Tag Archives: how to play piano

7 YouTube Piano Channels You Should Know About

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about 7 YouTube piano channels you should know about. It’s remarkable what a resource YouTube is. Did you know that YouTube is actually the second-most popular search engine after Google? Which is kind of scary when you consider that they’re both owned by the same company, Alphabet. I’m going to tell you about channels you may already know about and some you may not know about.

I’m going to start with a very popular channel by concert pianist Josh Wright.

Josh Wright Piano is the name of his channel. He’s here in the United States. He started on YouTube in 2009, the same year that Living Pianos started our YouTube channel. He has over 20 million views, 187,000 subscribers, and 711 videos! Josh is very professional in his delivery. He’s a fine pianist, and he’s got so much to offer. He’s a concert pianist and a teacher. He has everything from mastering sight-reading to tutorials on different repertoire, from Chopin waltzes to Scott Joplin rags. He also has performance videos of his playing. He has exercises. He even has videos about the psychology of playing and tips on piano technique. So it’s a really well-rounded channel that covers a lot of basic things that you’re probably interested in.

Tiffany Poon has a very different channel that I came upon years ago, and I’ve been following it ever since.

Tiffany Poon Pianist is the name of her YouTube channel. She’s a young, aspiring concert artist. She gives you a glimpse into what it’s like, from her days at Juilliard to the concert stage. She’s also in the United States. She started on YouTube back in 2007. She has 54 and a half million views, 323,000 subscribers, and 374 videos! From her Juilliard admissions to backstage at concerts, you get a real feeling for what it’s like for a young artist in this world and the psychology of it. She lets you into that world, so you feel like she’s talking just to you. It’s very personal. She reveals her inner emotions about all the things involved in the rigors of concertizing, traveling, and all of that. She’s proud to be releasing her Schumann album, which is just coming out now. This is really an achievement for this young concert pianist. She has tutorial videos on famous piano pieces like Clair de Lune and Chopin Fantaisie-Impromptu. She’s a delightful young woman and an emerging artist worth checking out.

Moving on to the other side of the world, we have Paul Barton.

Paul Barton Piano is located in Thailand. He started on YouTube in 2008. He has 199 million views, 700,000 subscribers, and over 2000 videos! He has involved his daughter in the videos since she was a baby sitting there by the piano. And now, he has four-hand videos playing along with his daughter. Sometimes he’s accompanying his daughter while she’s singing, and it’s really touching to see this development. He has tons of videos, playing famous piano pieces like Clair de Lune. But perhaps you’ve seen his most famous videos, where he plays piano for elephants! Pretty wild stuff. It’s definitely a different YouTube channel that covers many things and has a personal element with the family involvement.

Pianist Magazine is a tremendous resource, and they also have a YouTube channel.

Pianist Magazine is the name of the YouTube channel. One of their main artists is Graham Fitch. He’s in the United Kingdom. He started on YouTube in 2012. The channel has 9.7 million views, 100,000 subscribers, and 350 videos! This is a terrific channel! He gives in-depth tutorials of all different types, like How to Use Rubato and Understanding Meter and Rhythm. He has videos on scales and arpeggios and a masterclass series on different techniques like wrist and octaves, pedaling runs, and passage work. This channel is just a treasure trove of useful tips from a great pianist. Interestingly, Josh Wright, who I mentioned earlier, did an interview with Graham on his channel. So you can see them interacting together, which I think could be richly rewarding for you.

Another great channel you may have come upon is Pianote.

Pianote Official is the name of the YouTube channel, and it’s all the brainchild of Lisa Witt in Canada. The channel started on YouTube in 2008. It has 142 and a half million views, over a million and a half subscribers, and 834 videos! Lisa covers a wide range of styles, from worship music and rock piano to Chopin. She has videos like How to Play by Ear in Three Simple Steps, The Genius of Stevie Wonder and Piano Finger Speed Exercises. And she helps you to be able to match chords to melodies. So it’s not just about classical repertoire. It covers a wide range of styles in a very friendly, easy-to-follow format. It’s worth checking out if that’s the sort of thing you’re interested in.

Another great YouTube channel is Learn Piano with Jazer Lee.

Jazer Lee Piano is the name of the YouTube channel. He’s located in Australia. He started on YouTube in 2017. His channel has 32 million views, over 600,000 subscribers, and 165 videos! He covers piano technique with videos like 5 Classical Pieces Beginners Shouldn’t Skip, 5 Common Pitfalls of Self-taught Pianists, and Learning Piano as an Adult. These are subjects that I’m sure many of you are interested in. His videos are definitely worthwhile!

Next, we have Nahre Sol.

Nahre Sol is the name of her channel. She started on YouTube in 2017. She has 695,000 subscribers, over 54 million views, and 227 videos! She does some spectacular things that you’ve got to check out. For example, she plays Happy Birthday in the style of ten classical composers. And she nails it! It is really fun to listen to things like this. But she also covers things like piano technique. Her videos have very intriguing titles, like Is Chopin Jazz. You really have to see her take on these things. She has a whole series on how to sound like different composers, like Rachmaninoff, Debussy, and Chopin. It’s really interesting to get her insight into these composers. She really grasps the fundamentals, which is how she’s able to improvise and play in these styles. She also has great warm-up exercises. She has really keen insights into the great composers that could be really enriching for you!

That covers the seven great YouTube piano channels, but I have two bonus channels I’d like to share. The first one is Lord V.

Lord Vinheteiro is the name of his channel. You’ve probably already seen him because he’s so famous. He has over a billion views, over 7 million subscribers, and 671 videos! Can you believe it? How could he be that far ahead of everybody else in terms of views? The reason why is because this man is a comic genius! You’ve got to check him out. His videos have the goofiest titles sometimes, and yet, he never disappoints. He always takes you on an interesting journey. The funny thing is, he never talks in his videos! He plays, and he does little routines. He has videos like, Can You Hear The Difference Between a Cheap and Expensive Piano? 10 Songs You’ve Heard and Don’t Know The Name Of, and Can You Play Piano With Your Feet? Sometimes they get absurd, but they are so fun. They’re not usually that long. If you just want to have a blast and laugh your head off, tune in to Lord V, and you won’t be disappointed. Interestingly, Lisa Witt at Pianote has a collaborative video with him where he identifies pianos blindfolded. It’s unbelievable! You’ve got to check that video out! It’s a great introduction to both of these artists.

Lastly, my dear friend Zsolt Bognár.

Living The Classical Life is the name of his channel. This is such a rich resource. He travels the world with an absolutely exquisite video team from Germany and interviews some of the great artists of our time. He’s interviewed artists such as Yuja Wang, Daniil Trifonov, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Joshua Bell. Zsolt has a way of disarming people, so you feel like they’re talking just to you. It’s almost like you’re grabbing coffee with someone and they’re just pouring their heart out. There’s a personal element to it. He’s able to get these people to just relax and open up. And the production is absolutely stellar! In fact, many of these videos are seen the world over on television broadcast stations. So check out Living The Classical Life – The New Channel. You’ll love it!

Let me know how many of these channels you already watch! Which ones do you like, and why do you like them? Let us know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! 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

All Beats Are Not Created Equal – Part 2

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you why all beats are not created equal. Did you know that typically in 4/4 time, the strong beats are the first and third beats? The weaker beats are the second and fourth beats. In particular, the fourth beat is not as strong.

The way you count should reflect the feel of the music.

Instead of counting rigidly, you end up counting with accents on the first beat or the first and third beats. I’m going to demonstrate this with a Haydn sonata in D major, so you can hear for yourself. First, I’m going to play it with all the beats absolutely equal to hear what it sounds like, then I will play it with accented beats.

Watch the video to see the demonstration!

When you play with all the beats equal, it doesn’t have a bounce. It doesn’t have a pulse. It just kind of plods along. By playing with accented beats, you give your music a pulse. This isn’t only for 4/4 time. How about 3/4 time? You certainly wouldn’t play a waltz with all beats equal. It would lose the feel of the music.

You have to figure out where the strong beats are.

Typically, the strong beats are one and three in 4/4 time and the first beat in 3/4 time. In a waltz, the third beat is also pretty strong, but not as strong as the first beat. Each piece of music has its strong and weak beats. You must identify which beats are strong so you can give emphasis to those and propel the music forward so it doesn’t get bogged down. All beats are not created equal! I hope this is enlightening for you! Let us know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! 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

The 3 Essential Elements of Sight-Reading

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about the three essential elements of sight-reading. I know so many of you want to read better, and you’re wondering what the secret is. I’m going to tell you about three different skills that you must have working together in order to be successful at reading music.

Sight-reading is all about what you see, feel, and hear.

Naturally, there’s what you see in the score. You have to really see what you’re reading, which is why you can’t be looking down at your hands while you’re reading. Which leads us to the second thing: You must have a certain feel for the keyboard. So you’re seeing the music, you’re feeling the keys, and the last thing, which is the most important, is what you hear.

All three of these things work together as a system.

You can’t look at your hands. You can occasionally glance for a moment, but you have to keep your eyes on the score. As soon as you’re not looking at the score, you’re not reading anymore! So you have to keep your fingers moving on the keys. If it sounds wrong, you must adjust by feel. You have black keys and white keys, so you can feel where the correct keys are and make the adjustments. If it sounds wrong, go a little higher or lower. You might think that that’s imprecise, but anybody who’s a really good sight-reader knows that you have to make those kinds of adjustments when you’re reading something difficult. Even if you don’t play perfectly, you get the basic idea across.

You have to keep going.

If you are accompanying a soloist, they don’t want you to stop when you miss a note. That’s not going to do it for them. It doesn’t give the satisfaction of understanding what the piece is like with the piano part. So you must keep going and feel your way by listening, watching the score, and recreating what you see based upon what you feel and hear. The best way to do that is by playing with other musicians, because it forces you to keep going. You have to keep going. You must keep your eyes moving. You must keep your hands and fingers moving, and you must keep listening.

The way to develop your reading on the piano is by doing it!

Find appropriate-level music. If you can find anybody who has some accompaniments that are not outrageously difficult, to where you have a chance of being able to play a good chunk of the notes accurately, offer to play with them. You can even accompany children or friends singing songs they know. Find music that is on your reading level and offer to accompany them! Use the essential elements of what you see, what you feel, and what you hear. You will become a great reader over time, I promise you. If you have epiphanies about how to become better at reading, let us know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Why You Must Front-Load Your Practice

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you why you must front-load your practice. What am I talking about here? Sometimes you sit down to practice the piano, and you have certain issues. You get it pretty good, and you go on to the next part. And you keep working through it in this manner. Well, let’s erase that whole idea. Instead, with the first issue you have, go to extraordinary lengths to resolve it!

Spend as much time as you can correcting issues early on.

Go as far as you possibly can with your corrections. This is great when you’re starting a new piece. Maybe there’s something early on in the piece that isn’t gelling. You might think you can just skip it for now and get to it later. Well, here’s the secret for you: It’s okay for you to spend an inordinate amount of time on small issues. It may feel like you’re never going to get to everything else, but what you learn from taking something to the nth degree early on in your practice will have tremendous benefits for the rest of the piece.

All pieces of music evolve from the motifs that are introduced early on.

These motifs develop throughout the piece. So if you don’t solve those issues early on, as you go on with the piece, the problems compound themselves. That’s why you should spend a tremendous amount of time early on resolving issues that you have. You want to really solidify things to the maximum degree. By doing this, later you will be able to go through vast amounts of music without having to spend nearly as much time. That’s what I mean by frontloading your practice.

Put the time in during the early part of your music and the early part of your practice to get things really refined.

This process is going to help you master other parts of the same piece of music and will even transfer to other pieces with similar technical or musical challenges. Try it in your practice! Let us know how this works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! 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

Practicing Your Scales in Contrary Motion

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. I’ve made so many videos about scales, arpeggios, and exercises. But here’s one for you that I’ve never shared, and I think you’re going to enjoy it. The subject today is about practicing your scales in contrary motion. One of the biggest challenges when you’re playing scales is making sure your two hands are landing squarely together. When playing with both hands, it’s hard to hear the differentiation of each hand separately. Maybe one hand is louder than the other, or there could be unevenness.

When you play your scales in contrary motion, you hear everything clearly.

I learned all major and minor scales this way in conservatory. It’s a great way to practice scales! You play your scales with both hands going up. Then, once you get to the two-octave point, you come back down with your left hand while your right hand continues up. Then both hands come down two octaves at which point they go in opposite directions again. Then they come back together and when they reach the middle of the keyboard they go down again. You can watch the video to see how this is done.

Keep in mind that you should always practice your scales with a metronome.

There’s never a good reason to practice scales without a metronome. You want to measure your work and strive for evenness. When you are practicing scales, it isn’t music; it’s strictly technique. Finger work is all about the evenness—the evenness of the attacks, the evenness of the releases, and the evenness of the volume. By playing your scales in contrary motion, you can hear things more clearly. Try this with your scales! Let me know how it works for you here in the comments on LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! 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

Why You Must Not Overthink Your Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we’re going to talk about why you must not overthink your piano playing. Now that might seem like a strange thing for me to say, with thousands of articles and videos about piano playing, technique, how to practice, memorization, how to digest a score, harmony, and so many more. Isn’t that all about thinking? It is. And there is a time and a place for analysis, and there’s a time for intuitive playing. And you must have a balance between the two in your performances. So what am I talking about when I say you shouldn’t overthink your playing?

When you’re performing, you have to have a presence of mind.

You need to make sure you’re sitting in the right place and that your hands are in the right position. You need to listen in order to achieve the proper balance of sound. But if you make the mistake of really thinking about what you’re doing, it can drive you crazy. You might completely lose the ability to play at all! When you’re playing a piece of music, there are thousands of notes, different rhythms, articulations, phrasings, and dynamics. There’s so much going on. If you stop just for a moment to think about what you are doing and look at your hands, you might question if you even know what the next note is because you’re doing things almost on automatic pilot to some extent. Hopefully you’ve learned your music well enough that you can think it through, even away from the piano which gives you great security. You’ve referenced the score, you’ve studied the score, you’ve played slowly, and you’ve done all these things so you have security. But if you start thinking about what you’re doing while you’re doing it, you can get completely psyched out.

Stay in the moment while performing.

You’re playing a piece, and you’re in the moment. It’s great. But suddenly, you start thinking about how the next section goes. You take yourself out of the moment by overthinking. If you’re not right where you are, then you get completely fouled up. Because when you get to that part, you’ve thought it through and you’re not sure if you thought it through right or not, and you might second-guess it wrong. These are the kinds of mind games that can completely destroy you in a musical performance.

Remember, the time for analysis is in your practice, but when you’re performing, don’t overthink it.

Stay in the moment. Listen to what you’re achieving. Try to go with the sound of the music and keep your head on your shoulders. Think about where you are and let the music flow naturally, like you’ve done hundreds of times in your practice. Sometimes that’s the greatest challenge because when all eyes are looking at you in a performance, or even if it’s just a friend or your teacher you’re playing for, you start thinking more about it in a way that you aren’t used to in your practice.

Another thing you can do is practice performing.

Play through your music and pretend people are watching you. Pretend you’re playing for your teacher or your friends, and see if you can keep your wits about you. Try to psych yourself out and see if you can still hold things together. Because inevitably, when you play for people, it just feels different. Your whole psychology changes; so don’t let it overtake you. Stay in the moment in your playing, and you will be rewarded with fine performances. 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