When you hear your favorite singer, you know who it is instantly by the voice. Even listening to wind players and string players, you often can identify the player by the tone. What about piano? Can you tell who is playing just from the sound they ge
Practice your music mentally. I have a whole video dedicated to the subject of Playing Piano With Your Mind. This is a really important way of practicing your music when you can’t get to a piano. Whether you are on a plane, a train, in a car, or lying in bed, wherever you are that you can think about your music and analyze it mentally is a great way to practice. It might sound like a silly concept but this is a very powerful way to enhance your playing.
These are some ways you can improve your habits of practicing music and achieve much more with less time. If you have any comments or suggestions on this topic I would like to hear them. Thanks again for joining us, info@livingpianos.com (949) 244-3729
Time management is one of the most difficult things facing all of us and it doesn’t get any easier as we age. Finding time to pursue your passion – such as playing music – can be a real challenge and with our daily routines, it can seem
There was a time when all pianos had ivory key tops. By the middle of the 20th century, the use of plastic key tops began to replace ivory keys in a big way. Laws protecting elephants made ivory keys extremely rare in pianos built after the early 197
This is a really interesting question. We have music from centuries ago so it might be easy to think that we pretty much have all the music there must have been created in human civilization (or at least close to it) but this is far from the truth. F
You may not have heard the term Minimalism but you have certainly heard the music. This is a recent evolution in music and it is featured in countless film scores. Today we are going to discuss aspects of minimalism and what separates it from differe
Welcome to Part 2 in our series on the Chopin G minor Ballade. In Part 1 we discussed how the middle section of this piece requires you to switch your techniques rapidly. We are going to cover the next section which doesn’t get any easier. I’ll p
You’ve probably seen this in music and you might have wondered exactly what a dot does to a note. To preface, we are not talking about staccato notes (which have dots above or below notes) but dots next to notes that look like this: The short answe
The ultimate way to test this is by playing in the environment in which you will perform. If you have the opportunity you should get to play and test out the piano in the room before performing. A big challenge is that once people are in the room the acoustics change because the bodies absorb sound! If you are unable to get into your performance space early and get intimately familiar with the room, just follow the general guidelines listed above.
This is a very common problem for many performers and it can be a challenge to overcome. Learning the correct playing methods for different room acoustics can be tough but I’m going to give you a few tips to help you out. I performed a concert rece
If you’ve been to classical concerts with multiple movements you might have heard people applauding in the wrong places. For the uninitiated, it can be a challenge. You have just heard a performance of a piece with a heroic ending and then there is