Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you how to create beautiful melodies. And what melody is more beautiful than Clair de Lune by Debussy? I’m going to show you how to approach this piece, but this will apply to almost any melodic music you play. There are countless techniques you can employ on Clair de Lune, but today I’m going to show you something I learned from many years of living with my wife, Florence Estrin, who is a magnificent flutist. The way she uses the air in order to capture the phrase and to have a melodic line that carries the listener is something that I’ve literally lived with for decades. I want to share it with you because it translates to piano playing.

Having experience with a wind instrument, singing, or even a bowed instrument can be enlightening for a pianist.

After all, you’re playing a percussion instrument and trying to get a melodic line is a great challenge. You can better understand what’s involved playing a melody on an instrument that’s capable of a sustained line. So I’m going to play Clair de Lune for you now, just the beginning part, and then I’m going to explain what I’m doing to create this beautiful singing quality to the melody.

Watch the video to hear the demonstration!

Clair de Lune is such a gorgeous piece. Being in rhythm on this is vital to capturing the mood. The worst mistake you can make with Clair de Lune is to take too slow a tempo and not holding the long notes long enough. The rhythm is not what you might think it is. If you count it, try to count with the very slow dotted quarter notes as the beat since the beat is divided into three eighth notes most of the time, but sometimes Debussy writes two eighth notes to the dotted quarter note. What I’m going to talk about today is creating a flowing line. It’s not just about giving more energy to higher notes, just like you would naturally do with your breath when you’re singing or playing a wind instrument. It’s also about elongating those top notes just a little bit. It’s like how you use a little bit more air on higher notes if you were playing it on the flute and giving a little bit more time on those notes. I hate to use the word time because it really isn’t a rhythmic technique as much as it is filling up the sound, akin to the air on a wind instrument or when singing.

Without doing this, you don’t get the same feeling of serenity.

Take a little bit more time with those long notes. It’s very subtle because if it’s done too much, it would create rhythmic distortion, which would ruin the melodic line. But instead, it’s visualizing in your mind the sound that would be created if this was played on a flute or was an aria sung by a great singer to get that flowing line. You want to fill up those high notes, like you would naturally do if you sang such a melody.

Try this with all the melodic music you play!

I want you to try this, and not just with Clair de Lune. It’s not just about getting louder towards the higher notes, but making sure you ride over the crest of the phrase. Enjoy those high notes a little bit longer so that they can live on and give a nice expansiveness to your musical line. Let me know in the comments how this resonates with you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I have a really interesting story for you about how a Pinto blew up my teaching. This is not only an interesting story, but for any of you people out there who have ever thought about having a career or even a side hustle teaching the piano, there will be useful information for you. I’m going to give you a lot of pointers because I have a background in teaching going back literally generations.

My father, Morton Estrin, was a great concert pianist and teacher.

He taught my sister and me until we both went off to conservatory after high school. And in fact, both of us got our teaching career started by learning how to teach the piano from our father and assisting him in his teaching when we were still in high school. All throughout my college years in conservatory, my side hustle was teaching the piano as well as accompanying. So I was no stranger to teaching.

Have Pinto, will travel!

When I graduated from the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana, I very quickly amassed many students. I did this by offering to travel to people’s homes for lessons and advertising wherever I could to get students. Back then, it was classified ads because it was before the internet offered that possibility. No matter where people were located, I would go there .I would figure out how much more I’d have to charge for the amount of time it would take me to drive there.

I went all over the county.

No place was off-limits. I would just charge accordingly. My schedule back then was crazy because I would figure out the exact amount of time it would take to go from one student to the next. So one student might have a lesson starting at 3:15, and the next one might start at 3:55. It was all these odd times. Now, if a student was not able to make the lesson, it would be a disaster because I’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere! Sometimes it was really cold, and that car didn’t have the best heat. The other thing was that back then there were no smartphones with GPS. In some areas, there were no street signs! When it was dark, it was almost impossible to figure out where you were going. Worse yet, if for some reason I had to call a student, I’d have to find a payphone!

My mission was to figure out how to get students to come to me.

I figured the best way to do that was to have a really good piano to entice them. It also added a lot of validity when people walked into my studio and saw a beautiful, brand new Baldwin baby grand piano. We also always looked for houses with a separate entrance to a room so that students didn’t have to march through the whole house and there’d be some privacy. My wife Florence is also a musician, a flutist, so we always looked for houses with two rooms with separate entrances to each one. This was always a huge challenge! But you would be surprised at how many places we found that had two separate entrances that didn’t go through the whole house where she could do her teaching and I could do my teaching without disturbing each other.

If you want to get into teaching, you might consider driving to people’s homes.

Why is this so advantageous? Can’t you just teach at a music store or studio? The problem with that is that many studios now, at least in Southern California, get 50% or more of the money in studio fees! So you go to teach lessons, and the people who own the business that you’re teaching at are making more than you are for the actual teaching! You can make far more money if you’re willing to travel. Plus, people really appreciate the convenience of having you come to their homes. Once you develop enough students and have a following, seek out a place where you can make your own teaching studio. If you have a good instrument, and perhaps recording capabilities, it could be a viable place for people to come to for the benefits they get from studying with you.

I hope this is helpful for any of you who are interested in teaching!

By the way, I teach piano pedagogy. I have a deep background in teaching teachers. I was so lucky to have been taught how to teach by my father from the time I was in high school, and I’m happy to help any of you out there who would like to teach piano. 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 triads. What is a triad? A triad is the most basic chord that exists in music. I’m going to break it down for you, so you’ll have a keen understanding of what a triad is. Simply put:

A triad is a chord containing three notes arranged in thirds.

What is a third? Scales are built diatonically. That means interval of seconds. So each note of a scale is a second apart. If you skip a note in a scale, you have a third. Anytime you skip a note in a scale, it’s a third. In fact, anytime you go from one letter and skip a letter and go to another letter, that is some type of third. Fortunately, there are only two types of thirds that are used in triads. And by the way, there are only two types of thirds that are used in the vast majority of chords. Believe it or not, even sophisticated chords can all be broken down to some type of thirds.

In triads, you have two types of thirds: major thirds and minor thirds.

To make things easy for you, I’m going to explain what they are in the simplest possible terms. Once again, they’re always two letters that are separated by another letter. A major third is a total of four half-steps. So if you start on middle C and count up by four half-steps to E, that is a major third. It’s very simple. A minor third is smaller. It’s only three half-steps. So once again, start on middle C, but this time count up by three half-steps to E-flat. That’s a minor third. That’s basically those are the building blocks of Western harmony, in a nutshell. You can actually figure out just about all chords by simply arranging the notes in thirds. Sometimes they are inverted. I’m going to get to that in a little bit. But first, let’s get to the basics.

You have four possible arrangements.

As I said, a triad contains three notes arranged in thirds. So you have a root, a third, and a fifth. So you have two sets of thirds. If you have a major third on the bottom and a minor third on top, that is called a major triad, for example, C – E – G. If you reverse it and have a minor third on the bottom and a major third on the top, that is a minor triad which would be C – E-flat – G. Could you call the middle note, D-sharp? No. Why? Because all chords are spelled in thirds skipping letters between each note of the triad.

If you have two minor thirds, that’s a diminished triad. Why is it called a diminished triad? Because the fifth has become diminished. Instead of the perfect fifth, which is the fifth note of the scale, C to G, it’s now a half-step smaller C to G-flat. So the triad is spelled, C – E-flat – G – flat. The diminished triad has two minor thirds. Finally, two major thirds is an augmented triad because the fifth has become augmented, C to G-sharp. It has become larger by a half-step. The augmented triad is spelled C – E – G-sharp.

Now here’s where it gets interesting.

If you had, for example, a C-sharp major triad, once again, a major third on the bottom and a minor third on top, you start on C-sharp and go up by four half-steps. What is that note? Is that F? Well, it can’t be F because triads are built in thirds. Thirds must skip every other letter. So it has to be an E-sharp. Why would it be spelled that way? Isn’t that confusing? Quite the opposite. If you saw this written C-sharp, E-sharp, G-sharp in your score, it would look like a triad. If you saw C sharp, F, A-flat, or something of that nature, it wouldn’t look like a chord anymore. You wouldn’t recognize it as a chord. When it’s written correctly, you just see all the notes thirds apart, and it clicks that it is a triad.

You can figure out any major, minor, diminished, or augmented triad using this method.

Just remember they always must skip letters, and there are four combinations. To recap, a major triad has a major third on the bottom and a minor third on the top. Switch it up, and you get a minor triad, with the minor third on the bottom and the major third on top. Two minor thirds make a diminished triad. Two major thirds make an augmented triad. Triads are always spelled in thirds.

Keep in mind that triads are not always in root position.

That means that the root of the chord isn’t always on the bottom. So if you had a C-major triad and the E was on the bottom and the C was on top, this is still a C-major triad. How do you know this? You take the letters and arrange them in thirds, and that’s how you find the root of the chord. Understanding this will help you figure out harmonies, learn music, read more effectively, and improvise. All of this is great practice for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today, I’m going to talk about Steinway. What happened to Steinway? I’m going to give you 20 true or false statements, so get your pencil and paper ready! But first, I’m going to give a brief history of this venerable piano company. Of course, you all know Steinway, but I’m going to tell you some things you maybe don’t know about the company.

In 1850, Henry Steinweg, a German immigrant, witnessed a show put on by P.T. Barnum, and it featured a Chickering piano.

Chickering was a piano company going back to the 1820s in the United States. The show inspired him so much that they could barely drag him off the stage. A few years later, in 1853, he founded Steinway & Sons in New York, and the company remained under family ownership for generations. In 1880, Steinway opened a second factory in Hamburg, Germany. In 1931, the accelerated action was introduced, a new technology that caught the attention of many pianists. In 1936, Steinway introduced their patented diaphragmatic soundboard, which was a way of tapering the soundboard to produce the distinctive Steinway sound. Finally, in 1972, corporate ownership happened with CBS purchasing Steinway & Sons.

In 1992, Steinway introduced the Boston Piano brand. This is an OEM piano, designed by Steinway and produced in Japan by Kawai, with many Steinway elements—not the Steinway piano design, but many elements that Steinway specified in the pianos produced by Kawai in Japan. In 1995, Steinway merged with Selmer Industries, the makers of woodwind and brass instruments. Then, in 2001, Steinway introduced their Essex piano, made by Young Chang. But a few years later, in 2004, Young Chang suffered a bankruptcy. So in 2006, they started having the Essex produced in China by the world’s largest piano manufacturer, Pearl River, which is where they’re still made today.

In 2015, Steinway introduced Spirio, a player system that is only available in pianos that are built by Steinway and only in new Steinway pianos. This system introduced many innovative technologies. They took old recordings and digitized them so you can have your piano play Rubinstein when he was young, or things of that nature. And then, in 2019, they added a record function to Spirio.

Now get ready for the true or false statements!

A lot of these may be difficult, particularly this first one. And this is a very provocative statement:

1. Steinway makes a Mickey Mouse piano.

That sounds like blasphemy, doesn’t it? And some of you may wonder what I’m talking about here. Is it possibly true that Steinway makes a Mickey Mouse piano? This is TRUE This is a specially designed Steinway, and it is hand painted.

If you’ve got $375,000, you can get one of these ultra-limited edition Steinways for yourself. This isn’t the only limited edition Steinway they have, but it’s one of the more amusing ones. They have all sorts of different designer pianos that have extraordinarily high price tags. When you consider that even an entry-level Steinway baby grand is over $80,000, you can see how these limited runs would be expensive.

2. Steinway has stopped producing their accelerated action.

This has been something many people look for in Steinways. Is it possible they stopped producing their accelerated action? This is TRUE! Why would they stop making the accelerated action, which so many people like? Well, a lot of it comes down to the fact that Steinway has made every effort to make the pianos that are made in Hamburg similar to the pianos that are made in New York. For example, for many decades, they had the 5′ 10 1/2″ grand piano Model L made in New York and the exact same size Model O made in Hamburg. Well, they discontinued the L, so the O is now made in both factories. Also, a few years ago, they reintroduced the Model A in New York. For decades, the A was only made in Hamburg. So they have made improvements in their action and felt the accelerated action is no longer necessary. Pianists and technicians, I’d love to hear from all of you in the comments. How do you feel about the discontinuation of the accelerated action?

3. Steinway stopped making the 1098 studio piano.

This is TRUE. You can no longer buy a Steinway studio piano. They do not make any studio pianos.

4. Steinway is discontinuing all uprights made in New York.

This is TRUE. The K-52, the full-size upright, will no longer be made in New York. The only upright piano available from Steinway will be the K-132, manufactured in Hamburg, Germany.

5. Steinway has stopped making the Model S baby grand.

At 5′ 1″, the Model S is almost as expensive as the 5′ 7″ Model M, which is one of their most popular models. People have been saying that Steinway is no longer making the Model S. Is this true? This one is FALSE. The S is still in production, just as before. My personal piano is a Model S that my grandfather got for my father in the 1930s. We rebuilt it a number of years ago, and it’s still going strong! It’s a wonderful little baby grand.

6. Steinway moved their rebuilding off-site to Iowa.

Is this possible? They’ve always done their rebuilding in their New York factory. Did they really move their rebuilding to Iowa? This is TRUE. They are doing all of their rebuilds in Iowa. They ship their pin blocks and sound boards. In fact, that’s the only place where sound boards and pin blocks made by Steinway are available other than on new Steinway pianos made in New York and Hamburg.

7. Steinway refinishes their pianos in New Jersey.

This is actually partially true, but I have to say this is FALSE. There is a facility in New Jersey where they ship very few pianos for refinishing if they have extremely intricate woodwork. Think about the nightmare of logistics involved if they had all their pianos refinished in New Jersey! At first, I thought maybe this was true because I had heard this rumor. I thought maybe environmental laws in New York prohibited the new polyester high-gloss finishes that Steinway is offering. But no, this is false. Only a select few pianos are actually refinished in New Jersey.

8. Steinway is going public.

This is actually FALSE. There were murmurs about this, but they withdrew their SEC filing recently. They may still go public in the future. It could happen. But as of right now, there are no immediate plans for going public. I know a lot of people would like to invest in Steinway. It’s one of the strongest brand names out there.

9. Half of Steinways made in New York have Spirio systems.

This is actually TRUE. Half of the New York pianos have Spirio systems in them, and they’re selling them like hotcakes! It’s actually helped them tremendously to increase their sales.

10. Spirio is available on all Steinway models.

When you hear that half of their pianos have these systems, this sounds very plausible. But this is FALSE. The spirio is only available on the Model M, Model B, and the Model D concert grands. And yet half the total number of pianos they sell have Spirio systems. So a lot of B’s, M’s, and D’s have Spirio systems in them.

11. Spirio adds $20,000 to the cost of a piano.

This is FALSE. It actually adds $29,000 to the cost of new Steinways! Can you imagine? So if you want it, the only way you can get it is on a new Steinway.

12. For $29,000, you get a piano that records and plays back.

This is FALSE. If you want to be able to record as well as playback, it adds $48,000 to the price of a Steinway! So the least expensive recording Spirio Steinway, the 5′ 7″ Model M, will set you back $124,800 now in 2024.

13. Spirio-Cast plays live on other Spirio pianos.

This is TRUE! Somebody can play a Spirio in one place, and other Spirios can play that performance at the same time. You can have Lang Lang or Yuja Wang play your piano! That’s what Spirio is all about. That’s why people pay the big bucks to get it. Since there are so many Steinway artists out there, being able to have a library of Steinway artists is a big selling point for the Spirio system.

14. Steinway owns Renner.

Renner is the company that makes the action that’s available on Bösendorfer, Fazioli, Petrof, and so many other pianos. This is actually TRUE. Steinway bought Renner a few years ago. They’ve been using Renner actions on their Hamburg Steinways for years.

15. Hamburg and New York Steinways have the same hammers.

This is actually FALSE. There are unique hammers that are only available on New York Steinways, giving them a different sound from the Hamburg Steinways.

16. Steinway no longer makes their keyframes the way they traditionally have made them.

This is TRUE. They’re using what they say is a sturdier construction. Some technicians might find it a little harder to work on because it’s a heavier build, but they say that these are going to be more robust. So indeed, the keyframes are not made the same way they have always made them.

17. Steinway has sped up its manufacturing to meet demand.

According to Steinway, this is FALSE. They have added more workers to try to keep up with demand, but it still takes just as long to produce their pianos. It can take up to a year to produce a Steinway piano! There’s a lot involved in building pianos.

18. It is illegal to buy a Steinway decal.

This is actually TRUE. Steinway has made it illegal to buy their decals. So if you have a Steinway piano that you’ve had rebuilt and refinished, you might not be able to get a decal if your piano has been refinished unless you use all Steinway parts. But the catch is, you can’t buy Steinway pin blocks or soundboards. So if you rebuild your Steinway, you can’t buy the decals like you can for virtually every other piano brand in the world. Why does Steinway do this? Well, Steinway says it’s because they want to assure that anything that says Steinway on the front has the high quality associated with their name, so it doesn’t tarnish their reputation. Some people say it’s because used Steinways are actually the biggest competition Steinway has, because if somebody wants a Steinway, they’re probably not going to buy a Yamaha, Kawai, or any other piano. They want a Steinway. So they’re probably going to seek out a used Steinway if they can’t afford a new one. Who knows what the truth is. It could be elements of both.

19. 90% of concert artists play Steinway pianos.

This is actually FALSE. Over 97% of concert artists play Steinways! Why is this? Is Steinway that much better than every other piano brand? There are so many great piano companies. But the fact of the matter is, one by one, all the piano companies supporting the concert market have dropped out. The last holdout up until near the end of the 20th century was Baldwin. Baldwin had a good share of the concert market. But think of the daunting task of having concert grands ready in virtually every major city in the world. Even Yamaha tried to do that in the late 90s but couldn’t swing it. It was just too much of a burden to have these pianos prepped and ready for the concert stage in every major city. So any touring concert pianist really has no choice. They have to go with Steinway if they want to have pianos to play on in concerts all around the world.

20. The most expensive Steinway costs a million dollars.

A Steinway concert grand costs over $200,000. Are there any models that cost $1 million? Well, this is a misleading question because the answer is FALSE. The most expensive Steinway costs $2.5 million! What piano could possibly command $2.5 million? Well, this is the rare hand-painted Pictures at an Exhibition piano, named after the famous piece by Mussorgsky.

All of the movements of this magnificent work are painted on this one-of-a-kind piano that is just unbelievably intricate in its painting.

How well did you do with these 20 true or false questions?

Let us know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com how well you did with these 20 true or false questions! How many did you get right? How many of them surprised you? Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to present to you ways of practicing the first movement of Schumann’s wonderful Kinderszenen, or Scenes from Childhood. This is a glorious set of pieces that is accessible to people who are not necessarily on a virtuoso level of technique, and yet it is an absolutely stupendous piece of music! It’s a whole series of small movements, so you don’t have to take months to learn each one, and you don’t have to learn all of them. You can just learn select movements. I’m going to focus today on the very first movement: From Foreign Lands and People. It presents a unique challenge that you’ll find in other pieces. So what I’m going to show you here is not just for this movement. It covers a lot of things you can apply to many pieces of music!

A piece like this can be challenging using my usual practice method.

Any of you who follow me probably already know how I practice and how I teach how to practice, which is to memorize first. After reading the piece maybe 2 or 3 times, I get right to work, taking very small phrases, memorizing the right hand with all the details, memorizing the left hand with all the details, and then putting the hands together, going on to the next section and connecting. A piece like this has challenges when using this approach. First of all, I want to just play it for you so you can hear what the piece is about, and then I’m going to show you what challenges this piece has with the way I’m talking about practicing.

Watch the video to hear the music!

So I usually take two or four measures at a time, learn the hands separately, and then put the hands together. Then I move on to the next phrase. But the problem is, just like with a fugue, you have a middle voice, and it’s divided between the hands. At the beginning, you basically have a melody and a bass part. It’s a nice duet. But then you have a middle part that is divided between the hands. So if you try to learn the hands separately, it doesn’t make much sense. You end up with that middle part being bisected.

It makes much more sense to learn the inner voices as chords.

You really want to learn the melody and the bass, and then the middle part. It’s almost like you have three hands there in those three individual parts. Once you learn the three parts, (melody, bass, and chords), you can play the hands separately. But you want to understand that the three parts are basically a trio. Now I’m going to give you a bonus tip here.

How do you get that middle line to be quiet?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you the secret of extreme slow practice. This is an incredibly valuable technique. I’m going to demonstrate how this works and how it can be unbelievably valuable for your practice. I’m going to play part of the Bach French Suite in G major. The second movement, the Courante, goes really fast. I’m going to play it, and then I’m going to solidify it using extreme slow practice right in front of you. I’ll explain how valuable this is for you for a number of reasons. But first, let’s have some music!

Watch the video to see the demonstration.

Let’s say you have a piece you can play O.K, but maybe it’s getting rusty. What can you do to re-solidify it? Or you have a piece that you’ve gotten to a certain level and you just can’t quite get it really secure. Take a piece like this that’s fast, and you find an extremely slow tempo. You play looking at the score, using the metronome, and using no pedal. Exaggerate all the markings in the score including phrasing and dynamics so they become ingrained in your playing.

What’s so interesting about this technique is that when you play fast, some things may be a little blurry, and you may barely notice it. But at this extremely slow speed, any little imperfections are blown up.

It’s like putting your playing under a microscope!

And as a result, you can really solidify your playing. Now, here’s the amazing thing about this technique. Obviously, if you get it solid, and work with the metronome speeding up a notch at a time, that would be ideal. But if all you do is play it slowly like this, you will gain so much just from that! Not that progressively faster metronome speeds aren’t of value. Obviously that’s a great technique. But just going through things slowly and deliberately, even a piece you can play reasonably well, you will always learn new things about your score.

When you play things that slowly, you’re going to see things, hear things, and you’re going to feel things and understand things in a new way. Have you ever taken a word and say it over, over, over, over, and the word doesn’t even sound like a word anymore? And then eventually you really understand that word on a new level. Well, that’s what happens when you play very slowly like this, a piece that your fingers can play on auto-pilot.

You must be deliberate at these slow speeds, and you end up learning your music so much more securely. So try this with pieces that you want to get on a higher level, or pieces you’ve had on a high level, and you want to reinforce them. There’s no better way, by the way, before a performance, when you already have a piece in shape and you’re playing it over and over again, and then some days it’s better than others, and you wonder, what can you do.

Extreme slow practice to the rescue!

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you the secret of rounded fingers. If you studied piano, you probably had teachers who said you must round your fingers and make them into a ball. But that can be painful! So why am I telling you to use rounded fingers? Well, there are different ways of approaching rounded fingers. I’m going to show you the correct way, which takes zero effort, and I’m going to explain why it’s so important in your piano playing. And I’m going to give you examples of it. The first example I’m going to give is the famous Mozart K 545 C Major Sonata. I’m going to explain where the rounded fingers really come into play and why it’s so important for you.

Using rounded fingers is particularly helpful when playing trills.

Why are rounded fingers necessary to be able to execute trills? Think about this. You have three different finger joints. If you only use one joint, that’s a lot of work for that one joint. But you have two other joints. If you use all your joints, you divide the load among many more joints. It’s much easier than moving a whole finger from just your knuckle. That’s the main reason. But how do you do this without stressing? The idea of holding a ball is a terrible analogy.

You never want to be in a position that takes any effort to maintain.

I’m going to repeat that. Don’t go into a hand position that takes effort to maintain. You might think, well, how can you possibly be in a position that’s rounded like that without any effort? You just drop your limp hands straight down toward the keyboard, and let your hands completely relax on the keys. Your hands will naturally be in a rounded position. And it takes absolutely no effort to maintain because your hands naturally go into that position. Try it on your piano. Without any effort at all, just go down, and you’ll be in that rounded position. Isn’t that remarkable? What are the key places where this is really handy? Well, there are several actually, and I’m going to show you. For one thing, you have a short trill right at the beginning of this Mozart sonata. If you were to try to do that with flat fingers, it would be cumbersome. Your fingers are too big and heavy. It’s much easier with rounded fingers. With flat fingers, it’s all but impossible. By the way, three and one are your strongest trill fingers. I know a lot of you like to use three and two. Those are good too. But three and one are even stronger.

You always must know exactly how many notes you’re playing in a trill.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about the power of the perfect authentic cadence. Have you ever heard of this before? Well, I’m going to show you way more than that today! And what you’re going to learn here today is going to help you with your sight-reading, memorization of music, and improvisation. It’s that basic and important. It’s unbelievable. I’m surprised I have not done this video before because it’s so important.

What is a perfect authentic cadence?

In its simplest form, authentic cadence is basically just a five to one with some passing tones.

But what I want to show you today is even more valuable. It’s essentially how to establish a key with primary chords. What are your primary chords? Primary chords are your major chords. If you go up your scale and play chords on all 7 of the scale degrees, you have major chords on one, four, and five. The other chords are secondary chords. Your two chord, three chord, and six chord are minor chords. And your seventh chord is the one diminished chord, the outlier. So you have the one, four, five which are primary chords

Seventh chords are as follows. I7 and IV7 are major seventh chords. II7, III7 and VI7 are minor seventh chords. The VII7 is a half-diminished seventh chord. Why half-diminished? Because it is a diminished triad with a minor seventh.

And the V7 is the strongest chord of all – a major triad with a minor 7th which creates the dominant 7th chord. This chord is so powerful because it can establish the key with just this one chord. So here’s a great voicing for your basic four-part perfect voicing, resolutions, note leadings, and distance between all the notes. It follows all the classic rules of harmony.

Why do we have these rules?

We have these rules because they sound good! That’s why Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, and all the great composers wrote utilizing this basic structure in their music. Musicians analyzed all their great music and realized the truths behind it—the gems of truth that date back to Bach chorales. This basic chord progression is I, IV, I6/4, V7 I. You have nice voice leading and good spacing between the bass and the tenor, because it sounds better that way. Notice with the V7, it has the root, the seventh, and the third, but there’s no fifth. (It’s missing D.) Why would that be? It achieves better resolution. Doubling the root and leaving out the fifth can help to avoid the four going up to five because it resolves better going down to three (F resolving downward to E).

Why is this chord progression so basic and intrinsic to music?

Knowing all your primary chords and how to establish a key is enlightening in your music because it intrinsically makes you understand the harmonic underpinnings of all the music you play, read, or improvise. You can do this same chord progression in all major and minor keys. Once you get comfortable with all your keys, you can start expanding your repertoire of chords. A substitution for a four chord is a two chord in the first inversion, a II6.

Or you can spice it up even further with what’s called a Neapolitan sixth. What’s that? A Neapolitan sixth is like the II6, except it’s a major triad built on the flatted second degree of the scale. It’s almost like your II6 chord, but with two flatted notes. So you get a different flavor.

You can get to the point where you can modulate using a V7 of another key.
For example, if you used a D7, D is the five seven of G.

And instantly, you can modulate to G major! Start in C major, go to the D7, the dominant seventh, (the major triad with a minor seventh), and there you are in G major! And if you want to go to F major, the C7 (dominant 7th chord) brings you to F major.

The dominant seventh, the V7, is the secret to modulation.

Any time the key changes, the dominant seventh chord is pivotal. The V7 chord is almost always responsible for changing keys in music. Sometimes a diminished seventh can accomplish it too, but there’s nothing stronger than a dominant seventh chord for bringing you to a new key in music.

What is a dominant seventh chord?

A dominant seventh chord is a seventh chord built on the fifth scale degree. Build a chord on the fifth scale degree, (which in C major would be G B D F) and you get a major triad and a minor seventh. It’s the only place that exists in a scale. You can build seventh chords starting on any other note of the scale, and only the V7 has this arrangement.

I7 is major, II7 is minor, II7 is minor, IV7 is major, and V7 is the major triad with a minor seventh, it is the powerful dominant seventh chord. VI7 is minor, and VII7 is half diminished. Why half? Because it has a diminished triad and a minor seventh.

So the power of the dominant seventh can’t be stressed enough. For example, when you’re playing a sonata movement, they almost always modulate to the dominant (the key five scale degrees above the key of the piece). How does it modulate to the dominant in the exposition? Typically, it uses a dominant seventh chord! There’s modulation in so much of your music and the pivotal chord that gets you there is the V7, the dominant seventh chord, a major triad with a minor seventh

What is modulation?

Modulation is changing keys. For example if you start with a piece that has no sharps or flats in the key signature, then suddenly you have F sharps all over the place; you’re probably in G major! That’s an example of modulation. What gets you there? The D dominant seventh chord, which is the dominant of G (the fifth note of the G major scale).

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about the power of musical snippets in your practice. What you’re going to learn today is one of the most valuable techniques you could ever use in your piano practice. The amazing thing about it is that you can use this technique with almost all of your music! It’s incredibly valuable, especially for something fast. I’m going to play the beginning of the B minor Scherzo of Chopin. It’s a little rusty, so I can practice it in front of you. You can see for yourself how this technique works in the accompanying video.

The technique of fast playing is sometimes dramatically different from the technique of slow playing.

When you’re working on a fast section like this, you could do the obvious thing and put the metronome on a slow speed and do metronome speeds to work it up. But the problem with that approach is that you might hit a wall where you can’t get any faster. Why is that? Because the technique of fast playing is sometimes dramatically different from the technique of slow playing. This is particularly obvious on a wind instrument because the breaths come in different places. It’s a whole different experience. Even on the piano, fast playing feels different from slow playing. You try to get faster and faster with the metronome, but sometimes you just can’t get any faster.

I’m going to show you a completely different technique using musical snippets.

Just play the smallest possible unit that makes sense to you. Take a tiny number of notes. You can just take the first two notes, then take the next two, and then put them together. Now you might not want to go note by note. You might instead consider note groups that fall under your hands. Some snippets are basically broken chords. You want to get over the next note group as soon as you hit the new hand position; otherwise, you’ll never gain speed. So as you finish one note group, you get your hand in position over the next note group.

You can work through your music this way, gaining confidence and playing with the technique you’re going to eventually use when you play the whole piece.