Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Today we are going to present a very important topic for all pianists out there: The Challenge of the Thumbs. The thumbs are your strongest fingers yet they propose one of the biggest challenges when it comes to playing the piano. We are going to talk about this today and I will offer some solutions for how to deal with these sometimes cumbersome, strong fingers.

If you place your hands side by side you’ll see that your thumbs are in the middle and your smaller fingers are on the ends.

This matters a great deal in piano playing because your thumbs are your strongest fingers and your fourth and fifth fingers are your weakest. Despite our anatomy, you want to delineate the melody on the top and the bass on the bottom which means that your weakest fingers must produce the most sound!

Without balancing your hands and letting your thumbs dominante you will get a muddy sound. This really is a cruel trick of nature since you want to bring out the melody and bass but we are stuck playing them with your weakest fingers. So how do you compensate for this?

These are two terms that have major similarities but they also have distinctly different functions.

Transposition is simply changing the key of a piece of music or section of music to another key.

Modulation is changing keys within a piece of music, often times coming back to the original key. There can be many modulations within a piece of music.

In the video provided with this article you will hear an example of modulation, where I go from C major, modulate to G major, and then back to C major. This is used frequently in pieces of music to add harmonic interest. Since most pieces end in the keys they started in, often times there is more than one modulation within a piece or movement of a larger work. Modulation is a compositional technique which is written into the score; it’s not something you would generally choose to do with a piece of music.

Transposition on the other hand is used to take something and then play it in a different key. For example, if you were to take a series of chords and then play them again just transposed up a half step, a whole step, or anywhere you would like. This is transposition. If you have ever heard a choir warm up, they might sing a group of notes transposing the series of notes up by half-steps to help the group warm up. This is a classic example of transposition.

Another real world example of transposition would be if you were playing piano with a singer. You want the singer to be comfortable singing in a particular range. Sometimes the songs are available transposed into different keys to put the music in a comfortable range for the particular singer. There are even keyboards now that have a transposition functions that make it simple to transpose your playing into different keys at the push of a button!

Modulation on the other hand is a compositional technique that allows a free flow of tone centers within a piece of music.

Welcome to our two part series on how to measure your piano. Today we are going to cover grand pianos and next time we will cover upright pianos. This might sound like an easy thing to do yourself but finding out the exact length of a piano is a little bit trickier than you might think.

The most common question I get from people when measuring their pianos is exactly what measurement to look for. Is it the length, the width of the keys, the height, what are you supposed to be looking for?

The width of grand pianos is pretty standard. The width of the keyboard is right around 5 feet. This may differ slightly with the size of the cheek blocks on either end of the keyboard, but it is roughly the same for all pianos. If you can’t fit something at least 5 feet in width, you will not be able to fit a piano in your home unless it’s a highly unusual piano with less than 88 keys.

When talking about the measurement of pianos we are referring to the distance between the very end of the tail to the edge of the key slip in front of the keys – the total length. For a detailed example please watch the video included with this article.

To get the exact length of the piano you will want to close the lid of the piano. This is much easier with two people but if you are alone you can still measure the piano with the lid open. If you measure with the lid open, you will need to add about an inch to your measurement since the lid hangs over the edge of the rim of the piano.

To measure the length of the piano place one end of your tape measure at the longest point of the tail. Place the other end of the tape measure at the end of the key slip (the absolute longest point of the piano). You will have to make sure that you stand right above the tape measure since the angle at which you look at the tape measure will alter the perceived measurement of the piano. Try to be as exact as you can but if you’re within an inch or so you will have a good idea of the length of the piano.

Something that is interesting with Asian and European pianos is that they use the metric system for their measurements and they actually name the models based upon the length of the piano. So for example, a model 152 would be one hundred and fifty-two centimeters. You can easily calculate that into feet which is just about 5’.

Last week we discussed the importance of sightreading and why it’s a required skill for many musician. This week I will offer some helpful tips and tricks to improve your sightreading!

As a personal note, as a child I progressed to a fairly high level on the piano. By high school I was playing Beethoven Sonatas, Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies, Chopin Ballades; overall very advanced music. However, even though I progressed to a high level, I always had something holding me back as a musician; I was not a very good sightreader.

My sightreading was on such a low level in high school that when the choir director came to me with a stack of music to accompany his choir when his pianist was unavailable, I had to decline. He probably thought I was being rude. But I simply didn’t possess the skills to get this done – I would have had to memorize all the scores and there simply wasn’t enough time!

So how did I change this? It really came to me in an “Aha!” moment. My father, Morton Estrin was set to perform the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor piano concerto at Carnegie hall and he needed to play the concerto with someone playing the orchestra part at the second piano. He handed me the score – which if you’ve ever seen, is a very thick book. I told him I couldn’t read it and I would end up missing half the notes.

I opened up the score to face a swarm of black notes splattered all over the pages; it was going to be a challenge for sure. I realized immediately that if I looked away from the page I would definitely get lost. So I decided to put my fingers at the starting keys and simply play what I could but never look away from the score. I counted like crazy staying with the party as best I could. We went through the entire concerto, all three movements, and I never got lost! Although I missed tons of notes, to my surprise it didn’t seem to matter. All my father needed was to run the concerto and that we did.

I learned something incredibly valuable that day. Keeping your eyes on the music and keeping the music flowing in time is critical to your sightreading success. But even more important is playing with other musicians and sight reading with them is essential for developing your reading. It will greatly improve your sightreading capabilities to perform as a group. Sure, you can practice every day by yourself (and you should) but it’s not until you actually start playing with other musicians that you will be forced to keep the music flowing.

With complex music sometimes it’s necessary to approach the score like a skeleton and flesh out the music. As your sightreading develops, you will realize more substantial elements of the score over time.

What’s more important than actually playing all the notes when sightreading is to keep the general character of the music going, keep the nuances of expression and timing; all of this is much more important than just playing all the notes. Especially when you are in a group setting, it’s more important to have a coherent, unified sound.

Sightreading is an incredibly important skill for any musician. Being able to take a piece of music you have never seen before and play it at sight; it’s a pretty amazing skill to have.

I remember as a child I progressed with my piano playing but for a long time, I was terrible at sightreading. I used to see other musicians, like my father, who could sightread nearly anything! I have developed my sightreading to a high level, but it took a long time and a lot of work to achieve this skill, and it’s something that continues growing with your musical experience.

But why is sight reading so important? There are a number of reasons.

As you study an instrument you only get to study a limited number of pieces which require a great deal of work to get to a performance level; usually committing them to memory. And really, there are only a certain number of pieces you can learn in a year – and really only a finite number you can master over a lifetime. But who wants to be familiar with only a limited number of pieces? Most people will want to be able to play a broad spectrum of music and get the opportunity to try out other pieces just to see what types of music they want to learn.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to sit down and try a piece out to get a sense of it; to see if it’s worth studying? This is where sight reading can be incredibly useful. If you continue practicing sightreading on a daily basis, eventually you should be able to do this.

Another huge benefit to sight reading is playing with others. Meeting with other musicians informally and sightreading music together can be a rewarding experience; exploring new music with others offers a huge benefit to improving your playing and may even open new opportunities for your performances.

A huge benefit to learning how to sightread is the ability to spot trouble parts in music you are learning. If you can make it through a piece you will undoubtedly be able to tell which parts will require more practice than others. Being able to sightread a piece and go through it a few times will help you tremendously in figuring out what parts to focus on in your practice.

Really there are countless reasons why sight reading is important. It is something that every professional musician should be able to do at a reasonably high level. It’s also great fun exploring a wide range of music and being able to play with other musicians without necessarily practicing hours in advance.

This is a very interesting topic that someone asked me about the other day. It’s not that hard to sight-sing scales and it can be very beneficial to gaining a deeper understanding of your music. But the question is, how do you practice sight-singing intervals? Other than sight-singing a wide range of music, how is it possible to become better at sight-singing intervals that aren’t just one note apart as in scales?

You will see a demonstration in the video that accompanies this article that may help you achieve comfort in singing all of your intervals! I highly encourage you to watch the video for a thorough understanding of these techniques.

The first exercise (that I actually learned as a child) is based upon the notes of a major scale going up by a third and down by a step over and over again until you reach the octave above. Then go backward going down by a third, up by a step on and on until you are back on the starting note an octave below. This is extremely helpful in hearing and singing thirds.

Later in life, I wondered why stop at thirds? So (with some prompting from my father) I expanded my horizons to other intervals! First, try going up by fourths, down by thirds again and again as before – then reaching the top and going down by fourths and up by thirds which brings you back to the starting note. This is a challenging exercise which is very helpful for understanding other pitch relationships. If you are brave, you can go through all of your intervals in a similar manner. It gets progressively harder – wait until you try sevenths!

At first, this will be a great challenge. But eventually, you will become fluent with all of your intervals utilizing these exercises. You will get to a point where you will begin to comprehend the notes of music you hear because you will have mastered all diatonic pitch relationships.

The short answer is sure; why not? However, you really need to ask yourself what your intentions and expectations are. You should also be aware of the style of music that you would primarily want to play.

For example: if you want to play some blues or honky-tonk piano or maybe you want to play some pieces you make up or sing too, you might be just fine on your own. You might be able to find some good online resources and develop as a pianist and musician on your own.

When it comes to classical music, however, you will be at a severe disadvantage without the help of a teacher. The complexities of reading a score, the traditions developed over hundreds of years, advanced techniques, there are a number of roadblocks that would be incredibly difficult to overcome on your own. Even if you are a genius, you will progress at a much slower rate than someone who has assistance from an experienced teacher.

If you are interested in other genres of music – jazz, rock, country, etc. – you can try and sit down with other musicians who are better than you and gain a lot of knowledge and experience from these types of “informal lessons”. Some of the greatest musicians in these other styles of music are not traditionally trained.

If you are serious about becoming a musician – really in any style of music – you will greatly benefit from one on one instruction a great teacher can provide.

Practicing slowly is essential in order to develop and maintain a high level of piano playing. There are actually several different components I’m going to discuss when it comes to the magic of slow practice. Even pieces that you have polished and are on performance level will benefit from the reinforcement of going through slowly. This means playing the piece slowly and definitely looking at the musical score, using no pedal and most often using the metronome. Practicing like this will help solidify your memorization and your fingers. I find this is the best thing to do in the final practice for a performance you are well prepared for.