Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to know when to move on in your piano practice. This is one of the most important aspects of working at the piano productively. After all, you don’t want to shortchange yourself and give up before you solve problems. Yet, you don’t want to bang your head against the wall and spend hours on something that isn’t progressing. This will leave you frustrated. You won’t even want to touch the piano anymore! So, what is the balance? Well, in a nutshell, it’s:

Realizing where you have reached the point of diminishing returns.

What do I mean when I say, “the point of diminishing returns”? I remember the first time I ever heard that phrase, I had no idea what it meant. I was a young child. I asked my father and he described it this way, which I think is a really good description. Imagine there’s a building going up in Manhattan on a very valuable piece of real estate. Building a house on that property would never make sense, because the land is worth millions of dollars. There’s no way a house is ever going to be worth that much. Not even a 10-story building will be worth enough no matter how elaborate. So you have to have enough stories to lease or sell in order to make the building profitable. But at a certain point, it gets more expensive to build higher and higher. You have a certain amount of costs involved per story, but anything above 50 stories starts to get extremely expensive. Eventually, you get to a height where it’s absolutely the point of diminishing returns. There’s no way you could possibly lease space or sell condos on that many floors to overcome the tremendous costs of building a structure so tall. That’s an example of the point of diminishing returns.

Understanding how this relates to your piano practice is essential.

What makes it tough is knowing when you should give up and when you should keep plowing ahead. I think you want to give things a good shot. For example, if you’re working on a difficult passage and it just isn’t coming, you try playing hands separately, you put them back together, and it doesn’t quite do it. Is it time to give up? Not necessarily. You might try going very slowly with the metronome and doing progressive metronome speeds. If you get to a certain point when you can’t get any faster, do you give up? Well, maybe not. Maybe you try to squeeze out a few more notches. Sometimes, you get to a point where you think you’ve taken the metronome as far as you can, then you lighten up your touch or something else, and boom, you get a few more metronome notches! But, then you get to a point where you’re spending so much time getting one more notch, maybe that’s the time to leave it for another day.

Oftentimes, when you are learning a new phrase or phrases you are assimilating into your memory, it becomes really difficult to get things beyond a certain point of refinement.

You might get the music really refined once or twice. Maybe you get it three times in a row way under tempo, and that’s all you can do with it. Well, try to squeeze a little bit more out of that. If you got it perfectly at least a few times in a row, even if it’s way under tempo, it’s very likely the next day, when you refresh your memory on it, you’ll be able to play it faster right from the get-go just from sleeping on it. So, you must know when to move on. The key is to not give up right away. Try a couple of different techniques. Try slowing down. Try hands separately. Try using the metronome. Try stopping at strategic points. You can also try playing very strong or very light. You can try accenting different notes in a passage, or you could even alter the rhythm. If you have straight eighths, you could make them into a dotted rhythm, then reverse the dotted rhythm.

There are many, many different techniques to try before abandoning something altogether. However, you don’t want to get stuck and spend so much time on so little music that at the end of a week, you have very little to show for your work. Sometimes just plowing through something, getting it perfectly two or three times in a row under tempo allows you to learn more music. Because the next day you can take all of that music up to a higher level and push forward in the score. So, you have one part from the day before that’s starting to come along, the part from two days ago is getting quite secure, and the part from before that is already at performance level. You’re working on all these different sections simultaneously.

Try to push to the point of diminishing returns in your practice!

Try many different techniques before giving up, but don’t feel that giving up is necessarily a bad thing. It allows you to move forward and amass more music in your daily practice. I’m wondering how this all works for you. Try it out and let me know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks so much for joining me. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is, are pickups measures? Let’s say a piece is in 3/4 time, and it starts with a quarter note. Is that a measure? For example, in the Beethoven Sonata Opus 49 No. 2, the famous G major Sonata, the second movement starts with a dotted 8th and 16th. Then there’s a bar line right after that. Are those first two notes, the dotted 8th and 16th, a measure? They’re in a box. Well, the movement is in 3/4 time. 3/4 time tells you there are three beats in each measure and the quarter note gets one beat. Since you only have one beat total with a dotted 8th and 16th, this can’t possibly be a measure. This is a pickup, sometimes called an anacrusis.

A pickup is simply a beat (or beats) before the first measure (or other measures).

After the first bar line comes the first measure. The pickup notes are not a measure. When learning a piece in 3/4 time that starts with pickups, each phrase starts on the third beat and ends on the second beat. The whole piece is kind of juxtaposed starting with the third beat. An interesting thing that you may have noticed in most pieces that have pickups is that they almost always end on beat that make up the time from the beginning. So indeed, if you look at the end of the movement of this Beethoven Sonata, it only has only two beats in the last measure !And yes, that is considered a measure even though it only has two beats. This is because it starts with a pickup on the third beat and ends on the second beat. You could actually loop it back to the beginning. Now this doesn’t repeat. Although sometimes, you will have repeated sections with da capos or repeat signs that will repeat with pickup. You’ll have a partial measure at the end and the pickup at the beginning. It all works seamlessly! So that’s the way pickups work.

Remember, pickups are not measures.

The first measure comes after the bar line. If you don’t have a complete measure, even if it’s two beats out of four, those would be two beat pickups. If you don’t have a complete measure at the very beginning of a piece after the time signature, that is considered a pickup. Take a look at the last measure of a piece that starts off without enough beats, and nine times out of 10, it’s made up for in the last measure. That’s an interesting little fact for you! You count that note at the beginning backwards from the first measure. That’s why the first note of this movement would be counted as three, not one. You never have two first beats in a row. You know that after the bar line is the first beat. So the beat before the first beat of the measure must be the third beat.

That’s everything you need to know about pickups!

I hope that’s cleared things up for you! I’m sure a lot of you are already well aware of this, but I thought I’d make this video in case there’s any confusion for anybody. 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. Today I’m going to discuss a musical stress test. What am I talking about? You practice, and practice, and practice, but you wonder if you really know the score. How do you know if you have security with the music? Are you ready for a performance? Are you ready for a lesson? Are you ready to accompany someone? How do you know when you’re ready? You don’t want to wait until the moment of truth comes to find out you weren’t prepared! How can you know? Because as you well know, you can play something by yourself in your home perfectly, and then when you try to play it for somebody else, it goes haywire. What can you do to test things out?

Try playing faster.

There are a lot of things you can do to test yourself. You can try playing things faster to see if you can still hold it together. Because when you get nervous, one of the first things that happens is your physiology speeds up a little bit. Your heart rate, your breathing, all of that speeds up. So guess what happens to your playing? You go faster! You don’t even think you’re going faster. I’ll never forget many, many, years ago, listening to recordings of myself as a child, playing in my dad’s student recitals. I couldn’t believe how fast I was going! I was playing faster than I ever played those pieces! It could be a disaster if you’ve never tried your pieces faster, and the first time it happens is during a performance. I’ve had times where I would keep my fingers crossed hearing my students perform in recitals taking outrageously fast tempos they had never tried before, hoping they had some reserve in their playing.

Another great thing you can do is record yourself.

Psych yourself up like it’s an actual performance. Set up a device, and go through your music and make yourself a little bit nervous. Make yourself feel like you are performing. The key is not to stop! Even if you mess up right at the beginning, keep going. Because that can happen in a performance, and you don’t want to start over. Nobody wants to hear you start over. First of all, it’s as much as announcing to everybody that you’ve messed up. But more than that, it destroys the continuity of the performance for the audience. Speaking of which, there’s no better way to create stress than to play for an audience. If you regularly play for people, play for more people. The more people you play for, the more nervous you’re likely to get. That’s the ultimate stress test. And if you c witanhstand that, then you’re ready for anything.

What I recommend is ratcheting up little by little.

Start with recording for a device. Then play for a family member or a trusted friend. Then play for larger and larger numbers of people until you’re ready for an audience. If you can withstand that and you can withstand playing faster than you usually play, you should be ready for a performance. You can also try playing on different pianos as a musical stress test. Play on a piano you’ve never played and see what happens! Right from the get go, without even trying the piano first, just jump right in. Play on as many pianos as you can. It’s a great way to improve your preparedness, because you can’t take your piano with you. Usually, you have to play whatever piano is wherever you are performing. So playing on as many different instruments as possible is another great way to get ready for your performance. Make sure you’re in the best shape possible to withstand anything in your playing. I hope this is interesting for you! 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. Today the subject is about learning the hardest part of a piece first. I’ve talked before about learning a new piece from the beginning and working in sequence. You should read through a piece a couple of times to familiarize yourself with it, then get to work bit by bit learning each phrase hands separately, then put the hands together and connect the phrases. So what’s this business about learning the hardest part first? I talked about starting from the end of a piece also, as one pianist once suggested to me.

I find that learning a piece sequentially generally makes much more sense.

It helps you to understand the whole evolution of thought and the mathematical materials and motifs of a piece of music. Sometimes, though, there’s a piece that has such a monstrously difficult section later on that if you don’t tackle it early, it will hold you up later. Something like a coda to a Chopin Ballade is going to take you a long time to really get polished and solid. If you just start with the coda first, by the time you get there, you’ll have the whole piece together! Because that coda is going to take you so much longer to be able to get up to the level of the rest of the piece.

In certain instances, you want to zero in on the hardest part of a piece first.

Does that mean that you shouldn’t start at the beginning? No. Quite the contrary. You take two approaches at once. You start the piece from the beginning in the manner I described earlier, while dividing part of your practice for working on the hardest section. Just working on the hardest part the whole time when you’re starting a new piece can be very discouraging. After all, you have a piece that you love the sound of, for example the Chopin G minor Ballade. The coda is hard. It will require special attention. But you might want to play that beautiful first theme. That’s something that you can get on a high level much sooner than the coda. So it keeps you engaged, working from two fronts. By the time you get to the coda, you’ve already learned it! You don’t have to learn the whole coda before you even start the piece. But you can work concurrently on the beginning, as well as the coda, and perhaps a couple of other key sections. So when you get to them, they’re not in their infancy. They’re already starting to gel. It is a tremendous benefit in your practice to zero in on some of the hardest sections while going through sequentially from the beginning. That way when you get to these hard sections, they’re already mature. They’ve started to coalesce for you. 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. I’m here today with a comment and question from a viewer. They said, “Your enthusiasm is amazing. How do you stay so passionate and enthusiastic? You should make a video on that.” At first when I read that, I was flattered and all. But then I started thinking about it and I thought you might be interested in the backstory as to why I always seem to be upbeat in my videos. I have over 1,200 videos and I don’t think I’m really depressed in any of them. Does that mean I’m never depressed? Well, no. Everybody has their ups and downs.

Growing up, my friends didn’t have a strong appreciation for classical music.

I grew up in a musical household. My father, Morton Estrin, was a concert pianist. Although he was a Professor of Music at Hofstra University, he did most of his teaching right at home. There was a big addition totally separate from the rest of the house where my father taught. So, I did connect with many of his students. But truth be known, my friends couldn’t have cared less about Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin. That stuff wasn’t cool. I would play a few popular songs, but it wasn’t really my thing. I didn’t listen to very much rock music. There were some songs that I really enjoyed, but my whole life was centered around classical music!

After all these years, to find an audience of people who are enthusiastic about the piano and classical music, the way I am, is actually thrilling!

I look forward to these moments. It’s not easy to find them! I manage to make videos every week. I’ve been doing them on YouTube since 2009 and first started making piano videos in the late 1990’s! That’s a long time. But even right now, I’m here in the showroom. Everything looks great. I’m having a good time. But at the same time, our water heater went out. Our basement is flooded and I’m waiting for a plumber to arrive. So, it’s not all as rosy as you may think! But I take life at face value to a great extent.

You live. You die. So you want to make something happen in between!

I make these videos to share the things that are important to me. It really is thrilling to have people watch and care about classical music and the piano in the 21st century. It’s not irrelevant! I’d love to hear your experiences with classical music as a child and growing up. Did people respect you for it, or did they mock you? I wonder what experiences all of you have had being immersed in classical music, assuming you are. You can comment on LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks so much for the question. And I appreciate the support from all of you subscribers out there! 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 Living Pianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about stage presence. How much should you move during your performance? How much emotion should you show during a performance? This is a deep subject. You would not believe how important stage presence is. I’m going to tell you a personal story first, then I’m going to talk about specific pianists and how they emote through the way they look on stage.

In high school I had an epiphany.

At my high school we had a student recital. There was one girl who sang and I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard in my life! I was so excited about it that I went to listen to the tape afterwards. But when I listened to it, I was shocked to discover that it wasn’t as great as I had thought it was. How could I have been so off on that? I thought it was a phenomenal performance. But I realized afterwards, the way she looked at the audience and the vibrancy in her whole presentation made it such an experience to watch her. That’s when I realized the significance of how you look on stage.

Your presence during a performance is part of your personal style.

Sometimes I will watch piano competitions on YouTube to see contest winners. It’s very interesting. But because they’re in a contest situation, oftentimes they’re very robotic. I have a video from years ago about extraneous motion in performance that you can see here. But the opposite of moving a lot is just being very still. I had an experience years ago hearing a great recital of Ivo Pogorelich, a phenomenal pianist. It was interesting how he dealt with the whole performance. Just before he came on stage the lights went out. You couldn’t see anything. The spotlight was on the piano. The hall was completely dark when he came out. Before the audience even stopped applauding, he just sat down and played. Straight ahead, business. He didn’t even look at the audience. I hadn’t seen that before. The playing was so superb though that it really didn’t matter, but it was an extreme style. If you’re on that level, maybe you can get away with that. Now, a polar opposite of that is someone like Lang Lang, who shows everything. For those people who are less sophisticated musically, there’s actually a lot of merit to that. You might not realize the mood of a piece, but when it’s shown with gestures, or even on the face of the performer, it can bring people in.

How do you know how much to emote on stage?

Watching concerts of Andre Watts, every single nuance of the music is interpreted through his body language, particularly his facial expressions. You don’t even have to hear the music to know what he’s emoting moment by moment. But how much is appropriate and how much becomes distracting? I think the most important thing about any kind of motion during a performance, or showing emotion on your face, is that it has to be genuine. If you really feel it and you’re showing it, there’s nothing wrong with that. And for those watching for whom the music is new, they’ll probably pay closer attention based upon the gestures or the facial expressions. It gives a clue to people as to what to listen for, which parts are surprising, which parts are sad. It can all be shown. It’s part of the performance.

Think of a great conductor.

The job of a conductor is to convey the feeling of the music, as well as the timing and many more aspects. Look at Leonard Bernstein conducting and you really get the sense of the music just watching him conduct. If you’ve never heard a Brahms symphony, or even if you have, and you watch him conduct it, you’ll understand it on a deeper level just from watching his face and his gestures. Well, the same is true of performers on the piano to some extent. It can be a very good thing to add to the whole experience of going to a concert. Otherwise you can stay home and just listen to the music and have a first class aural experience. But it’s the whole experience that makes the music greater than the sum of the parts. That’s my opinion. I’m Interested in hearing from you! You can leave comments at LivingPianos.com or on YouTube. Thanks so much 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