Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. If you’ve watched my videos, you know I’m not a big fan of doing endless exercises. In fact, I often suggest turning your music into exercises. That approach can solve many problems while also solidifying the pieces you actually play. But today, we’re going to talk about four essential exercises that can elevate your piano playing. Anyone serious about playing the piano should include these four things in their practice routine. You’ll get tremendous benefits from them.

1. Scales

It’s not just about playing scales. It’s how you practice them that makes the real difference. Did you know that it’s much harder to lift fingers off the keys than to push them down? I’ve demonstrated this many times. Try it yourself. You’ll notice, especially with your fourth finger, that cleanly lifting it is more difficult than pressing it down. The best way to develop control is with slow practice, raising your fingers deliberately while keeping your hands relaxed. Use only your fingers, not your arms. Let the power come from the fingers themselves. As you practice slowly, keep your thumb tucked under in advance of when it needs to play. This is crucial for fluid thumb crossings. For example, in the right hand, the thumb should be tucked under the whole time except when it plays. This preparation avoids awkward movements when playing fast. The same principle applies in reverse for the left hand. Focus on raised, rounded fingers, with no up-and-down arm motion. You’ll start to feel strength and independence building in your fingers through this deliberate approach.

Interestingly, slow practice builds more muscular benefits than fast playing. Do four repetitions slowly at a tempo like 60 BPM, or whatever is comfortable for you. Once you’re confident, move on to two notes per beat, then four notes per beat. At faster speeds, lighten up and stay close to the keys to develop fluency. There’s no time to raise your fingers at that pace, so listen carefully for evenness and consistency. There are many ways to vary your scale practice, such as changing the phrasing, articulation, or dynamics. But before exploring those variations, it’s essential to first master the fundamentals. Learn all the major scales thoroughly and with intention.

2. Arpeggios

Arpeggios are just as important as scales, and they’re practiced in a similar manner. One complication with arpeggios is that thumb crossings are wider, so you might run into issues where your hands feel cramped or awkward. Just like with scales, tuck the thumb under in advance, but also incorporate a slight hand rotation. This lets you avoid raising your shoulders or adding unnecessary tension. Your right hand rotates slightly as the thumb passes under, and in the left hand, it’s the same idea in reverse. Always prepare the next note in advance.

You can also break down arpeggios into shorter groupings, which can help develop control and accuracy. There are many ways to approach this, and I’ve made plenty of videos on the subject. If you visit LivingPianos.com and type “arpeggios” in the search box, you’ll find a wealth of material to explore!

3. Developing the Wrist

Finger technique is only part of the story. Your wrists are also instrumental in piano technique, particularly for staccato, octaves, and chords. One of the best ways to train the wrist is with a simple exercise in thirds, using just the wrist for motion. It’s important to isolate the wrist from the arm. The arms are heavy and clumsy and simply can’t move fast enough. The goal is to identify and isolate wrist motion. In the exercise, your arms should not move up and down. Instead, let the arms guide your hands over the correct keys, and strike from above with a quick, sudden motion from the wrist. If this is new to you, you’ll feel it in your forearms. These are muscles you don’t typically use, so that’s a good sign. However, if you find yourself using the whole arm to generate motion, stop. That’s not the technique you’re going for.

This might seem like a simple exercise, but it’s all in the execution. Just go through this routine a few times a day and you’ll be amazed how much it helps with control and clarity in everything from staccato to dense chordal passages. When you see someone playing crisp staccato or powerful chords with ease, much of that control is coming from proper wrist technique. Take a piece like Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata, which is filled with repeated chords. If you try to play that with your arms, you’ll tire out quickly and lose articulation. Wrist technique allows for speed and lightness, which are critical in such music.

4. Octaves

The final exercise is octaves. This builds directly on the wrist technique we’ve already explored. This uses the same wrist principle but adds the strength of the hand’s arch. Why is the arch important? Because it equalizes the power between the strong thumb and the weaker pinky. Without the arch, your thumb would dominate and the sound would be uneven.

Start with a metronome at 60. Strike from above with the wrist, preparing each octave position in advance. Be sure to keep your second finger curled. That maintains the structural integrity of the hand. Use the wrist to balance the pinky and thumb so both land evenly. If you don’t do this, you’ll get a heavy, uneven sound where the thumb overpowers everything. Relax your shoulders and focus all the motion in the wrist. Imagine bouncing a ball. The energy comes from a quick, natural release, not a forced push. If you try to play octaves with your arms, you’ll quickly hit a wall with speed and stamina. The wrist allows for quick, fluid motion and prevents fatigue. Do as many repetitions as you can while maintaining proper form. Over time, this will dramatically improve your endurance, clarity, and control with octaves.

These Are Four Essential Exercises

Spend just a few minutes on each of these every day and you’ll see real improvement in your playing. Learn all the major and minor scales and arpeggios, and take your time. There’s no rush. You have a lifetime to enjoy the piano and develop your artistry! Thanks for joining me here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today, I’m going to show you how to start anywhere in your music. To have effective practice, you must be able to start anywhere. Let’s say you’re playing a piece of music. You mess up somewhere, and you keep starting at the beginning. Maybe the next time you get it, but you haven’t really solved the underlying weakness that caused that problem in the first place.

Being able to start where the correction is made is vital.

You want to be able to start where the correction is made, but sometimes it’s really hard to even find that place. I want to demonstrate this with a piece that’s difficult to start in the middle because it’s counterpoint. I’m going to use Bach’s Invention No. 1 in C major. Watch the video to see the demonstration! This piece does divide itself into some macro-sections that I can articulate for you. Suppose you have an issue in the middle of a section. So you decide to just start the whole section again. Whether you get it again or not, it doesn’t really matter because you still have the same odds moving forward of getting it or not getting it. Just finding the exact place is a big challenge! You must read your score and identify where it is. Now you know where to start, but you can’t start there. It seems totally foreign.

The reason it’s hard to start in the middle of a section is that you don’t know what fingering to use.

When you’re starting in the middle, it’s hard to figure out what fingering to use. So here’s the tip. Go back to a place you can start from. When you get to where the issue is, stop and pay close attention to what fingers are on what notes in each hand. Then you lock it in, and you can start from there. Now you can make the correction and get it solidified by playing through the passage a number of times. Then you go back to the beginning of that macro section and connect it several times until it is smooth.

To recap: Step one is: Find where the correction is. Step two: Go back to a place you can start from before that place. Step three: Lock in what fingers you use to start in that measure or phrase so you can effectively start there. Without this method, you get there, and it’s almost like you’re reading the music for the first time! It seems totally unfamiliar. Have you ever had that experience where you almost feel like you don’t even know the piece when you try to start in the middle? Your fingers know where to go, but you can’t solve the underlying weakness because you can’t start right at that particular spot. Well, now I’m giving you the tools to start from anywhere in any piece!

This is the way to have effective, productive practice!

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today, I’m going to show you how to practice Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Minor from book one of his Well-Tempered Clavier. First, I’m going to play it for you. Then I want to zero in on the fast section. The whole thing is 16th notes, and then just towards the end it gets fast. It’s a great prelude. I want you to hear it first, and then I’m going to show you a bunch of ways you can practice this prelude. Stay until the end, because the last technique I’m going to show you is the ultimate technique!

Some people spend countless hours learning exercises.

Instead of learning tedious exercises, you might as well use music to develop your playing. That’s exactly what I’m going to show you how to do here. I’m going to show you a whole bunch of ways you can practice this prelude. These methods are really valuable. It kind of turns this prelude into different exercises that have great value, not just for playing this piece but for developing your technique.

First, let’s talk about the obvious things you can do.

Turn the metronome on. Find a comfortable speed where you can play it accurately. At first, when you’re playing slowly, articulate each note with gently rounded, raised fingers. This way, you get precise release of notes so the notes don’t blur together. Take the tempo up one notch at a time. As you get faster, make the fingers more gently rounded, and stay close to the keys. Of course, you don’t raise your fingers when playing fast. It’s only a way to help you practice the release of notes when playing slowly. When you get faster, lighten up and stay close to the keys.

Another handy way of working on this is with different articulations.

For example, try playing with staccato fingers. Or you could play one hand staccato and the other hand legato. There are also different accents that you could use. You could do four-note groups. You can play with different rhythms. You can play with different dynamics in the two hands. Naturally, there are other things you can do—other rhythms or accents. Some people might even want to accent the offbeats. See the video for examples of each of these techniques!

You could just spend hours, days, weeks, months, or even years with this one prelude, turning it into hundreds of different exercises!

You can use these different practice techniques with your music instead of learning hundreds of different exercises, and you get the same value. Plus, you get the added benefit of learning a piece inside and out as a reward for your hard work.

As I promised, here is the ultimate practice technique.

I love this practice method because it really trains your hand and your brain to be able to play this piece by practicing different note groups. First, play through the section broken up into four-note groups. Then, when you get comfortable going through the whole section that way, you can practice playing groups of eight notes. And then you can play groups of 16 notes at a time. You can focus on sections that need work, and identify the precise group of notes that need to be solidified.

Zero in on the parts that need work.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to learn the piano. For me, it’s hard to imagine any other way because, from the youngest age, I started private lessons with my father, Morton Estrin, who was not only an incredible concert pianist, but also one of the most amazing teachers. I was very fortunate to have that opportunity.

Private lessons are a great way to learn to play the piano if you can find the right teacher.

I can’t tell you how many horror stories I’ve heard from people. Some teachers are just mean. Some will even hit their students’ hands with rulers! Many times, people study for years and years and discover they really haven’t learned how to play anything with solidity and confidence, because teaching any subject is an art that very few people possess, sadly. But I’ve known many people who have picked up piano on their own just by playing and listening. And they have managed to figure out how to play things to their own satisfaction. Formal piano instruction isn’t one size fits all. Some people can just pick it up on their own.

There are other ways of learning the piano.

Online resources are tremendous these days. I’ve seen people who have had great success just from watching YouTube videos with the notes going down, almost like Guitar Hero. To me, that seems much harder than reading the notation. But some people just want to learn which keys to push down. And you know, some people do very well just with that. But there are many other online resources. Here at LivingPianos.com, we have thousands of articles and videos on just about every subject you can imagine. What other possible avenues are there for learning the piano?

Piano classes are a great way to get introduced to the piano.

With piano classes, you have the social element, which can make it fun and enriching. However, I have taught piano classes, and the problem is that everybody has drastically different abilities on the piano. So private lessons are much better for really getting to any sophisticated level on the instrument. It’s not like some people are better and some people are worse. It’s the types of abilities. There are so many different skill sets that are necessary to play the piano. There’s the actual physiology and what type of hands you have, the connection from reading the score to the hands, the sense of rhythm, the sense of pitch, the sense of sound and tone. There are so many different aspects! People have talents in some areas and weaknesses in others. In a class situation, it’s very difficult for a teacher to really cater to everybody, and so it brings down the median level because the teacher can’t possibly be sensitive to everybody’s needs. But if you just want to get your feet wet, see how you like it, and meet other people who are interested in the piano, a piano class can be a good choice.

However you choose to learn the piano, it can be greatly rewarding!