Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you the secrets of how to play softly on the piano. Have you ever tried to play something softly, but the notes just don’t play? You try to create beautiful melodic lines with decrescendos at the end of phrases, but the notes just drop out. What’s going on? Is something wrong with you? Is your piano broken?

It takes great energy to play softly on any instrument.

In a symphony orchestra, for example, when there is a quiet woodwind solo, whether it’s a clarinet, oboe, flute, or even a French horn solo, you’d be amazed at the energy they are utilizing in order to project the sound. Even though it’s soft, it has to somehow get out to the audience through a 60 or 80 piece orchestra. Yet it doesn’t sound loud because they are not expelling their air. They’re just putting the air under tremendous pressure with diaphragm support, much like a great singer can sing with a beautiful sustained sound and achieve whatever volume they want.

What’s the analog of breath on the piano?

I’ve talked a great deal about arm weight. It takes much more energy than you may think in order to project a quiet melody on the piano. A good example of this is the second movement of the famous Mozart C Major Sonata K545. It’s all pretty much soft throughout. If you play it without much intensity, it will sound lifeless. So you have to use some intensity. First of all, you need to overcome the accompaniment in the left hand! The accompaniment is supportive. It should be like the babbling brook under a boat floating on water. It supports it, but you don’t want to call attention to it.

One secret is to play very quietly keeping your fingers close to the keys.

Stay very close to the keys, and make sure you depress the keys all the way down. As long as the keys depress all the way in one motion, all the notes will play on a well regulated piano. But to project the melody, you have to use a tremendous amount of arm weight. What do I mean by that? I mean that when you play that first note, you are actually holding up your whole arm with that single finger. That finger is holding up your arm! You’re not holding up the arm with your shoulder anymore. That way, the weight can be transferred smoothly from note to note, achieving a beautiful line.

That is the way to project a melody in a piano context so it’s above the accompaniment.

Keep your left hand light, and just push the keys to the bottom with a minimum amount of effort. The right hand supports a tremendous amount of weight that transfers smoothly from key to key giving a singing line. And yes, it will still be piano! It’s also possible to get nuance in your phrasing, the rise and the fall of the melody as it goes up to the middle of the phrase, and then descends to the end of the phrase. Just like speaking. There is a natural rise in the middle of a sentence when you speak, and the sound tapers off when you finish. Music imitates life. And when I say life, I mean literally breathing! You have to have that rise and fall. You get the analog of the breath on the piano through the use of the weight of your arm.

Don’t be afraid to use a lot of energy.

It’s just like a musician in an orchestra projecting the melody from the back of the woodwind section. You have to do the same thing by utilizing arm weight, projecting melodies in your music that are written piano and pianissimo. That is the way to achieve it.

Let me know how this works for you! If you have questions about your piano, whether it’s capable of this, you can email me Robert@LivingPianos.com. I’m very responsive to comments, particularly on LivingPianos.com. You can post your comments on YouTube as well. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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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 give you an important wrist technique. I’ve talked so much about how to utilize the wrist in many of my videos, as well as with my students. The wrists are almost as important as the fingers in piano playing! There’s so much the wrists allow for in phrasing, the way in which notes are connected or detached. Generally speaking, I’ve talked about how the wrists have to be independent from the arms.

If you play with your arms, there’s a limitation to the speed you can achieve compared to playing with your wrists.

The wrist also has a crisper sound. So, for example, in a Bach Minuet, you would use your wrists to articulate the staccatos. The way to practice that is with various exercises where you just use your wrists without using your arms to achieve staccatos. And one simple exercise for this is to utilize thirds, just using your second and fourth fingers. You set the metronome on 60, and play using just your wrists, not going up and down with your arms.

The arms are important in keeping your fingers exactly over the right keys.

You want to move your arms to put your fingers over the correct keys. It seems so simple, and really it is! But playing in a simple manner might be hard if you’ve never done it before. But this enables you to achieve great speed. Once you can identify the wrists separate from the arms, then you can have the speed and power to play advanced repertoire. And it’s rather effortless, because you’re only using a small amount of mass instead of trying to play with your whole body or your arms. But what I’m talking about today is something entirely different. I’ve never brought this up in any video before. It’s a different type of wrist technique.

Suppose you want something a little bit more subtle, where the staccatos are not punctuated in such a manner.

With the technique I previously described, every single one of the staccatos are accented. Maybe you don’t want that. Maybe you want it to taper at the end, yet still keep it short. For that, there is an alternative wrist technique where you come up, instead of going down with the wrist. You actually come up with the arm, and allow the wrist to just be lifeless. This way it comes off with a gentle staccato, not an accented staccato. So that’s the tip for today. If you want a gentle staccato, you can come up with the arm and allow the wrist to be floppy. You get the opposite of an accent.

Come up with the arm, and let the wrist just gently bend without any force, and you get a gentle staccato that isn’t accented.

So that’s a new technique for you to try out in your music. I’m interested in how this works for all of you! Try it out where you have staccatos that are on the off-beats, staccatos that are not punctuated, that are not to be accented. This is a way you can achieve that phrasing without accenting the staccatos.

I hope this is helpful for you! Let me know in the comments here 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

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 sight-read on the piano. Sight-reading is one of the most difficult things you can do on the piano. Sometimes it seems absolutely mind boggling that it’s even possible! An accomplished player can take a piece of music they’ve never seen before and play it up to speed almost perfectly. How can they possibly see everything on the page? It doesn’t seem possible.

When I was young, I was a miserable sight-reader.

Even in high school, when I was a fairly advanced player, I wasn’t good at sight-reading. I was playing Chopin ballades and Liszt Hungarian rhapsodies and Beethoven sonatas, but my reading level was almost that of a beginner. I couldn’t seem to crack it. I have a video about my personal story of learning how to sight-read. You can see that video here. I had a revelatory moment when suddenly I realized I could read anything! Of course, I couldn’t get all the notes. I worked for years to get more and more of the notes in my sight-reading.

Keep your eyes on the music.

You can’t look down when you sight-read. You can’t read what you’re not looking at! You have to depend upon feel to a great extent. You must make the connection between what you hear and what you feel. But what I’m talking about today is something even more fundamental.

When you’re sight-reading, you’re not seeing absolutely everything.

It’s virtually impossible to see everything. There’s so much in a score. All the notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing andexpression, you can’t see it all. Even that person you think is reading everything perfectly, and maybe it sounds perfect, are they really seeing everything?

Hvae yeu eevr sein tohse wurd jmubles lkie tihs? Evon touhgh i’ts wrtiten inocrerctly, as lnog as tne frist and lsat ltteers are in the coerrct palecs, yeu can sitll reed it.

There are almost no words there at all! How is it possible to read that? Well, You’re not actually looking at every single letter. You’re looking at key letters that form the words, and you’re surmising what the words have to be in the context of the sentences. That’s exactly what you do in sight-reading! You actually look at what you can digest. You get a grasp of the sense of the harmonies. You surmise what the other notes must be based upon the ones you can see. You get an idea of where the music is going and you make many, many instantaneous decisions about what you can’t see. You flesh out all the notes based upon the skeletal image of what you capture reading quickly. Much like reading those jumbled words, you can make sense and you can even realize the music as it’s written without necessarily seeing every single thing in the score. It’s just like you were able to do a few moments ago, if you were able to read those jumbled words. It’s the same principle. So don’t feel like you can never read because there’s too much to see. There is too much to see, but you see what you need to see. Get the melody, of course. Get the bass and some of the inner lines. Get as many notes as you can, and make intelligent assumptions about what those inner voices must be.

Always look at chunks of music.

As I’ve talked about before, you don’t look from note to note. Just like when you’re reading text, you’re not looking at every single letter. It’s impossible to read that way. You look at words. You guess what the words are when reading text and you guess what the chords are when sight-reading music. You can get incredibly good at guessing if you’re experienced, particularly with composers you’ve played before, or styles you’re familiar with. There’s a certain formulaic type of notation that you can get your head around, and you can get pretty good at reading certain styles. There will always be some music where this breaks down, where you can’t even begin to decipher what the composer means. Maybe you’ve never even heard that composer before and you’re lost. But for a great deal of music, the more you do it, the more you’ll be able to assimilate into your fingers and be able to digest what you’re looking at and make musical sense. The key to sight-reading is deciphering the symbols you can grasp on the fly and fleshing out a performance on the spot. That’s what sight-reading is really all about.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with sight-reading. Share them 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 when music is off the beat. Now you might be thinking, “Music that’s off the beat? Maybe it’s jazz or ragtime, like The Entertainer.” But that’s not what this is about at all. This is about hemiola. There are a lot of examples of syncopated rhythms where emphasis is on the weak beats or off the beat entirely on the “ands”, but hemiola is different. There is a great example of hemiola in the Kuhlau Sonatina Opus 55, No. 1. In the second movement there’s a big chromatic scale going up. When it gets to the very top, that’s when the hemiola begins.

You probably have come across hemiola in your music and wondered how to count it, and why composers even utilize it.

Listen to a little bit of the Kuhlau Sonatina. Do you hear the way it comes down after the chromatic scale? The grouping of notes overlap the beats. It’s kind of odd. It’s actually a pattern of two that is superimposed on this piece which is in three. So you don’t have the comfort of the downbeat at the beginning of each pattern. That, in a nutshell, is what hemiola is. It can be a very effective technique for giving a rhythmic accent that you don’t expect in music.

How do you approach hemiola?

You must count and you must count correctly! If you succumb to the hemiola and let it trick you into thinking in a different time signature where the hemiola is, it’ll mess you up. You must maintain the integrity of the time signature in hemiola. You don’t have to accent the beats. You can play it and let it be a flourish that’s off the beat even though you’re counting it correctly. It’s a wonderful compositional technique. I want all of you to check out your scores. Find places you think you might have hemiola. You’re welcome to share them in the comments here on LivingPianos.com and YouTube. I hope this is enjoyable for you and provides some insights into your music. 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 great music is storytelling. This has many ramifications. For example, a great piece of music sometimes evokes images and emotions that can tell a story. It may not tell a story with words as much as with feeling and direction. Interestingly, this is also true of great improvisations. For example, listen to a great jazz pianist crafting a ballad. As it unfolds, it can remind you of so many things in your life that you can’t even put into words. That’s what’s so great about music!

A performance can sometimes tell a story.

What I’m going to do today is something a little bit different. I thought I’d challenge myself and play the beginning of Chopin’s G Minor Ballade. I will play it twice. The first time, I’m going to try to play it absolutely faithfully to the score. The second time I’m going to try to tell a story. I’ll let the notes evoke something to make you feel it’s going somewhere and keep you on the edge of your seat, wondering where it’s going next. Can this really be done? I’m going to see if I can play this absolutely accurately the first time. Then, I’m going to go back and see if I can do something more than that and tell a story with the same exact notes, markings, rhythms, and phrasing. I will add subtlety of emotion that can somehow transcend the notes. Is this possible? This is what this experiment is about today.

It’s just like the lines of a play.

The lines of a play can be read in so many different ways. Everything the playwright wrote is in there, yet each actor has a completely different feeling and tells a different story. That’s what I’m going to attempt to do now. I’ll see if I can take the same passage of music with all the same markings, the same notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing, and expression and see if I can tell more than what is on the page.

See video for my performances of the beginning of Chopin’s G Minor Ballade.

I wonder, could you hear a difference? I’m really interested in your opinions of these two different performances. They both are accurate from a technical standpoint, all the notes that Chopin wrote were in both of them. I’m wondering what your feelings are about them, if they evoke different senses. Do they tell different stories? That’s what music is all about. It’s telling stories that can’t be told with words – stories of emotion. That’s what I believe. I’m wondering how many of you feel the same way, and what these two different snippets of the Chopin G Minor Ballade did for you. Let me know in the comments, on LivingPianos.com, as well as 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

Supplemental Content:
Chopin Ballade #1 in G-Minor on Steinway Model D Concert Grand

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about why you must play on more than one piano. I am very fortunate because I’m always surrounded by pianos. As a matter of fact, when I was born, there was a piano in my bedroom, and my father had two pianos upstairs as well! We had four pianos in our house most of the time when I was growing up.

There was a time when I was first married that we had 27 pianos in our house!

I was teaching piano, and oftentimes, prospective students didn’t have pianos. This was before the days when you could buy a fairly inexpensive digital piano that would be serviceable for a beginning student. So I made it my business to have lots of inexpensive pianos around. I’ve been surrounded by pianos my entire life! Now with Living Pianos, I have a concert grand Steinway, a six-foot two-inch Steinway, a Mason and Hamlin grand, a Knabe grand, and I have a Chickering baby grand upstairs to name a few. I am loaded with pianos! But what about you?

How can you play more than one piano, and why should you?

Why is this so important? My wife is a flutist. My daughter is a violinist. So, like most instrumentalists, they can take their instruments with them wherever they go. So it’s no surprise when they show up for performances. The acoustics may offer challenges they’re not used to, but at least they have their own instruments with them. As pianists, we don’t have that luxury unless you’re only playing for yourself, by yourself in the same place all the time. If you never want to play for anybody else or with anybody else, then maybe you don’t need to play on more than one piano. But for most of us, you want to be able to play at school, at church, at friends’ houses, maybe you even play occasional concerts.

When you sit down at a piano you haven’t played before, everything feels different.

The pedals respond differently. The touch is different. The tone is different. The only way you can really learn to overcome that is by playing other pianos. Naturally, if you’re playing a concert, you want to have a chance to try out the piano beforehand, if at all possible. Sadly, a lot of times it’s not possible. You get to the hall, maybe a few minutes before and there’s noise. Maybe they’re vacuuming. You never get a chance to really try out the piano. And I’ve got new news for you. Even if you get the opportunity to play a piano in a hall before a performance, once people come into the room, it changes the acoustics and it can feel markedly different!

How can you play different pianos?

You can try to go to piano stores, although piano stores are not there for that purpose. You might not be welcome just to play pianos there. But some stores might allow you to play their pianos if you ask them very nicely. If you’re in the market for a piano, of course, they will welcome you to try different pianos. But I would never suggest that you pretend you’re looking for a piano and waste their time because they’re very busy and have work to do. You don’t want to take their precious time away from their job. Oftentimes, schools have multiple pianos, If you can figure out how to get in and play those pianos. Maybe at your own school or church or some other place, you can find a piano to play. If you’re on vacation and you’re jonesing for a piano, you might scope out the bar to see if there’s a piano there, or maybe tucked away in a corner outside of the convention rooms. I always make a beeline for these pianos when I’m on vacation!

There are many different places you can try out pianos. It’s really important. The way the tone develops, for example, in the bass on a larger grand is so different from that of a spinet or a console piano. If you’re playing on digital pianos all the time, you don’t even have anything close to the feel of a grand piano. So it’s vitally important if you want to be able to adjust to pianos you encounter.

Is that the only benefit? Far from it!

You will learn so much about your playing, about your technique when you play other instruments. You may discover that a problem you thought you had in your playing is actually your piano! Maybe your piano doesn’t repeat fast enough. Maybe the regulation isn’t great. Maybe the tone of your piano is lacking in one area or another and you’re constantly overcompensating.

When you play other instruments, you realize how individual your piano is, because every single piano is different.

In fact, even brand new pianos of the same make and model are markedly different from one another. Each instrument is its own work of art. So try to play on different pianos any opportunity you get. You will grow as a pianist and a musician, discovering new possibilities of tone and phrasing, and finding new technical solutions on different actions. Try it out. Let me know how it works for you! 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

Early on when I first started doing videos there were some people who trolled. It happens. But as time goes on, people will come to respect and enjoy your content. It’s very gratifying and it becomes a feedback loop because people then have ideas for you. So I would like to reach out to everyone and once again thank you for supporting this channel and being a part of the Living Pianos experience! Any ideas and reflections upon what I offer on my channel and what you’d like to see in the future, let me know. If you have any ideas to help other people, put it in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube, because we’re all in this together. We’re all in life together! We want to share our love and our passion with each other so that we can enjoy our experience here on the planet. That’s my philosophy. 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

This is LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about the importance of rotation when playing arpeggios. What makes arpeggios so difficult? Even compared to scales, which have third and fourth finger crossings, as well as thumb crossings, arpeggios can be even more difficult. This is because your thumb and your third finger have to cross so far over, it makes it difficult. The way to practice this is to have the metronome set at a slow speed. Practice preparing your thumb as early as possible, which means right when the second finger plays, the thumb tucks under.

Instead of waiting until the thumb needs to play, prepare the thumb when your second finger plays.

Right after the thumb releases, it tucks under. Train your hand to prepare the thumb early. The left hand does exactly the same thing coming down. That is an essential technique. Practice without moving your arms up and down. Work with the metronome slowly, then increase the speed. Get it to two notes, and eventually four notes to the beat. You might have to work with progressively faster metronome speeds to get it that fast.

There are countless ways to practice arpeggios, but today I’m going to show you an essential technique, which is:
The rotation of the hand.

You don’t want to have an abrupt crossing of the thumb or your fingers at the point at which they cross over. Naturally, preparing the thumb early is a great way to avoid this. But there’s more to it. No matter how much you tuck your thumb under, it’s not all the way to where it needs to be. In a C major arpeggios, the right hand thumb crossing going up from a G to C is really far! So you should rotate your hand slightly to put your thumb over the next key. It’s important that it be a smooth motion, not a jerky one. This allows for playing fluid, faster arpeggios. Practice slowly, preparing the thumb in advance. Eventually you get to the point where you’re rotating the hand slightly, in a smooth manner. That is the rotation of the hands in arpeggios.

You’ll find in scales that this technique is not necessary, because you don’t have nearly as far a reach. But there are many places in music, with broken chords of different sorts, where this rotation of the hand is really important. It is also useful in being able to delegate the weight of the hand for balance, which is a subject for another video.

If there is a subject you would like for me to cover, let me know! I have a whole list of subjects from my students and other people who contact me on a daily basis. I appreciate the support! 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