Piano and Music Videos

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’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’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.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how playing a second instrument can enhance your piano playing. I grew up studying the piano with my father, Morton Estrin, starting when I was seven and a half years old. He was such a great teacher! Shortly after, our school offered band, orchestra, and chorus. I joined all of them in the fourth grade. I played the French horn. So I had the benefit of playing two instruments. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to only play one instrument.

Once you play a wind instrument, it’s a revelatory moment.

I can tell you from my personal experience that it had a profound effect on me from the very beginning. Of course, the piano helped the French horn because I had a keen understanding of music theory, harmony, counterpoint, and all the things that are hard to imagine on a single-line instrument. But what about the horn and the effect that has had on my piano playing? On the piano, it can be difficult to evoke a sense of a singing line in your playing. Even just singing can help you with that. The piano is a percussion instrument, with all the notes fading out. Playing a wind instrument, you can get a true legato, slurs, and all of that.

When you play an orchestral instrument, you’re playing with other instruments almost all the time.

Whereas on the piano, many of you probably play by yourself predominantly. You don’t get the enriching experience of playing with other musicians. Also, when you’re playing to a conductor, you learn how the pulse of the music can be communicated and how to follow other musicians. You learn how to make a cohesive whole with other people. The entire experience is enriching, and it might encourage you to play chamber music or accompany on the piano with other instruments. There are so many benefits to playing other instruments. Every other instrument you play brings a different level and depth of understanding of music to what you’re able to achieve on the piano.

So if you play another instrument or sing, consider that a benefit to your piano playing!

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m asking: Are you killing the goose that lays the golden eggs in your practice? Boy, it’s horrible to think that this could be possible. What am I talking about here, anyway? Well, it’s important to cover the most vital subjects in your practice and to work out exercises and technique. Some things are fun to work on, and some things are drudgery. You must strike a balance, or you risk the possibility of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs!

The goose that lays the golden eggs is your passion for the instrument.

If you force yourself to do things that you know you need to do in your practice, but you feel like it’s drudgery to sit down at the piano because the stuff you need to do is so distasteful, then what do you have left? If you don’t love the instrument, then you’re not going to want to practice it anyway. In your practice, of course, you must do certain vital things. And there are some things that maybe you’d rather not do. Maybe you don’t want to work on scales or memorization.

Find time for the important things and balance it out with things that bring you great joy on the instrument.

You have to have some enjoyment, so it’s not all work and no play. You should do some things just because you love to do them instead of falling into a routine that you think you have to do because it’s important. Find the balance between what is productive and what is enriching! That will take you much further than beating yourself up and driving something into the ground until you don’t even want to do it anymore. Make time for what’s important. And if you make the time for playing and enjoying your instrument, then you’ll be able to balance the time spent on important things that may be very challenging. The challenging aspects of your practice can give you a bit of a sickness in the pit of your stomach if you do them too much. Let me know in the comments how many of you have faced this issue! I know it’s a tough thing, particularly for younger students.

Most kids hate to practice.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we’ll be discussing two methods of piano practice, and one is clearly better. I’m wondering which one you do. What are these two macro-methods of piano practice? One is the shotgun approach, and the other is the band-aid approach. I want to explain what each of these methods entails and why one is clearly better than the other.

What is the shotgun approach?

Some of you probably like to sit down at the piano to practice your music and go through the whole piece. Then you start over, and you go through it again. You try to work through the whole piece because you want to cover everything. I would describe this as a shotgun approach. You’re kind of covering everything because you know everything is important.

What is the band-aid approach?

You start your piece, but instead of going through the whole thing, you zero in on where you know the weaknesses are and focus on what needs work. Then, after you’ve gotten that section nailed down, you can go back and try to connect it with the previous section. After that, you can go back further. As soon as you come to a section where something doesn’t feel secure or doesn’t sound quite right, once again, you’ll focus your attention on that. The band-aid approach is strategic practice.

You don’t need to practice everything equally!

You will get so much more done using the band-aid approach. I know it’s gratifying to play the music and try to cover all your pieces because it makes you feel like you’ve really accomplished something. But it’s definitely not the most efficient way to get things done when your time is limited, which is the case for most people. I know that when I sit down to practice, I want to get as much done as I can for every minute I’m practicing. So I go right for what I know needs work. I spend the vast majority of my time that way. It’s the 80-20 rule: spend 80% of your practice on 20% of the material. Perhaps it’s more like the 90-10 rule. You could spend 90% of your time on 10% of the material. It makes a world of difference to gain security where you really need it.

Remember: avoid the shotgun approach!

The shotgun approach is not in your best interest most of the time. Occasionally, you will want to go through all your music as a check to see where to focus your next practice session. Then you can use the band-aid approach, as I described. What practice method works for you? Let us know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! We have thousands of videos and articles about almost every subject you can imagine! You can also consider joining our Patreon, where we make videos just for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.