Piano and Music Videos

Believe it or not, this is a question that is dear to my heart. I don’t know if any of you have noticed but I actually have very small hands.

This was a problem for me as I was growing up and working on more advanced repertoire; I was learning music that required reaching an octave, yet my hands could barely reach – I was only able to achieve this by playing around the keys as opposed to directly above them.

If you are learning to play the piano and your hands are too small to reach an octave, you will be at a severe disadvantage. However, it’s not impossible. I work with Jake Clayton, a 10-year-old pianist who has trouble reaching an octave but you would never tell by the way he plays Mozart Concertos or Chopin; he manages just fine.

At this point, Jake’s hands will eventually get bigger; mine, on the other hand, are pretty much stuck where they are. Now I have no trouble reaching an octave but when I get into playing music with 10ths and 11ths it requires a bigger reach then I can manage. You probably wonder, do I have to leave out notes? Actually no.

It’s not overly difficult and anyone can learn how to achieve this. The secret is learning how to break chords very quickly using the pedal; The difference is almost imperceptible.

While there may be disadvantages to small hands, there is also a tremendous benefit to having small hands for playing the piano. Believe it or not, some people have such large fingers that they can’t get their fingers easily between the black keys; so they will have to play on the outside of the keyboard as opposed to the inside near the fallboard – presenting a big challenge.

The most important part of playing the piano is achieving the sound you imagine. With practice, you can play the piano with small hands.

Welcome back to my two-part series on how to play the Beethoven moonlight sonata. Today we will be addressing a question from Dong about the third movement:

I’m still working on the 3rd movement of the moonlight sonata. I can’t get the measures 7 and 8: the problem is that I can’t do the broken chords while moving up octaves each time fast/ precise enough… can you give me some advice on how I should practice that?

For your reference, here is the section Dong is referring to in his question:

This part of the piece is much different from the ethereal first movement; it comes on fast like a bat out hell!

When you slow this part of the piece down you’ll find that it’s simply a broken minor chord going up by octaves, and then moves on to a diminished chord in the same manner. It is actually not so difficult to play once it is broken down into its component parts.

The secret is hand positions and finger patterns.

As I’ve addressed in previous videos, being over the right keys with each hand position change can make any passage much easier to play and helps to develop confidence in your playing.

In this piece, you simply play to the fifth finger – the C# – and then switch your hand position by placing the thumb on the exact same note you started with (the C#) and play the same sequence again.

In your slow practice – which we’ve addressed in a previous video – you’ll want to play up to and not past the 2nd C# – the one in which you switch hand positions and play starting with the thumb. If you play this correctly, you will end up instantly over the next cord simply one octave higher.

The trick is to position your hand over the chord as soon as you play the second C# with your thumb.

Start by playing slowly and then consistently practice faster and faster until you can get up to speed. Try just starting up until the second C# and get that up to speed, then move on from there to the next chord position.

The good news is that this is not just a technique for this piece or this movement. This hand and finger technique is something you can use in all your music. Being aware of hand position and finger patterns can make any technical challenge very manageable.

Welcome the first in the two part series of how to play the Beethoven Moonlight Sonata. This lesson will cover how to control voicing in the famous 1st movement.

Learning to balance the hands is one of the most challenging aspects of learning to play the piano. It gets even harder when playing the Moonlight Sonata because you have two different parts in one hand and you want to play one part louder than the other – using only one hand. This is truly a challenge and will definitely take some practice to master.

I’m going to provide some techniques to help you practice this part of the Moonlight Sonata but this is intrinsic information when it comes to piano playing; you can use these techniques for all your music!

(If you are not familiar with the first movement of the Beethoven Moonlight Sonata, you should be able to get the score on line.)

In this particular part you have two parts with the right hand – triplets on the bottom and a slow melody on top. The difficulty is compounded because the longer melody notes fade out while the accompaniment triplets keep repeating and are therefore naturally louder; so how do you balance the two?

If you try and play some notes louder than others you might not be able to achieve this at first. You might wonder how you would ever be able to practice something like that. There is a great technique to remedy this!

Instead of just practicing louder and softer with the right hand, practice with two completely different articulations. Play the melody legato and play the accompaniment part staccato (from the fingers); this will give you control.

By practicing in this extreme manner it will help to identify the feel of the melody compared to the accompaniment. Practice playing the accompaniment very lightly and play with just a touch of the fingers, not the wrist.

When you do play the piece as written – with the legato triplets on the bottom – feel that you are reaching for the melody notes on top and you will be able to control the sound from the fingers.

It is very important in your initial practice to not use the pedal; so you can accomplish the independence of your fingers from one-another and hear the voices clearly. The pedal is literally the last thing you add.

This is a technique you can use in all your music to bring out melodies. I’m very interested to hear any input or advice you might have regarding this technique. Thanks again for watching.

When I was growing up, I would listen to some of the great pianists such as Horowitz and Rubinstein. I would also listen to some of the pianists from the early 20th century such as Hoffman, Rachmaninoff, and Joseph Levine. I was always so impressed with the pristine finger work. It almost would sound like a string of jewels because of the evenness of the notes, and I always wondered how to achieve that sound. So today’s show is about how to achieve brilliant finger work.

I’m going to regress a little bit more. When I first started studying the piano with my father Morton Estrin, he showed me how to practice scales with raised fingers and often times my students ask me, “Why do I have to raise my fingers?” Let me show you what I’m talking about. With slow scale practice, it’s important for strength to raise the fingers. You may wonder why you would ever want to play that way because obviously when you play quickly, you don’t have time to raise your fingers. The secret to getting the evenness in your scale work and fast finger passages is the release of notes.

For example, if you were to put your hand on a flat surface and just try to lift one finger, some of them are pretty hard to lift. Lift your fourth finger with your hands on a flat surface, and it’s very hard. It’s actually the release of notes that takes more strength than the pushing down of notes! So to strengthen and then to release is the reason for practicing slowly with raised fingers so you’ll practice the release of each note and that will lead to the pristine beauty you can get in fast finger work.

Use the music: After you have the piece memorized, you must periodically go back and read the score carefully. I suggest playing slowly without pedal and using the metronome for the most dramatic results.

Practice slowly: Fast practice is like moving in quicksand. You dig yourself into the ground by reinforcing mistakes instead of identifying and eradicating them as you do in slow practice. Slow practice is like putting newsprint under a microscope. You see all the imperfections. This enables you to refine your playing by identifying rough edges.

Practice without the pedal: While the pedal makes everything sound better, when practicing, you can not only hear more critically without the pedal, but you will also be able to quickly hear fingering problems before they become ingrained.

Use the metronome: Even in music that has fluidity with the tempo will benefit from metronome practice. You need a reference of time to know how much you are bending the phrase with rubato. Also, when learning difficult passages, it is usual to slow down. Over time you may even overcompensate for difficult passages rushing them. Difficult passages can be mastered by increasing the metronome a notch or 2 at a time to speed up particularly difficult passages.

Take very small sections at a time: It is tempting to try to learn large chunks to save time. The problem is that it becomes overwhelming. If you take tiny sections at a time and master them, you will be able to sustain a productive practice much longer.

Practice in chords when possible: Not only does reducing the music to chords help to clarify the structure, it also helps to figure out the best fingering.

Always put corrections into context: Fixing a mistake isn’t enough. After you have mastered a correction, go back and connect the phrase to the preceding phrase. Then go back to the beginning of the section and connect, or you will find your old mistake recurring.

Practicing should be like a fine meal, served in courses: If you divide your practice into different sections of activities, you will be productive longer. First you may do some memorization. Then you can work on refining previously learned material. Then perhaps scales and arpeggios, and then perhaps some sight-reading. Doing any one skill for too long takes much greater mental effort and you may not work at optimum level.

Use the 80/20 rule: If you focus the majority of your time on the few places that are weak, you will get much better results than practicing equally on all sections of your music.

Be keenly aware of how you feel: It is essential to be relaxed, sitting comfortably at the right distance from the keyboard and at the right height to avoid injury. Also, you should take periodic breaks to stretch or at least take a short walk to keep your body limber. Be aware of any lingering pain and take appropriate steps to avoid injury.

How To Practice the Piano

3 Part Series

There are 3 separate skills in learning to play the piano:

• Memorizing

• Sight Reading

• Improvising

You can become quite proficient in one or two of these skills and be completely deficient in others. It is necessary to take a unique approach to develop each of these skills. The biggest mistake you can make is to not be clear as to which skill you are working on!

How To Sight Read Almost Anything

The piano presents tremendous challenges in sight reading. While basic tone production on the piano is easier than almost any instrument, (Just try to get a sound out of a flute!) composers make up for it by writing incredibly complex scores.

The secret is to keep your eyes on the music no matter what. If you look down at your hands, you will stop reading. You must count and keep your eyes moving to each measure without ever correcting mistakes. This is very unnatural since practice requires exactly the opposite approach.

If you count and keep moving, your hands will hit many right notes. The more reading you do, the more right notes you will get!