Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question is, “Can a dotted note get the beat?” This is a much more complicated question than you might imagine. The simple answer is no, but with a qualified, yes. Let me explain a bit. First, a primer on time signatures. The top number in a time signature represents how many beats there are in each measure. Each measure of music has a certain number of beats. So if you have a 4 on top, naturally you have 4 beats in each measure. The bottom number represents the kind of note that gets one beat. So if you have a 4 on the bottom, the 4 stands for the quarter note and the quarter note gets one beat. That’s simple enough.

HOW MANY BEATS IN EACH MEASURE

KIND OF NOTE GETTING ONE BEAT

4 – There are 4 beats in each measure

4 – A quarter note gets one beat

Why do you have to have different notes getting one beat? Why would that ever change?

What I’m about to reveal to you will make sense as to why composers choose to have a different note value getting the beat. Why not keep that standard? Well, I’m going to use an example of the second movement of the Clementi D Major Sonatina Opus 36, Number 6. This movement is in 6/8 time. Once again, the top number tells you there are 6 beats in a measure and the bottom number tells you an eighth note gets one beat. So yes, there are 6 beats in each measure. But when you’re playing fast, if you’re tapping along, you’re probably not tapping every single one of those eighth notes. In fact, you end up tapping twice each measure! Those are dotted quarter notes. This is sometimes referred to as a duple division of the measure because you have two groups of 3, two dotted quarter notes, each of which essentially gets the beat. The time signature isn’t written that way though. There’s no way to indicate this in the time signature. So why would a composer choose to write 6/8 since 6 eighth notes is the same as 3 quarter notes. So why wouldn’t it be written in 3/4? Why do composers ever put an 8 or 16 on the bottom? It’s because the subdivisions cause the measure to be divided differently. So you can actually count this piece of 6/8 in two, counting each dotted quarter note as one beat.

In a faster piece, counting in two makes more sense.

Imagine a really fast piece in 6/8. Instead of counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 quickly, you count 1, 2 on the first and fourth beat of each measure. That’s basically having dotted quarter notes getting the beat! The time signature doesn’t indicate that precisely, but once you see your music it becomes really obvious. For example, you’ll see notes being grouped in 3’s, 3 eighth notes and 3 eighth notes in a measure, and oftentimes dotted quarter notes. This is how a dotted note will get the beat. The time signature doesn’t tell you that explicitly, but if a piece is rather fast it just makes sense to count it that way.

With a slow piece in 6/8 it may be different. For example, in the second movement of the Opus 10 Number 3 Beethoven Sonata. You probably wouldn’t count that in two because it’s too slow. So there are times in 6/8 where indeed there are 6 beats in the measure. But when 6/8, 3/8, 9/8, or 12/8 is fast, it’s almost always counted with the dotted quarter note getting one beat and each of those beats being divided into 3 because a dotted quarter note contains 3 eighth notes. So, composers who want a triplet feel and don’t want a whole piece written with triplets all over the place, will instead write the piece with the eighth note getting one beat. The dotted quarter notes essentially become the de facto beat with 3 divisions of each beat being the eighth notes. So that 3/8 time could be in one, 6/8 time could be in two, 9/8 time could be in three, and 12/8 time could be in four. Once again, each one of those beats has groups of 3, which is markedly different from 4/4 time compared to 12/8 time. In 4/4 time, generally, each beat is divided in half or quarters. You have two eighth notes in each beat or four sixteenth notes to each beat.

Composers sometimes will write a piece with triplets throughout the whole thing like in the famous Heller Etudes in A minor. That piece could very well have been written in 6/8 time, but for whatever reason, Heller decided to write it in four and have triplets throughout the whole piece. That is an option. But most often when you have triple divisions of each beat, rather than write with a quarter note getting one beat, composers will write with the eighth note getting one beat. Then the dotted quarter note becomes the de facto beat with 3 eight notes in each dotted quarter note. I hope this has been helpful for you! 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 the difference between performing and practicing. These are two entirely different experiences and all too often students will confuse which one they’re doing! You want to know whether you are performing or practicing. There is a drastic difference! They are polar opposites in regards to approaches. So what is the fundamental difference between performing and practicing?

If you’re practicing, don’t you want to play through your music?

Well, sure you do. But when you’re practicing you want to fix any mistakes. So if you’re playing through a piece and something goes wrong or it just feels insecure, that’s a signal to stop, take out the score, figure out what’s wrong and spend time securing the music in your head and your hands. So the lesson for practicing is, whenever there’s a problem, you must stop and take the time to fix it. It’s vitally important to do that. You don’t want to gloss over mistakes.

With performing it’s exactly the opposite!

It doesn’t matter how devastating a mistake you make during a performance, the show must go on! You have to just keep moving forward. Nobody wants to hear you practice during a performance. You might think that you want to show the audience that you know you made a mistake. So you want to go back and correct it to show them you can play it accurately. They don’t want to hear it! Believe me. They’d rather you let mistakes go by the wayside. They’re already anticipating the next part of the piece. They don’t want to hear a repeat of what they just heard. Losing the continuity of the performance is actually the worst thing you can do. Keep moving forward no matter what. That’s the lesson. Do not stop. Do not correct mistakes in performance. Why is it so difficult to continue a performance after a mistake?
In your practice, you must always stop when you have a problem and correct it. So how do you alleviate that tendency in your performance?

You must practice performing!

You can practice performing in a number of ways. In the earliest stages before you’re comfortable playing for anyone, you can just sit down at the piano and say, “Okay, this is a practice performance and I’m not going to stop no matter what.” You just want to see what level you’re at and if you can get through the piece without stopping. No matter what happens, go through it without stopping, and you’ll learn a lot from the experience. First of all, you’re going to know where to zero in on your practice. It will be very obvious the parts that need work. It’s better to discover that in your practice than when you’re in an actual performance. Secondly, you’ll get in the habit of moving forward no matter what, even if things do inevitably go wrong, which they do for everyone at some point or another no matter what level you’re on. Later, you can practice performing by setting up a device and recording yourself. Then go through your performance and even if the beginning is a disaster, just keep going. This gives you an opportunity to try out recovering when you don’t have an audience in front of you. Then you can always record a second time to have the gratification of doing a better performance.

You can also play for friends or family.

Playing for friends or family is a great way to practice performing. And even though they’re going to be a forgiving audience, don’t start over! Even if you start off and something messes up right away, just keep going. Use them as guinea pigs and explain to them what you’re doing. They’ll forgive your mistakes! Explain that you are going to play through the entire performance for better or worse, and then stick to it. Don’t miss the opportunity to utilize them as a resource to practice your performing. Eventually, you can play for other groups of people. If you’re at a party and there’s a piano there, you can ask if anyone wants to hear the music you’ve been working on. And a lot of times people will be more than happy to hear you play! Once again, even though they might be a supportive, wonderful crowd, keep going so you get comfortable playing from the beginning to the end of a piece without stopping. So eventually when you’re playing a public performance, you will feel more comfortable. You’ll know you can get through it for better or for worse and have a performance, not just somebody watching you practice.

Generally in your piano practice you stop when there’s something that is not accurate or something that doesn’t feel comfortable. You check the score and you work things out using innumerable practice techniques until you can pass that point with assurance. But in performance, you keep going no matter what. And that is the answer. They require completely different approaches! Make sure you’re clear as to which one you’re doing in your practice so you don’t fall into the trap of doing something that’s kind of in between performing and practicing, sort of a performance, sort of practicing. When you do that, you’re actually not developing good performance habits or practice habits. So you want to eliminate that ambiguity entirely. 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 how long it should take you to learn a piece of music. There are a lot of people who feel really committed to the piano. And when they are passionate about learning a piece, they don’t care if it takes a year to learn it. They just really want to learn that piece! This is not necessarily the best approach. Let me explain. In the amount of time that it would take in that year to learn one piece of music, imagine instead you focus on pieces that you can master in a couple of weeks. Then you build up a repertoire of pieces you can play on a high level.

Find music on your level.

Focus on pieces you can learn relatively quickly, each one a little bit more difficult than the last. You can expand not only the difficulty, but the style, the range, the mood, the period, all different aspects of music that you can assimilate into your technique. After a year, that piece that maybe would have taken you a year might only take you three or four weeks! The secret is finding music on your level. Now there are certainly exceptions to what I’ve just said. For example, maybe you’re a pretty serious pianist and you’ve just always wanted to study a monumental work like the Brahms Handel Variations, the Beethoven Hammerklavier Sonata, or the Liszt B Minor Sonata. Are you going to learn one of those pieces in two or three weeks? No, not likely. It could take you months to really learn and maybe up to a year to get on a performance level. A major concerto takes time to master as well. But even if you are learning such a work, I would strongly recommend that in parallel you also work on other formative pieces along the way. So at the end of the year you don’t have just that one piece, but maybe you have a dozen or more pieces that you’ve learned over the course of the year, including that one long-term piece that you’ve always wanted to learn.

Always be assimilating new music into your repertoire.

Learn music of different styles, different techniques, and you will grow as a musician far faster and greater than just focusing on one or two pieces that you really want to learn. You will actually be able to learn those pieces far sooner and get them at a higher level if you have progressive repertoire that you’re always mastering on the piano. I hope this is helpful for you and that you don’t find this discouraging. This is actually the fastest way you’re going to be able to learn that piece you’ve always wanted to learn! 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 the great composers came up with so much music. It just seems impossible! When you think about Brahms, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and so many other composers, it almost seems like magic. It’s as if something was handed down to them from the heavens. It doesn’t seem like anyone could write so much fantastic music.

The truth is that we only have a tiny glimpse of their music.

Most of the great composers made music up spontaneously, constantly. They were known to be tremendous improvisers. But because audio recording was not developed until centuries later, we only have the written scores of these great composers to go by. But we get glimpses as to what the great composers actually improvised, and some of their fantasies. For example, you think about Bach and you think about very regular, beautifully crafted music that obviously was written out. But what about music that he just made up? Are there any glimpses into that? Yes! For example, Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. The way that starts out is very rhapsodic and spontaneous in nature. It’s an amazing work that goes places you would never expect. It gives you a little glimpse of what these composers were able to create on the fly.

Improvisation can sow the seeds for compositions.

This isn’t just true of the early composers. Think about when you listen to a Chopin Nocturne. Just imagine the melodies that Chopin and Liszt made up. Sometimes they would have parlor gatherings, and they would go back and forth. As did other great composers of the 19th century, such as Anton Rubinstein. It was one of the things that they did, where they played for one another spontaneously. Listen to the opening phrase of the B-flat minor Nocturne of Chopin. The second cadenza is something that no-one would think of writing. He must have just played this and figured out a way to write it down. It’s very rhapsodic, off the cuff phrasing. It’s not metered. And it gives you just a little hint as to what these composers did on a daily basis, by themselves, for their family, for their friends, and at all kinds of get-togethers.

Have fun with music!

I believe all the great composers have joy and passion in their music! It wasn’t just a tedious task. It wasn’t all lonely nights of crafting great compositions, although that’s a part of music. A part of practicing and learning music is spending the time to learn scores. But having fun with it and not losing the love of music is what it’s all about! I believe those are the seeds of the great composers. So enjoy your music! Explore things and see what you can come up with! 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’s subject is about which fingers work best for playing trills on the piano. Sometimes people see trills and they think they should just play as many notes as possible. I’ve talked before about how trills must be measured. You have to know exactly how many notes you’re playing in a trill. Even though when you listen to a trill it sounds like a free form explosion of notes going back and forth, trills have to be measured so you know exactly how many notes you play. Otherwise, ending a trill is impossible because you’re leaving it to chance whether you end up on the right note or not!

You don’t always get to choose your trill fingers.

There are some instances, for example in Bach Fugues, where you must trill with four and five. These are the worst fingers to trill with! Try to avoid four and five as trill fingers. A lot of people think three and two are the best trill fingers. And indeed, three and two are pretty strong trill fingers. But the best trill fingers are actually three and one! Three and one are the strongest fingers. Your thumb is the strongest finger and the third finger is probably your second strongest finger. Three and one are terrific for trills. Four and two could work nicely as well. There are a lot of different possibilities. Three and one are great when you have that possibility. Three and two are good too. It depends where you’re coming from and where you’re going in your score to determine what the right fingering is. Not only that but if you have other lines within the same hand, sometimes as I said, in contrapuntal writing in fugues particularly, you might not have much of a choice as to which fingers to use for trills.

I’m going to give you one final trill fingering tip.

I’m going to show you something that’s really interesting and it ties right in with the idea of measuring your trills. If you measure your trills, you might want to try alternating three, one, three, two. By using those fingers, you actually reduce the load of the trill to three fingers so none of the fingers have to work quite as hard. Not only that but it helps you to measure your trills. Even if you don’t end up using three, one, three, two as trill fingerings, it will help you to make sure that you’re playing the right number of notes in your trills, which is the most important thing!

You never want to think of trills as something abstract from music.

Just imagine that every single note is written out and play it as it’s written in the score. If you’re figuring out your own trills, find something you can play reliably. Don’t worry about trying to make the fastest trill. What’s important is that it’s musical, repeatable, and dependable. If you can use three and one, or at least three and two, you’re going to be way ahead of the game. I would like all of you to try three, one, three, two, as well and let me know how it works for 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. The subject today is about how to play with a metronome. It can be a really daunting task, particularly if you’re not accustomed to playing with a metronome. The tips I’m going to give you today are not just for those of you who are new to the metronome, but also for those of you who practice with a metronome incessantly and wonder how to stay with the metronome.

How do you set a metronome?

There is some great software out there that can be helpful. You can get apps on your phone that allow you to just tap the tempo and it finds it for you, which can be incredibly valuable. But how do you even establish the tempo? Let’s say you’re playing a piece and you’re wondering how to set the metronome. Well, you can tap your foot along with the music to establish the beat. You have to establish the beat first. Then turn your metronome on and try to match it. Once it sounds right, try playing along to see if it feels right. If it feels too fast or slow, adjust the speed and try again until it feels right.

How do you stay with the metronome?

I’ve seen so many people struggle to stay with the metronome. I’m going to show you a very simple technique that’s going to make a world of difference. When the metronome speeds up, speed up with it. When the metronome slows down, slow down with it. Of course the metronome is consistent, but I bet when you’re playing with the metronome, you could swear that it’s speeding up and slowing down! In reality, it’s you who is changing speed. But it feels like the metronome is slowing down or speeding up sometimes, doesn’t it? All you have to do is follow whatever it seems to be doing. If it seems to be getting faster, you get faster. If it seems to be getting slower, you get slower. And if you do that, you will stay with the metronome.

If you continue to struggle you may want to adjust the speed.

When you’re playing with a metronome and you’re not absolutely precisely with it, make minute adjustments in your playing by going a little faster with it, or a little slower with it to get back on time. But if you ever gain or lose a beat, you should stop and figure out if maybe the metronome is set a little too fast for you. Try a slightly slower speed to see if you can stay with it, because you should never gain or lose a beat. However, if you just nuance slightly behind or ahead, you might just finish the phrase then go back and see if you can do it more faithfully on the beat. Practice a number of times until that ebb and flow around the beat is minimized. The goal, of course, is to stay spot on with the metronome. But you don’t necessarily have to stop every single time you’re slightly off. Instead, get used to adjusting. Follow whatever the metronome seems to be doing. That’s the answer for staying with the metronome!

Once again to recap, establish the speed by tapping your foot or tapping your hand and then finding that speed on your metronome. Or better yet, download an app where you can just tap in the tempo. From there you can adjust further to find exactly the right speed. As you’re playing, if it feels just too fast or slow to be able to play with, adjust the speed. But once you lock it in, whatever the metronome seems to do, that’s what you’re going to do. That’s how you’ll stay with the metronome. I encourage all of you to try this! If you’ve had problems with the metronome, try these techniques and see how they work for you. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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