Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you the secrets of how to play softly on the piano. Have you ever tried to play something softly, but the notes just don’t play? You try to create beautiful melodic lines with decrescendos at the end of phrases, but the notes just drop out. What’s going on? Is something wrong with you? Is your piano broken?

It takes great energy to play softly on any instrument.

In a symphony orchestra, for example, when there is a quiet woodwind solo, whether it’s a clarinet, oboe, flute, or even a French horn solo, you’d be amazed at the energy they are utilizing in order to project the sound. Even though it’s soft, it has to somehow get out to the audience through a 60 or 80 piece orchestra. Yet it doesn’t sound loud because they are not expelling their air. They’re just putting the air under tremendous pressure with diaphragm support, much like a great singer can sing with a beautiful sustained sound and achieve whatever volume they want.

What’s the analog of breath on the piano?

I’ve talked a great deal about arm weight. It takes much more energy than you may think in order to project a quiet melody on the piano. A good example of this is the second movement of the famous Mozart C Major Sonata K545. It’s all pretty much soft throughout. If you play it without much intensity, it will sound lifeless. So you have to use some intensity. First of all, you need to overcome the accompaniment in the left hand! The accompaniment is supportive. It should be like the babbling brook under a boat floating on water. It supports it, but you don’t want to call attention to it.

One secret is to play very quietly keeping your fingers close to the keys.

Stay very close to the keys, and make sure you depress the keys all the way down. As long as the keys depress all the way in one motion, all the notes will play on a well regulated piano. But to project the melody, you have to use a tremendous amount of arm weight. What do I mean by that? I mean that when you play that first note, you are actually holding up your whole arm with that single finger. That finger is holding up your arm! You’re not holding up the arm with your shoulder anymore. That way, the weight can be transferred smoothly from note to note, achieving a beautiful line.

That is the way to project a melody in a piano context so it’s above the accompaniment.

Keep your left hand light, and just push the keys to the bottom with a minimum amount of effort. The right hand supports a tremendous amount of weight that transfers smoothly from key to key giving a singing line. And yes, it will still be piano! It’s also possible to get nuance in your phrasing, the rise and the fall of the melody as it goes up to the middle of the phrase, and then descends to the end of the phrase. Just like speaking. There is a natural rise in the middle of a sentence when you speak, and the sound tapers off when you finish. Music imitates life. And when I say life, I mean literally breathing! You have to have that rise and fall. You get the analog of the breath on the piano through the use of the weight of your arm.

Don’t be afraid to use a lot of energy.

It’s just like a musician in an orchestra projecting the melody from the back of the woodwind section. You have to do the same thing by utilizing arm weight, projecting melodies in your music that are written piano and pianissimo. That is the way to achieve it.

Let me know how this works for you! If you have questions about your piano, whether it’s capable of this, you can email me Robert@LivingPianos.com. I’m very responsive to comments, particularly on LivingPianos.com. You can post your comments on YouTube as well. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about why you must play on more than one piano. I am very fortunate because I’m always surrounded by pianos. As a matter of fact, when I was born, there was a piano in my bedroom, and my father had two pianos upstairs as well! We had four pianos in our house most of the time when I was growing up.

There was a time when I was first married that we had 27 pianos in our house!

I was teaching piano, and oftentimes, prospective students didn’t have pianos. This was before the days when you could buy a fairly inexpensive digital piano that would be serviceable for a beginning student. So I made it my business to have lots of inexpensive pianos around. I’ve been surrounded by pianos my entire life! Now with Living Pianos, I have a concert grand Steinway, a six-foot two-inch Steinway, a Mason and Hamlin grand, a Knabe grand, and I have a Chickering baby grand upstairs to name a few. I am loaded with pianos! But what about you?

How can you play more than one piano, and why should you?

Why is this so important? My wife is a flutist. My daughter is a violinist. So, like most instrumentalists, they can take their instruments with them wherever they go. So it’s no surprise when they show up for performances. The acoustics may offer challenges they’re not used to, but at least they have their own instruments with them. As pianists, we don’t have that luxury unless you’re only playing for yourself, by yourself in the same place all the time. If you never want to play for anybody else or with anybody else, then maybe you don’t need to play on more than one piano. But for most of us, you want to be able to play at school, at church, at friends’ houses, maybe you even play occasional concerts.

When you sit down at a piano you haven’t played before, everything feels different.

The pedals respond differently. The touch is different. The tone is different. The only way you can really learn to overcome that is by playing other pianos. Naturally, if you’re playing a concert, you want to have a chance to try out the piano beforehand, if at all possible. Sadly, a lot of times it’s not possible. You get to the hall, maybe a few minutes before and there’s noise. Maybe they’re vacuuming. You never get a chance to really try out the piano. And I’ve got new news for you. Even if you get the opportunity to play a piano in a hall before a performance, once people come into the room, it changes the acoustics and it can feel markedly different!

How can you play different pianos?

You can try to go to piano stores, although piano stores are not there for that purpose. You might not be welcome just to play pianos there. But some stores might allow you to play their pianos if you ask them very nicely. If you’re in the market for a piano, of course, they will welcome you to try different pianos. But I would never suggest that you pretend you’re looking for a piano and waste their time because they’re very busy and have work to do. You don’t want to take their precious time away from their job. Oftentimes, schools have multiple pianos, If you can figure out how to get in and play those pianos. Maybe at your own school or church or some other place, you can find a piano to play. If you’re on vacation and you’re jonesing for a piano, you might scope out the bar to see if there’s a piano there, or maybe tucked away in a corner outside of the convention rooms. I always make a beeline for these pianos when I’m on vacation!

There are many different places you can try out pianos. It’s really important. The way the tone develops, for example, in the bass on a larger grand is so different from that of a spinet or a console piano. If you’re playing on digital pianos all the time, you don’t even have anything close to the feel of a grand piano. So it’s vitally important if you want to be able to adjust to pianos you encounter.

Is that the only benefit? Far from it!

You will learn so much about your playing, about your technique when you play other instruments. You may discover that a problem you thought you had in your playing is actually your piano! Maybe your piano doesn’t repeat fast enough. Maybe the regulation isn’t great. Maybe the tone of your piano is lacking in one area or another and you’re constantly overcompensating.

When you play other instruments, you realize how individual your piano is, because every single piano is different.

In fact, even brand new pianos of the same make and model are markedly different from one another. Each instrument is its own work of art. So try to play on different pianos any opportunity you get. You will grow as a pianist and a musician, discovering new possibilities of tone and phrasing, and finding new technical solutions on different actions. Try it out. Let me know how it works for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. We now have over 1,300 videos here on Living Pianos and YouTube! After 1,300+ videos, what more is there to say? Well, quite a bit, really! Today’s subject is about how to develop more speed in your piano playing. I did a video about this years ago. It’s worth watching. You can see that video here. But today I’m going to share one particular secret which is the whole basis for developing speed at the piano. Before I get to that, I’m going to talk about the simple physics of the piano.

More motion equals greater volume – Less motion equals faster speed.

I’m going to break it down into finger technique and wrist technique. I’ll show you how both of them work. To demonstrate, I’m going to use the Ballade by Burgmuller. This is a great little piece to demonstrate both techniques. The right hand has chords which utilize wrist technique. While the left hand has fast 16th note finger work. So let’s first talk about the wrist technique first in the right hand. When you’re first learning this piece, you should articulate everything clearly by differentiating each finger and each wrist motion to achieve precision in your playing.

Wrist technique:

It’s just like if you want a lot of power doing anything. For example, let’s say you are hammering in some nails. You would naturally lift the hammer up high enough to gain momentum of the hammer. which provides more motion. You’re obviously going to get far greater power from the extra motion of your arm. Well, in piano, you don’t use your arms for this type of technique. But you do use your wrists. So in slow practice you want to articulate the chords with your wrist. Later, you can use less motion to achieve faster speed. When going slowly, you can play chords with quite a bit of power if desired. Now in this particular piece, it is written at a low dynamic level. But if you want to play them loud, more wrist motion will accomplish that. As you go faster, you use less motion and stay closer to the keys.

Finger technique:

It isn’t just your wrists! It also is true of finger work. As you begin to learn a piece, use raised fingers and sink your fingers into the keys, much like you do when practicing exercises or scales and arpeggios at a slow speed, because it helps to delineate the release of notes. It’s actually far harder to lift up previously played fingers than to play new notes. What do I mean by this? Well, you can demonstrate this for yourself. Put your hand on a flat surface, and lift your fingers one at a time. You will notice the fourth and fifth fingers are particularly hard to lift up when your other fingers are down. However, pushing your fingers down is not so hard.

One of the most important finger techniques to develop on the piano is the release of previously played notes.

If you don’t practice releasing notes, you can get a blurry sound. Worse yet, imagine if your thumb didn’t release and couldn’t play again! The first three notes of this piece are C, B natural, and then C again. If the C doesn’t come up in time, it won’t replay after the B plays because it would still be down. That’s why in slow practice, practicing with an exaggerated motion of the fingers can really help your hand learn which fingers are down and which fingers are up. Try this and you’ll see the power you can get by using strong, raised fingers. Typically you don’t play this way in performance, but in practice it can be extremely valuable when you’re first learning a piece. You want to really articulate the notes to figure out your hand position, and to feel your fingers really dig into the keys. You want to start very slowly with a lot of motion and raised fingers. As the tempo increases, you’ll notice that the fingers stay closer and closer to the keys. Again, less motion equals more speed.

It’s simple physics really. When you need power, you use more motion. And when you need speed, you use less motion.

That’s the lesson for today! Try this in your playing. If you come to a passage you’re working on, and you can’t get fast enough speed, try lightening up. Stay closer to the keys, and you’ll be astounded at how much faster you can play by simply using less motion! I hope this lesson is helpful for you. I’m producing a lot more videos and it’s all for you! You can email me and let me know what you’d like to see in future videos. Tell me what topics you are interested in. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Thanks for subscribing, and telling people about Living Pianos. There are more piano videos coming your way on LivingPianos.com – Your Online Piano Resource!

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. A few weeks ago, I put out a video on the top 5 piano lesson fails. I thought it was only fair to do the other side of the equation. So today, I’m sharing the top 10 piano teacher fails! Incidentally, these aren’t just about piano teachers. Most of these apply to all teachers. So I think you’ll be very interested in this!

1. Your teacher doesn’t show you how to practice.

You go to your lesson. Your teacher makes corrections and they assign new material. When you get all done, they tell you to practice. You leave the lesson and go through those corrections. You have your new piece. But how do you practice? You realize you have no idea even how to approach the practicing! That’s because they didn’t show you how to practice. When you leave a lesson, you should know exactly what it is you have to do and how to do it. Just telling a student to practice isn’t enough.

2. Your teacher doesn’t show you how to memorize.

You learn a piece and you’ve played it for a long time. Finally, at the end of the lesson, your teacher says, “For next week, I want you to have this memorized.” You get home and you start from the beginning. You see if you know any of it. You remember just the first couple of bars. Your fingers kind of just go to the right keys because you’ve played it so many times. Then you wonder, “Well, now what do I do?” You can’t figure out how to memorize because your teacher didn’t show you how to memorize! They just expected you to know how to memorize.

This is really bad for a number of reasons. First of all, it makes you feel like something’s wrong with you! The teacher expects you to be able to memorize and you can’t do it. You feel like maybe you just aren’t smart enough to know how to memorize. Well, nobody can just instantly memorize! I guess there are some amazing geniuses out there who can just play music and it’s memorized immediately. Of course, if music is simple enough, maybe just sheer repetition will work. But if you have just one week to get something memorized, and you don’t have a method or a process, you’re in trouble. So, if your teacher tells you to memorize, ask them how to memorize. If you don’t get a clear, concise answer, then you might consider getting another teacher if memorization is important to you.

3. Your teacher gives you music that is too hard for you.

This is something that is so blatantly wrong and common! Teachers give music that’s too hard. Now, why would they do that? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First of all, you might be begging your teacher to give you a certain Chopin etude. So part of it can be inspired by the student asking to play something that is really not appropriate for their level. Another thing is that teachers often like to brag to other teachers and pianists. “I have students playing Liszt etudes and late Beethoven sonatas.”, or whatever it may be, because it makes them feel like they’re really good teachers. Or maybe they’re tired of the easy pieces they teach all the time. If a student asks for something that’s too hard, they just say, “Go ahead and do it.” They figure, at least they’ll be listening to something that they like. Occasionally, studying a piece far more advanced than you have played before, can help you reach new levels in your playing if you are willing to put in the hours of practice necessary to master it. But all too often, you can end up wasting valuable practice time on something you can’t end up playing on a decent level.

4. Your teacher talks over your head.

This is something true of almost all subjects. Some teachers will talk over your head. They’re talking as if you understand them, and you sort of do, but not quite. You don’t even know what question to ask. You feel like it would make you seem stupid if you ask a question after your teacher talks to you like you understand. This is particularly true with music theory. Maybe they expect you to understand some complex harmonic progression and they think, “Well, this is the C diminished, which obviously is going to be in the key of D flat.” And you go, “Mm-hmm”. Before you can even formulate the question, they’re going on to the next thing. “So this is the diatonic chord in this key. And you can see, well of course the key signature…” You’re nodding along hoping you will eventually catch on, but you never really understand anything they’re talking about! You sort of get it. And once again, you think there’s something wrong with you because you think you should understand what they’re talking about! They seem so brilliant. And if they think you understand it, you should. Well, sometimes teachers don’t appreciate the foundation you need in order to follow the whole chain of a conversation. You could be lost at the beginning and kind of nodding along, thinking, “Oh, I’ll get this eventually by the end of this talk.” But then before you know it, you’re onto the next topic, and you never even get to it. So this is a really big problem.

5. Your teacher never reviews what you’ve learned previously.

Your teacher introduces something new. Great! “Today, we’re going to do harmonic analysis.” So you spend a little bit of time with it. But that’s the last time it ever comes up. Next time they bring up something else, like how to play scales in contrary motion. They do it once, then you never hear about that again. You never quite got it. Before you know it, you’re going on to two, three, or four other things. There’s no follow through. So you end up with all these little tidbits of knowledge that go by the wayside. You never really understand any of them because your teacher is not consistent in the instruction.

6. Your teacher’s instructions are too vague.

Have you ever gotten some abstract instructions? You’re playing a piece and your teacher says, “Over here, make it sound like butterflies flying through the wind in the flowers.” You’re thinking, “Wow, that sounds great.” You’re just so impressed with the imagery. But you think, “What do I do to make it sound like butterflies?” You love the whole concept of it so much that you don’t want to ask about it. Abstract comments can sometimes give you some vague idea of what you’re after. But if it’s not followed through with specific instructions about how to achieve that sound, it can be meaningless. It might sound good, but you need more than that.

7. Your teacher makes you feel bad about yourself.

Now we’re getting to some of the heavy things. There are some really destructive things that teachers can do. A teacher might say something passive aggressive like, “That’s good if you think you like it that way.” They make you feel small. They’re saying things to you and making you feel terrible. Why is this so destructive? Well, first of all, it’s hurtful! Also, it might make you just give up on the whole idea of piano. If you’re constantly demeaned at lessons, then you lose the joy. What’s the point of studying piano if you can’t enjoy it, right?

8. Your teacher yells.

Teachers who yell, there’s really no excuse for this. It really is verbal abuse. “Why don’t you know your scales? You should know this by now!” Or, “You didn’t memorize this piece? I told you to memorize it!” Any kind of yelling, there’s no place for that in a piano lesson. There is one tiny exception. I notice that with online lessons, occasionally the technology doesn’t cooperate. A student is playing a sonata and I need to stop them. I’m going, “Hey! Hey!” Trying to get somebody’s attention online. But that’s a different story. I’m talking about yelling at a student because they’re doing something wrong. The teacher thinks they need to yell to make their point. No. That’s not an appropriate way to make a point. End of story.

9. Your teacher physically harms you.

I’ve heard so many stories about teachers who hit their students. Hitting is absolutely wrong in any circumstance during a lesson! There’s an old story, you’ve probably heard of teachers who used rulers to make students’ corrections. Every time there was a wrong finger, whack! The teacher thought, “If they know they’re going to get hit, they’re going to play with the right fingers.” Well, aside from the potential for damage, pain is not a good way of getting people to be open to concepts of instruction. Hitting is just absolutely wrong.

Early on in my teaching career, I had a student who hit me! It was a child, but a child who was old enough to know better. And Janine, if you’re listening now, I forgive you. She was actually joyful to work with and it really didn’t hurt. But it was kind of weird to be hit by a student! But hitting from a teacher, or a student for that matter, is absolutely inappropriate, obviously.

10. Your teacher doesn’t allow you to play through anything.

This can be so frustrating! You start your piano lesson and begin playing. You make a mistake early on and your teacher stops you. “That was wrong.” So then you try to continue, but you’re kind of put off by this. So you go on and make a mistake again, just because you’re not in your groove anymore. Before you know it, you’re so afraid of being stopped, that you’re not even concentrating on the music anymore! This is so counterproductive. A teacher has to let you play through your music so they know how to guide the lesson. That’s how they can see the points that need to be covered during the course of the lesson. They must listen through. Even if there are several things they think they absolutely must discuss with you, if they don’t hear everything, how do they know the priorities of the lesson? They don’t. Worse yet, it doesn’t give you an opportunity to show them the hard work you did during the course of the week. You want to show them your achievements and feel good about them before getting to work. So, if you have a teacher who doesn’t let you play through things during the course of a lesson, that’s not going to work. It’s not going to be a very useful or valuable lesson for you.

Those are the top 10 teacher fails!

I wonder if any of you have other teacher fails to share. Let me know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com or YouTube! Thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for subscribing, and telling people about Living Pianos. There are more piano videos coming your way on LivingPianos.com – Your Online Piano Resource!

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Supplemental Content:
Top 5 Piano Lesson Fails