Piano and Music Videos

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

This is LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin asking the question: What is the most productive practice routine? I’m sure this is important to many of you. If you spend a lot of time during the week practicing the piano, you want to get as much accomplished as possible. People often ask me, “How much time should I spend on this or that? Should I be doing exercises?” People sometimes feel lost deciding what to practice. They don’t know if they’re spending the appropriate amount of time on each discipline. I’m going to give you things you should be doing in your practice daily, or almost every day. Certainly, the ones at the beginning of this list are going to be things you should do every day, and towards the end of the list are things you should do every week. I’m listing them in order of importance of how much time you should spend on the following tasks:

As a pianist, learning music is of paramount importance.

You should spend the vast majority of your time memorizing music, or if you’re a collaborative player, learning scores of accompaniments or chamber music. This is the hardest part of practicing, and you have to spend the majority of your practice time doing it. There’s no shortcut to this. I wish there was some way the works of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Ravel, Debussy, Chopin, Liszt, and others could be embedded in my head and in yours! But there isn’t. You have to just painstakingly practice bit by bit assimilating music. That is the primary thing you should be doing in your piano practice on a daily basis.

Refine the music you have learned on previous days.

Whatever you’ve learned the day before isn’t solidified yet. As a matter of fact, when you first sit down to practice, you might think, “Did I even learn this yesterday?” It may seem quite foreign. Mostly, you’ll find that when you’re reading through the music, it will come back to you quickly. But a lot of times it doesn’t. You’re not alone! There’s nothing wrong with you. If you have to relearn the music you just learned the day before, welcome to the club! It happens. But don’t fret, because when you just go through the same steps of relearning, it comes back much more quickly than the first time you learned it. Just go through the memorization steps again, and the second time you learn it, you will retain it much better.

Review your pieces.

What else is there besides memorizing new material and reviewing the music you learned days before? Well, there’s always review pieces you should work on. If you don’t work on review pieces, you’ll never have the familiarity of something that you’ve lived with and played many times. Reviewing your pieces keeps them at a high level. Then, at any time, you’re ready to play at least two or three pieces on a high level because you play them nearly every day. From time to time, you should take out the score. Take your foot off the pedal. Look at the score carefully, and play slowly. Use the metronome, reinforcing your memory. But at the very least, you should play through a few pieces every day. It’s of tremendous value keeping your music in shape and simply moving your fingers. It provides good exercise for you as well, which seamlessly leads us to the next topic:

Play through exercises regularly.

What exercises should you do? Primarily scales and arpeggios. If you’re not up to scales and arpeggios yet, you can do simple Hanon exercises just to strengthen your fingers. When playing exercises, slow practice is vitally important. You actually get more physiological benefit from slow practice than you do from fast playing. Plus, it trains your fingers. You will feel which fingers are down and which fingers are up by exaggerating the finger motion. You get clean releases of the notes so you avoid muddiness in your playing. You should use the metronome when practicing Hanon exercises, as well as scales and arpeggios. Always practice slowly with raised fingers first. Then playing two notes to the beat, and finally four notes to the beat staying close to the keys, and playing lighter. Play at four notes to the beat many times so that you’re used to playing a lot of notes quickly and evenly. It’s a godsend for your technique!

There’s also wrist exercises. At the beginning, I like to teach simple exercises in thirds. Once again, use the metronome. Make sure you identify your wrists separate from your arms. You don’t want to move your arms up and down when working on wrist technique. You want your arms to place your hands exactly in the right position over the keys. Why? Because slow practice is preparation for being able to play faster for articulated staccatos and such. Eventually, you’ll be working on octave technique which also comes from the wrist. I have a little octave exercise you can reference. You can even work on scales in octaves! You can work on fingers all day long, but If you don’t work on wrist exercises, you’re not going to develop your wrist technique which is essential for piano playing.

Sight reading should be a part of your daily work as well.

It can be fun exploring new music or playing different styles of music that you like but don’t ordinarily play. Just pick up the sheet music and read through it! Find music on your reading level. It’s not going to be the same level of pieces you’re studying. Pieces you’re breaking down bit by bit, hands separately, then putting them together, and working through methodically, are going to be far more complex than pieces you can simply read accurately after playing them through maybe two or three times. If you can’t play the music you’re sight reading perfectly after two or three times slowly, then it’s not the appropriate level for you to sight read. Your reading level will grow if you do it every day. Better yet, find people to play with. When you’re forced to keep going, that is the best way to develop your reading abilities.

Improvisation is awesome!

If you’re not fluent with improvisation, just do anything, even if it’s just abstract chords. You can experiment with various styles of improvised music, whether it’s blues, jazz, or new age. Just come up with anything. Have fun with it! You’ll be developing your ears while you’re doing this. It provides great value. You don’t necessarily have to do this every day, but it can’t hurt. Experiment with it. It not only helps you to improvise better, but it’s a lifesaver when you develop a connection between the keys you play, and what you hear. If you ever have a memory slip in performance, you can feel your way back because if you have improvised a great deal, you will know what sounds are going to be created from the keys you play. You develop a connection with the keyboard. So do a little improvisation. Even just a few minutes a day can help your piano playing tremendously.

Take some time for theory.

What are you going to do with theory? Well, your teacher might guide you, and you can also simply study your music. If you have a piece, you can take time to study the score and figure out what it’s all about. For example, you can figure out what the harmonies are doing. Or if you’re doing a sonata, you know it changes keys in the second subject since all sonatas do. Determine where it changes key. Look at the accidentals to be able to figure out where the piece is going to the dominant (the key starting on the fifth note of the key of the piece). Study your scores. It will help you to learn them better and avoid taking wrong turns in performance.

Are those all the things you can do in practice?

No. Make practice an exciting journey! You can sing. You can improvise while singing. That’s an excellent test to know if you are hearing what you’re playing. If you can sing what you’re playing, then you know you’re hearing it. That is really key to being able to solidify memory in your classical playing. This is just the tip of the iceberg. These are fundamental things you should be achieving in your daily work. Remember, learning new music is number one. Refining what you did the day before is number two. Number three is playing review pieces. Enjoy them! There’s time for scales, arpeggios, octaves, wrist exercise, things of that nature as well. Then reward yourself with some sight reading for fun and just make some music up with improvisation. Then delve into some music theory. Study the music that you’re learning or music you want to learn. These are all great things you can do on a regular basis to keep your practicing productive, rewarding, and engaging, which is the most important part!

Whatever you do, make sure you’re not just going through the motions.

Be sure you’re actually involved in the process. After all, practicing is a mental activity. If you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing, it really isn’t practicing no matter how long you sit at the bench. Make sure you’re getting something done with your time. Thanks so much for joining me. 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

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to practice with a metronome. The metronome is one of the most valuable tools for your practice. It is perhaps the most valuable tool other than the instrument you’re playing on. The metronome is something that should be on your piano whenever you practice, to check your work, and to work out passages.

How do you use a metronome to work through a section of a piece?

Let’s say you’re working on the famous Alla Turca movement of the famous Mozart Sonata in A major K.331 no. 11. You get to the F-sharp minor section that has some tricky finger work, and it isn’t gelling for you. Some people might think you should go through the whole piece with the metronome. There is value in doing that to check your tempo, and the consistency of speed throughout a movement. It’s important to make sure you’re not speeding up or slowing down. But what I’m going to show you today is how to use the metronome to be able to solidify a passage like this. So let’s say you aren’t happy with your playing in the F-sharp minor section. It’s not as even as you would like. What can you do about that?

Find a speed on your metronome at which you can play the trouble section evenly and beautifully.

Taking too large a section to do progressive metronome speeds can sometimes be counterproductive. If you work on smaller sections, and then string the sections together later, you might have more success. Not only that, but maybe there’s a section you can already play up to tempo, but the next section still needs improvement. It’s unnecessary to work all those metronome speeds on both passages.

There are metronome applications for your phone that allow you to simply tap in the tempo. That’s a real help. If you are using a traditional metronome, you just start tapping or clapping along with your music as you sing or play mentally, so you can match the speed on the metronome. Make sure that it’s a comfortable speed for you. The most important thing is finding a speed at which you can play it perfectly. Once you can play the passage absolutely perfectly, and repeatably, you’re ready to increase the speed. But make sure you find the speed at which you have absolute security first.

The first time you do this, you’re going to find it to be really difficult to play perfectly at any tempo.

Here’s the key: Spend the time on the front end. Play it perfectly even with comfort. If you find you can’t do that, slow the metronome down further until you find a tempo where you can. Make sure you can play without feeling you’re getting off from the metronome at all. Make sure it’s rock solid, steady, and repeatable. You should be able to get it at least three times in a row, perfectly. It should not only sound perfect, it should feel comfortable. Then once you have it at one speed, take the metronome up a notch.

Physical metronomes actually have one benefit that digital metronomes don’t have. On physical metronomes, each notch goes up multiple numbers instead of having every number. For example, 60, 63, 66, 69, 72, 76, 80, et cetera. Notice how the speeds progress from going up by three, to going up by four beats per minute. If you double the speed, 60 to 63, at 120, the next notch on the metronome is 126 which is double the slower speeds. It doesn’t just go up by three throughout the range of speeds on the metronome. So the progression of speeds on a metronome is calculated correctly. You don’t want to go from 69 to 70 to 71 because the increases in speed are infinitesimally small. But one notch on the metronome, or maybe two notches at most, provides just the right amount of challenge to speed up a passage. Once you can play it successfully and repeatably with comfort at one slow speed, go to the next notch on the metronome. So if you’re at 60, play the passage at 63. You may only have to play it once to feel that it’s perfect and keep going notch by notch. But anytime you have any issues where it doesn’t sound right or doesn’t feel comfortable, keep doing it at that metronome speed.

This is one of the greatest practice techniques for developing speed, fluency and evenness in your piano playing!

I recommend doing metronome speeds on a regular basis with anything in your music that isn’t up to a high standard. If you feel that there’s some passage work or any sections of your music that aren’t even, or aren’t reliable, find a speed at which you can play it perfectly, repeatably, and comfortably, and go through metronome speeds notch by notch. You can solve almost any technical problem this way. Try it out! Let me know how it works for you! You can leave comments here at LivingPianos.com or YouTube. Thanks so much for joining me. 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