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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to know when a piece is in a major key or a minor key. There are certain sonic signatures you may already be aware of. Something in the minor key has more of a sad or dark quality than a major key. Just establishing a major key compared to the same exact chord progression in the minor key sounds drastically different. So you might be able to figure out that a piece is in a minor key because of the sadder quality that minor harmonies naturally tend to have. But is there a technical way to differentiate?

The key signature provides you with essential information.

If you know your key signatures, you know that if you have no sharps or flats that you’re probably in C major, if you’re in a major key. Because no sharps or flats form the C major scale. So what if that was in a minor key? What would that mean? Well, here’s the interesting thing about key signatures. All key signatures share both major and minor key possibilities. So if you have no sharps or flats, it could be in C major, but it might be in the relative minor of C major. What do I mean by the relative minor? It has to do with starting on a different note of the scale. The sixth note of the major scale is where the relative minor is found. So if you have no sharps or flats, instead of being centered on C, being centered on A, the sixth note of the C major scale, you are in A minor. Another way you can find the relative minor is to simply go down three half-steps from the major key. So once again, no sharps or flats could be C major, or it could potentially be three half-steps lower than C, which again brings you to A.

So what is the A minor scale?

The pure form of the A minor scale is simply the same exact notes of a C major scale, except starting on A. To discover whether a piece is in a major or minor key, you might think all you need to do is figure out where the notes are centered. There is actually a much easier way! Generally speaking, the minor is not found in its pure or natural form. Instead, it’s found in the harmonic or melodic forms, which have altered tones. That is to say that in a harmonic minor scale, the seventh note is raised a half-step. Interestingly, having a raised seventh makes an augmented second between the sixth and seventh notes. All the other notes of the scale are either half-steps or whole steps, but here you have a step and a half between the sixth and seventh notes.

Why is this so significant? Because if you see a piece with no sharps or flats, and all over the place you have G sharps, then you can pretty well assume that you’re in A minor. I mentioned that there’s a harmonic and a melodic form. The melodic form has two altered tones. Both the sixth and seventh notes are raised by a half-step. But the melodic minor scale descends in the natural form with no altered tones. There’s something really interesting about the melodic minor in that it has all the exact same notes of the major scale with the exception of the third. If you just change the third note from C to C sharp, now you have an A major scale. That’s an interesting side note, not to confuse the issue, because the A major scale has almost nothing to do with the A minor scale, except they are parallel major and minor.

Today the thing to think about is the relative minor.

Once again, the relative minor is found starting on the sixth note of the major scale. In C major the relative minor is A minor, which can be found in either the harmonic form with the raised seventh or the melodic form with the raised sixth and seventh, which only is ascending. Descending, it reverts back to the natural minor. So if you have a piece with no sharps or flats and you see a lot of F sharps and G sharps, you can be pretty well assured it’s not in C major, but it’s in A minor.

With other keys, as long as you know key signatures, you know which specific notes to look for. For example, if you have one sharp in the key signature, which would be an F sharp, this is the key of G major. To find the relative minor of G major, it’s exactly the same thing. It starts on the sixth note of the G major scale. Or you could go down three half steps from G. Either way, E minor is the relative minor of G major. So if you played all the notes of the G major scale, except starting on E, you would have the natural or pure E minor scale, the relative minor of G major. But that’s not the way minor scales generally occur. Usually, minor keys are found in the harmonic or melodic forms with altered tones. Both the harmonic and melodic minor have raised sevenths. The melodic also has a raised sixth. But the raised seventh is the keynote, because either of those altered forms will have a raised seventh. So the seventh note of the E minor scale gets raised by a half-step, which means the D goes up to D sharp. So if you have a piece with one sharp you might assume it could be in G major, which it very well might be. But you also want to investigate the possibility that it’s in the relative minor. Just count up to the sixth note of that scale to E, go to the seventh note of the E minor scale, which is D, and if you see a bunch of D sharps in your score, even though you’re in one sharp and you think you should be in G major, it could very well be in E minor. This is the way to really assess whether a piece is indeed in a minor key or a major key. Every single key signature has its associated relative minor starting on the sixth note of that major key, or going down three half-steps from the tonic note.

I hope this is helpful for you!

Study the scores of pieces you’ve played for years or pieces you’re working on. Check to see those keynotes. If you have a raised seventh in the relative minor, you’re probably in the minor key, not the major key. I hope this has taken a rather complex subject and broken it down for you so that you can investigate for yourself. It is extremely important to have the whole understanding of the score, the harmonies, and the structure. It can help with memory. It can help with sight reading. It’s not just an arbitrary exercise in theory. It has practical elements 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. Today we’re going to discuss how to achieve speed and lightness in your piano playing. These two things are related. It’s simple physics really. Moving a great deal of mass takes more work than moving a smaller amount of mass. So minimizing motion in your fast playing is really the secret. I’ve talked about this with finger work, so today the focus is going to be on the wrists. The wrists are incredibly important on the piano for so many things that the fingers just can’t do because they don’t have enough power. First I’m going to give a little refresher on how this applies to finger work. Then I’m going to show you wrist technique and how minimizing motion gives you more speed and lightness with the wrists as well.

Minimize motion of the fingers when playing fast.

A piano melody, even one that is quiet, still has to project. It takes a certain amount of arm weight supported by the fingers to achieve this. This is analogous to the breath of a wind instrument or the bow of a violin. You can get a nice warm melody that projects and creates a fluid line by utilizing the fingers and the arm weight. But you can’t use that much finger motion when you want to play at a much faster tempo. You have to stay closer to the keys. Your fingers need to be close to the keys and rounded, so there’s a minimum amount of motion necessary. It makes it much easier to play fast and light.

The wrists are necessary for articulating staccatos, phrasing, accents, and chord technique.

For an example, I’m choosing a piece that I’ve taught countless times, the Ballade by Burgmuller. Students often play the staccatos with their arms, which creates a ponderous sound because the arms are so big and heavy. It’s better to utilize the wrists instead of the arms. However, trying to get the speed faster with that much motion can be incredibly difficult. But by staying closer to the keys you can play faster and lighter. When you want speed, stay closer to the keys in your finger work and use less wrist motion. Certainly don’t use the arms! The arms have a real limit of speed. Playing fast staccatos with the arms is all but impossible. But the wrists can go very fast. The wrists have much less mass to move compared with the arms, so already that helps. To get even more speed, agility and lightness in quick playing that is not just finger work, stay closer to the keys and have a minimal amount of motion. Then you’ll be able to go much faster!

Try this technique on whatever music you’re playing!

If you’re playing rapid finger work and you find that you’ve hit a brick wall, try lightening up and staying closer to the keys. In chord technique and staccatos, use the wrists, not the arms because they are much faster and more agile. And as you get quicker, stay closer to the keys and use less motion. That’s the tip for today! I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me! 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 we’re going to discuss the three worst piano practice habits. These might be things that you do in your piano practice. Maybe you’re scared I’m going to bring something up that you do! Maybe you’re not aware of these destructive habits that are part of your practice routine. But it’s better to find out now than to continue on the wrong path.

1. Hesitating before a tricky passage

Hesitation is a habit that I constantly work with students to eradicate. It’s such a bad habit! You get to a difficult part and you can’t quite get it, so you hesitate just for a moment, then you get it and go on. This is a very bad habit because it ingrains stopping into your playing. The more you do it, the more you will continue to do it. It’s self regenerating. So how do you break that habit? We’re going to get to that, but first I’m just going to list the three habits so you can see how they apply to you.

2. Starting over from the beginning after making a mistake

The second bad habit is, when you make a mistake you get frustrated and you go back to the beginning. I’ve talked about this many times before. This is such a destructive habit. In a performance, if you find yourself having difficulty, what are you going to do? You can’t just go back to the beginning. The audience doesn’t want to listen to all of that again just so you can get past that point.

3. Changing speeds in your performance

Maybe there are some parts of a piece that you can play really well, so you play them at a nice fast tempo. Then you get to the parts that are a little harder and you slow down to accommodate them. Once again, you lose the whole flow of the music. You might think that to play everything slowly is tedious for the audience, so you might as well play fast where you can. But that doesn’t make for a fluid performance.

What can you do in your practice to eradicate these bad habits?

1. Hesitating before a tricky passage: You’re going along and you pause for just a moment, and then you go on. This is incredibly disturbing to the audience. Maybe they are tapping along to the beat and then suddenly it hesitates. It’s off-putting. With something that’s lyrical, anytime there’s a hesitation it just doesn’t feel right. I’m going to tell you what you can do. First of all, make sure you’re choosing the right tempo so you can play through the piece without hesitation. But suppose that just doesn’t cut it. Suppose you’d have to play the piece at half the speed just to avoid a couple of hesitations. That seems like a brutal solution. Indeed there are more effective ways of dealing with hesitations, unless you’re hesitating every bar, in which case you obviously need to choose a much slower tempo. But if it’s just a few key places where you are hesitating, and you can’t quite eradicate it, I have a solution for you.

When you are practicing, get in the habit of stopping whenever there’s a hesitation. Stop immediately and find your place in the score. Find an appropriate place in the score just before that hesitation where you can start to get past the point of hesitation. You might have to start slowly and increase the speed. Maybe even do metronome speeds if you can’t quite get through the hesitation by playing it several times. Then after you’ve played through the trouble section several times in a row perfectly at a comfortable tempo, go back to the beginning of the piece, or the beginning of the section to pass that hesitation.

Interestingly, you may find that even though you can play it many times in a row perfectly starting at the previous phrase before the hesitation, once you go back further, you may still hesitate there. So you may have to go back a little bit further to get it fluid. Then go back to the beginning of the section or the beginning of the movement to finally eradicate that hesitation. You can work all your key hesitations out that way. I sometimes refer to this as the band-aid approach of practicing. It can be very effective, because if you just have three or four places in an entire piece where you’re hesitating, to take the whole piece painfully slowly will feel quite tedious. And it’s not the most productive way to solve the problem. So hopefully this solution works for you!

2. Starting over from the beginning after making a mistake: It’s so tempting when something goes wrong to just start over and try again. Well, the problem with this is if you get in the habit of doing that in your practice, when you get out to perform you’re going to do the same thing. More than that, it doesn’t solve the underlying weakness in your playing. So what you must do is find exactly where you had the problem, and study the score to figure out the solution. Then, much like I described before in avoiding hesitation, start just before the point at which you had the problem, pass that point several times, increase the speed, and use the metronome if necessary. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It’s a very valuable technique. You may have to go back a little bit further to finally be able to start from the beginning and pass that point without starting over. So the key here is to reference the score and nail down the correction. Be very deliberate with this. Find the specific correction so that you don’t just play on automatic pilot with your tactile memory. You don’t want to rely upon that because obviously, whatever made you miss it that time, will undoubtedly happen again. So you want to really focus on the correction. A lot of people want to know what they did wrong, but that’s of no value. Find the correction! Whatever you focus on is going to be apparent in your playing. If you’re focused on the mistake, you’re going to make the mistake. Focus on the correction and forget the mistake. This is a life lesson too!

3. Changing speeds in your performance: I have a student who’s extremely talented. He likes to play everything really fast and it’s pretty dazzling. He hasn’t been playing very long, and I’m constantly impressed by him. But being able to get through an entire piece or even an entire movement at the speed at which he starts is oftentimes all but impossible. So going faster and slower really isn’t the answer.

Here again, you want to focus on the parts you can’t play up to speed. The answer here is to work with a metronome. Once you get to the part you can’t play up to speed, find a speed you can handle and set your metronome to it. Then start from the beginning and play the whole selection at that speed. If you really want to play a faster tempo, zero in on the parts you can’t play faster and work with progressive metronome speeds and other practicing techniques in order to get them up to speed. Then you will be able to play everything at the tempo you want. But starting off at a tempo faster than you can play the difficult sections won’t work.

So these are three tips for you! You’ve probably noticed there are similarities in the solutions. Focusing in on the correction, going back, speeding things up, working with a metronome, going back a little bit further, then going back to the beginning. These are tremendous practice techniques that come into play in solving these common problems in piano practice. If you can break these bad habits, I promise you, you’re going to take your playing to a higher level! You’ll really have security, and you’ll be able to play through a piece from the beginning to the end at one speed without stopping, without going back, without hesitating, and without changing speeds. I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me! 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 practicing slower will get you where you want to be faster. It seems counter-intuitive. I have seen so many students falling into a trap. Maybe you’ve had this experience. Or if you’re a teacher, you’ve seen students succumb to the false promise of solving problems by playing too quickly. They’re playing a piece and they miss something so they go back a little bit, and then they miss it again. Then they get more and more frustrated. They’ll say, “No, wait. I can get this. I know I can get this!” They just want to have the satisfaction of getting it right once. But they keep reinforcing the mistake because every time they play it again, they miss it. After many failed attempts they get it right, and they feel so good that they’ve finally gotten it. Of course, then they move on and do exactly the same thing with the next section. This is akin to someone who gets stuck in quicksand and they struggle to get out moving furiously. And what happens? They sink deeper and deeper! If they keep doing that long enough, they will end up so deep in the hole they cannot get out. And the same thing can happen in your practice if you’re not careful.

Practice the correction, not the mistake.

The more times you repeat a mistake, the harder it is to ever play it right again. And even if you manage to play it correctly after missing it again and again, you’ve still practiced the mistake far more than you’ve practiced the correction. So next time you play that section, the same thing is likely to happen again. How do you get out of this trap? I’ll answer that, but first let me tell you a story:

There are two men in the woods and they are chopping wood. They need the firewood. It’s very important they get this done before the day ends because it gets intensely cold at night. One of the men is chopping furiously. He sees his friend taking breaks, sitting there with his ax. Inside, he’s kind of peeved, but he knows they need to get this done because it’s going to get very cold and they will need the wood. He’s working as hard as he can, but he keeps seeing his friend taking breaks with his ax. He wants to say something, but he’s just too busy chopping the wood. At the end of the day he’s exhausted. He looks over, and much to his shock, his friend’s pile of wood is much larger than his own pile! He couldn’t imagine how this could have happened. So he says to his friend, “I don’t get it. All day long, I’ve been busy chopping wood while you took several breaks just sitting there with your ax, but somehow you chopped more wood than I did.” And his friend replied, “Yes, I like to sharpen my ax.”

Use a ‘sharp ax’ in your piano practice.

That’s a funny story. But the same principle applies to your piano practice. It’s not so important to keep charging forward as fast as you can. Be sure to reflect upon what you’re doing. Take that time. Slow yourself down. When you miss something, the temptation is to just charge forward and get it right. But if you do that, you’re missing a tremendous opportunity to find the correction, to find what you need to do differently, and to slow down so you can get it right the next time.

Once you miss something, it’s critical that you get it right the very next time.

Once you miss something, make the correction and play it perfectly at least three times in a row. Solidify the correction! Reinforce it using different practice techniques. Use progressive metronome speeds, or other techniques to cement the correction. Remember to slow down in your practice and you’ll end up with much more to show for your time. Just like the men in the woods. The man who sat there sharpening his ax had a better tool to be more productive. You want to take time in your practice. You don’t want to keep going back over mistakes hoping to get things right, because that’s not what practicing is about. It’s a matter of cementing corrections right from the get-go, to play accurately the very next time. And how do you do that? Study the score and slow down so you play perfectly the very next time. Then repeat it until you can play it correctly again and again consecutively.

So make the correction! You’ll find your practice will take on a productivity that you can’t even imagine if you haven’t used this technique before. Repeating mistakes in hopes of getting things right is like sinking into quicksand. It is anti-practicing. Repeating your mistake again and again, and thinking just because you got it right once, even though you missed it a bunch of times in a row is destructive work even though it may have been done with the best intentions. You know you can play it right because you played it right before. Why shouldn’t it come out right now? Well, that’s not an important question to ask yourself. Instead, focus on the correction. Get it right and get it done! You will be so much more productive in your practice and avoid frustration. Thanks again for joining me! 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 how much you should practice the piano. I hear this question all the time. Of course, parents always want to know that for their kids, and adults also want to know if they are practicing enough. This is a great question, but it really isn’t the right question, believe it or not. The most important aspect is not how much you are practicing, but how often you practice. Why is this so important?

Practicing on a daily basis is essential to maximize your productivity and progress at the piano.

When you practice every day, you reinforce what you’ve done the day before on a daily basis. Skipping days is like taking one step forward and two steps backwards. It’s very difficult and can become frustrating. It makes you not even want to practice because you forget what you did and you feel like you’re not getting anywhere. And maybe that’s true. So it becomes self-defeating. Practice every day and you’ll see your progress growing.

Your mind has only a certain amount of time when it can work with maximum effectiveness.

When your mind is fresh, it can be so productive! You can get so much done. So you want to take advantage of that every day. You can even practice more than once in the course of a day. Maybe you have a little bit of time before you start working when you can review what you did the day before. By keeping it present in your head, right from the moment you sit down to practice, you’re ready to go! So that is the most important thing.

Setting the clock to practice a certain amount of time every day isn’t necessarily productive.

Why? Because what is practicing? Sure, there’s a certain amount of physiology involved. You want to develop strength and independence of your fingers and wrists for technique. But that’s not the most important aspect of piano practice. Practicing is a thought process. You can’t just do it by the clock. I’ve seen kids do this when their parents make them practice and they just sit there thinking about anything other than the piano! They’re thinking about what they’re going to do later when they run out the clock. So you must maximize the productivity of your practice. And that takes a thought process that you can’t always force. If you practice for 30 minutes and you’re really focused, you can accomplish far more than practicing for hours while daydreaming or just going through the motions. You want to digest a chunk at a time and really have something to show for your work at the end of practicing. So make sure you get to the piano every day. At least refresh what you did the day before and try to learn something new. Even if it’s just one tiny phrase. And on good days when you’re fresh and you’ve got time, do as much as you can! That way you will really grow tremendously rather than trying to have an arbitrary time limit that you are going to practice.

I hope this is helpful for you and for your teachers. This is a great recommendation, particularly for parents of students, because a lot of parents don’t know how hard it is to practice if you’re doing it correctly. So give your kids a break! Just make sure they do some work at the piano every day. That’s the most important thing. Thanks again for joining me! 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 I’m going to share with you two ways of solving technical problems on the piano. There are many different ways of solving technical problems. But I find that most pianists use these two methods, particularly the first method I’m going to show you. We’re going to use a very tiny excerpt from the first movement of the Mozart Sonata in C major K. 330. There’s a tricky passage in the development section early on. I’m going to play this for you on the accompanying video starting from the beginning of the development section through to this tricky passage. Then we’re going to go back and dissect what makes this passage difficult and how to solve it. This can translate to problems you have with finger work on almost anything you play. So this will be very valuable for you!

One of the primary ways of practicing is utilizing progressively faster metronome speeds.

I think all serious pianists practice this way. This is the lifeblood of serious piano practice. So if you’re having trouble with a passage, start at a speed in which you can play it with total security. Start very slow, 60 bpm, for example. Play through the passage as many times as it takes to be able to play fluidly and easily. You not only have to be able to play it reliably, you have to feel comfortable. You want to feel like you can do it without even thinking. You want to make it a total fluid line before ever raising the metronome at all. You have to be very critical at this stage because if you start increasing the speed before you have it absolutely perfect and repeatable, then you’re just going to be embedding those insecurities in your playing when you get it up to speed. This is the most important part. Take the time on the front end to really cement things and get it really comfortable before ever raising the metronome.

Take it one notch at a time.

Once the passage feels 100% solid at 60 bpm, raise the metronome speed by one notch. Why one notch? Because you can’t even feel it! That’s the secret. Gradually get the security in your playing, not just playing it perfectly, but feeling comfortable where you can repeat it again and again easily. If you have the patience to work through your music this way, you will be rewarded with a refinement and a security that is unparalleled. That’s the secret to developing security and confidence in your playing. I guarantee if you spend the 10 or 15 minutes it takes to get a passage up to speed this way you will be richly rewarded.

Work to the point of diminishing returns.

You’re going to get to a certain point where you can’t play any faster. You might have a breakthrough and get two or three more notches. Then you hit that brick wall again. At that point, it’s time to stop and move on to another part of the piece to work on. There’s always tomorrow. When you get to a point when you really can’t get it any faster without spending an inordinate amount of time, leave it for the next day. You’ll be surprised the next day, maybe when you first start, you’ll have to do it at a slower speed. Maybe not all the way back down to 60. Maybe the first day you’ll get it up to 80 or 84. And maybe the next day you start around 72 and you work it up the same way and get it up to 90 or 92. Each day you will get metronome speeds progressively faster, starting a little faster than you ended up the previous day. Find a speed where you can play it with that same security and confidence and move up from there. Practicing this way is really rewarding because you might think you’ll never be able to get it, but it will only take 10 or 15 minutes to do this.

Very few passages in the sonata are this difficult.

You don’t have to necessarily work the entire piece one notch at a time. Although if you have the patience to do that, you’ll have an incredibly refined performance. But certainly key sections will require this kind of focused attention. And of course you’ll have to work on larger sections than just tiny snippets. You have to put things into context! So after this, you might go back a few measures or even go back to the beginning of the section.

There’s another way of practicing that’s diametrically opposed to this.

This second method is completely different. It’s sometimes a tremendous time saver, preventing you from having to go through the tedium of metronome speeds. Sometimes you can pinpoint the exact place where you can’t play up to speed. Maybe you can play almost all the notes up to speed, except there are two or three places where you can’t get from one note to the next fast enough. If you can isolate those two or three places, you can get the whole passage without having to go through the entire thing methodically. Let me show you how this works.

Of course if there is a scale passage as in this excerpt, that helps. If you can play a G major scale in one octave as occurs here, you’ve got it, right? Well, it’s more complex than that because normally when you play the G major scale you’re going to end with fingers over the next keys of the scale. But here, you want to end with the fourth finger over A, and the second finger over the F-sharp to be ready for the next section. So you need to practice that. Then you can play the next small note group and get it up to speed. Then you put the two small sections together. You might not be able to put them together right away. You can try, but chances are, if you’ve never played the note groups together, you’re going to have trouble with that at first. So instead, play just up to the second note group but don’t play it yet. First, get just those first few notes fluid and comfortable and up to tempo. Then stop just before the next group of notes with your fingers right over the next notes you are about to play, but don’t play them. After the pause, play the next note group. Do this again and again, shortening the break between these two small note groups little by little until you get to a point where the break is so short that it’s rhythmically imperceptible. So you know the break is there mentally, but it’s no longer aurally perceptible. It just gives you that moment to relax because you practice relaxing at that exact point by stopping on the last note of the previous group of notes while being over the next note group in a totally relaxed manner. You can work through small snippets one by one in this manner stopping just before the next note group while being right over the notes you are about to play.

Now you have two entirely different ways of solving technical problems!

The great thing is you can alternate between them. Sometimes one method will work just like magic. You’ll be able to move quickly through metronome speeds and in 10 minutes you’ve got an entire passage solved. Another time you may work this way and find that you can play almost all of it up to speed, so you find exactly where you can’t quite play up to speed and work on just those note groups. Then you can put the note groups together.

These are two incredibly valuable techniques for solving many technical problems you have in your piano practice. Remember when doing progressive metronome speeds, be totally secure at the slowest possible speed so you gain a high level of security and confidence and repeatability first. Then with each progressively master metronome speed, strive for that same level of comfort and speed. Take it to the point of diminishing returns. When you are working way too long just to get one notch, leave it for the next day. But it’s possible you can focus on just a couple of small note groups that you can master by stopping just before a problem spot, being relaxed with your fingers over the keys of the following passage.

I would love to hear how these methods work for you! I use these two techniques incessantly in my practice, and many other pianists do too. Thanks again for joining me! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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