what he’s saying?

Let me know how you feel about Ray Kurzweil’s prediction about the singularity in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. And in general, how do you feel about A.I. and music and the whole direction things are going in the creative fields? Who would have thought that artificial intelligence would be taking over in creative fields before anything else? It’s pretty wild stuff, isn’t it? 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 show you four ways to develop speed in your piano playing. You hear people who play dazzlingly fast, but maybe you’re just struggling to get a piece up to speed. Is there anything that you can do to develop more speed? Absolutely! There are a number of things you can do. Of course, working generally on different repertoire, scales, and arpeggios is helpful. These are essential building blocks of technique on the piano. But what I’m going to show you today are specific things you can incorporate in your practice to help develop speed.

I’m going to use Ballade of Burgmüller as an example. The part I’m going to focus on is the end, where you have a fast pattern of notes in both hands. What better place than this to demonstrate the myriad ways you can practice? Today I’m just going to cover four specific ways of developing speed, to not overwhelm you.

1. METRONOME SPEEDS

One of the most fundamental ways of working with the metronome is to do progressively faster metronome speeds. You find the speed at which you can play the passage absolutely faithfully, and then work up the speed one notch at a time. Why one notch? Because you won’t even notice the difference in speed! You find the speed at which you can play it perfectly, comfortably and securely, repeatedly. Then you put it up a notch and do it again. I would never suggest trying to get a whole piece up to speed by going one notch at a time, but when you have just a few measures like this, it’s an ideal opportunity to do metronome speeds.

The key is to make sure you don’t raise the metronome at all until you have absolute security.

That’s the important thing. Now, you may think it’s going to take you forever, because it takes you so long to really get it solid. But spend the time at the front end to get it absolutely secure! You may have to go hands separately at first and pick a much slower speed than you think is necessary. But don’t even think about raising the metronome speed until you can play it ten times in a row, not only where it’s perfect, but where it feels comfortable. You want to play every note with absolute security and definition. Once you get that, then raise it up a notch. Then once again, keep playing it until it not only sounds perfect, but it feels comfortable.

As you get faster, remember to lighten up and stay close to the keys with rounded fingers.

When you play with flat fingers, you don’t get the benefit of all the joints of your fingers like you do when you’re playing with rounded fingers. Your fingers will naturally go into this position if you just allow them to. And that position gives you much more ease because you have the benefit of all the joints of the fingers. Plus, the thumb is in alignment with the rest of the fingers.

2. NOTE GROUPS

Practice small groups of notes, repeatedly. You can work on a few select notes at a time, even just two note groups! And the secret is to play up to speed. Take different groups of notes and find the ones that allow you to land on notes that are insecure. Ultimately this is training your fingers where the hands play together. Listen strategically to where the hands are playing together and when they aren’t. You can get a lot done just by finding the right notes to land on. When you land on notes, avoid tension. You want to land on them with total relaxation. Practice relaxation in your playing, even if you have to play just two notes! Find groups of notes that help you land securely with hands precisely together, and you can accomplish a tremendous amount.

3. ACCENTED NOTES

Playing with accented notes can be really valuable. You can accent different notes within a phrase. This can be done in innumerable ways. You can do different numbers of notes or any type of accents that help you feel relaxed. You don’t want to be pushing with the arms, just use your fingers. By doing this, you train yourself where the fingers play together and where the hands play together. You’ll discover tremendous things. You might come upon certains accents and realize you don’t know where your hands play together! Those are the places to focus on.

4. RHYTHMS

Rhythms are another great tool. Depending upon the passage, there are many different rhythms that can aid in developing speed. You want to find whatever rhythms solve your issue. Try playing passages of even eighth notes as dotted rhythms, dotted eighths followed by sixteenth notes. Then you can reverse the rhythm playing sixteenths followed by dotted eighth notes. You want to discover where the hands need to be together. If you don’t know where the hands play together, you might be able to play your right hand fast or your left hand fast, but you really don’t know where they land together. So this is what trains your hands to play precisely together.

These are four techniques that can help you develop speed in your playing!

Remember, working on scales and arpeggios is incredibly valuable. That gives you an opportunity to just focus on your fingerwork. You can work on pure technique, devoid of music. It’s a great thing to have all your major and minor scales and arpeggios under your fingers. That will be incredibly valuable for you. Remember, the faster you play, the lighter and closer to the keys you must be in order to facilitate speed, because it takes a lot of work to raise fingers when practicing slowly. Raising the fingers can be valuable, so you can feel which fingers are down and which fingers are up initially. As you get faster, lighten up and stay closer to the keys with rounded fingers. Remember these four methods of developing speed: metronome speeds, note groups, accents, and rhythms. Let me know how this works for you! For those of you who have other techniques, share them 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. The topic today is about how to bring out voices in your music. The great thing about the piano is that it’s almost like a whole orchestra! You have so many different voices. Because of this, you want to call attention to different melodies intertwining within your music. I’ve talked about many ways of doing that in the past, which I’m going to refresh you on right now. Then I’m going to show you an intrinsic skill that transcends everything I’m about to tell you.

One great practice technique is to work on music with different articulations.

Try playing the melodies legato while playing accompaniments and parts you want softer with a gentle finger staccato. This way you can clearly hear the melody. You don’t want all the notes to sound equal. You want balance so that you hear the melody and the bass while keeping the inner voices delicate, yet everything may be in a piano context. The way to practice this is by playing the melody legato and those gentle, undulating notes in the middle with a gentle finger staccato. By doing this you train your hand which notes are melody, and which notes are accompaniment. It’s very difficult to quantify loud and soft, but short and long are very binary. You can hear the short notes on the bottom and the long notes on top. If you can do that, then you can play and control the balance of all the notes.

How do you draw the listeners attention to the voice that you want them to hear?

I’m going to show you a hack for drawing the listener’s attention to the voice you want them to hear. The secret is delineating the very first note of the melody you want the listener to be attached to. Once they hear the first note, they can follow it through. You want to make it very clear on the first note of a new line. After that, even if it’s not brought out that much, the listener is already aware that they should be listening for it. As soon as that first melody comes in. the listener is listening for it and they’ll follow it through. And you don’t even have to punctuate the melody that much anymore, because they’re already attuned to it. It’s in their consciousness.

Sometimes a melody or a counter melody can be contained within the texture.

Maybe the counter melody is at the top or the bottom, as is the case in the middle section of the Chopin Ballade No.3 in A-flat Major. In this section, there is a counter melody in the tenor voice, on the top of the left hand. You can accentuate the very beginning of it, and then just let it float. You don’t need to punctuate it that much after that, because it’s not necessary. The audience will already be listening for it. Once they hear the first note, they’re listening for where it’s going to go next. So it can be a more gentle inner voice, just punctuating that first note so the listener is aware that something new is there to listen to. Just play the beginning of that with some substance to the sound, and then let it be more in the background so that you don’t lose the melody on top, which is the main melody.

So that is the tip for today!

Aside from practicing with different articulations so you have control over all the notes in a texture, remember when you want to bring out a line, bring out the first note and the listener will latch on to it. This is particularly helpful when playing counterpoint like Bach fugues, for example. Whenever the fugue subject starts, articulate that first note. Then the listener doesn’t have to work hard to find the melodies of the subjects of fugues. It’s handed to them on a silver platter! They can easily follow it through even if you don’t punctuate it that much. It doesn’t have to sound labored. It can sound fluid and beautiful, and yet the listener has the experience of understanding the structure of the music, which greatly enhances the appreciation of the score. 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