Tag Archives: piano lessons

How Soft is Piano?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. How soft is piano? That’s the question for today! You see piano written in your music, or maybe pianissimo. How soft should you play it? How soft is soft, and how do you even achieve it on the piano? We’re going to dive right into this today and cover this in a way that will help you achieve soft playing.

Dynamics can’t really be measured.

There is something called a decibel meter. It measures the unit of volume and you might think this could provide a good answer to this question. For example, when you see allegro in your score, how fast is allegro? What number is it on the metronome? There’s a similarity here because allegro is more of a mood, a feel to the music, not an exact number. It’s the same thing with dynamics in music. So how do you achieve a piano or pianissimo sound? How do you get a quiet sound?

Piano has more to do with tone than just volume.

For example, if you play the first Clementi Sonatina Opus 36, No. 1, the second movement is a quiet movement. Some people struggle to play really quietly, finding it difficult to even get the keys down! How can you possibly play that quietly? There’s a lot to be considered here. First of all, you should realize and understand that you are the closest person to your piano. Anybody listening to you is going to be much further away. Even if they’re just across the room, they might be three, four, or five times further away from the piano.

You must project your playing!

When you are performing in a hall, there are people listening from the last row of the balcony. Think about how far away from the piano they are. Think about a large hall like the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City at Lincoln Center. It’s is an astounding hall with magnificent acoustics. It holds 3,800 people in the audience! It’s an enormous place to fill with sound. There is no P.A. system; it’s all just acoustics. The singers on stage. and the instrumentalists in the pit, are being heard acoustically. There are no microphones or speakers. So when they have something written piano, they still have to use an immense amount of energy to create a projecting sound. The singers take big breaths and put it under pressure with their diaphragms so that they can project even the softest sound.

Playing piano or pianissimo is like being able to project a whisper by using diaphragm support.

When you whisper with diaphragm support, it can be heard across the room. That’s what you must achieve in your piano and pianissimo playing. Using the weight of the arm, you can project a big flowing line that will come through. It will still have a soft quality, even though the actual decibel level may be greater than you think. You would not believe the amount of energy you have to put into the keyboard, with tremendous weight of the arm transferring smoothly from finger to finger. So you shouldn’t just be limply pushing down keys.

The continuity of the arm weight is what creates the line and ensures that you can control a quiet line.

Remember, the melody line must project above the accompaniment in the left hand. It has to have more projection than you might think. Without that support, it would have more of a percussive quality, sounding loud even when you’re not playing particularly energetically. Instead, you want to play with a smooth quality that evokes the quality of sound of piano or pianissimo. This also enables you to shape the rise and fall of the phrase providing room to grow and die away, giving architecture to your music.

So remember, piano is more a quality of tone than an absolute volume.

Not only that, but you must project out into the room. Remember, you’re not just playing the piano, you’re playing the room you’re in! You must reach every listener in that room. So project your sound. Don’t be afraid to use some energy! As long as it’s a smooth energy, transferring from key to key with the weight of the arm, it will never have a harshness, and it won’t sound forte or even mezzo forte. It will have a tonal quality of piano. That’s the lesson for today! 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

Will AI & The Singularity Transform Music? Ray Kurzweil’s Vision

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about the relationship between keyboards and the singularity. This should get a lively discussion going, and the central figure in our discussion is a man by the name of Ray Kurzweil. How many of you have heard of Kurzweil keyboards?

This is a subject very close to me.

In the 1980s, I had in my recording studio, a cutting edge digital audio workstation, the Kurzweil K 250. This was a keyboard with 88 wooden keys that could sound like a grand piano or a whole orchestra. It was one of a breed of digital audio workstations. Some of them were ultra expensive, like Fairlight, which was well into five figures, or New England Digital’s Synclavier Synthesizer System, which cost over $100,000! What made these so expensive? Well, before MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) if you wanted to have a computer hooked to music, you had to have a whole integrated system. So, digital sampling, multitrack recording, and music printing, all of these fantastic features came at a very steep price. Kurzweil was one of the leaders in this technology. How did this ever come to be?

Ray Kurzweil was a great inventor and still is on the cutting edge.

In 1975, he came up with a reader for the blind. It was a text recognition program that could take written text and read it aloud to people with visual impairment. One of the people who appreciated this was a man by the name of Stevie Wonder! He said to Ray, “You should come up with a keyboard that can sound like any instrument, including the piano.” And wouldn’t you know it, Ray did it! That’s when the Kurzweil keyboard was invented. Ray is a director of engineering at Google. Ray has been known as a futurist. If anyone else made the kind of predictions that he has made, I would scoff at them.

What is the singularity?

There are different definitions of the singularity. One of them is where machines become more intelligent than humans. Once that happens, all bets are off. No one really knows what will happen. Some people think it may create a utopia, while other people think it may be a dystopia. There’s no way to really know what will happen, but there are a lot of fears about it. Now, a lot of people are talking about this because of artificial intelligence. Right now we have things like ChatGPT, which can pass the bar exam, write papers, analyze spreadsheets, and can even write computer code. There are other programs like Stable Diffusion and Dall-E that can output works of art and even photorealistic pictures from text prompts. It’s pretty remarkable what’s happening. Believe it or not, there’s even A.I. that can compose music!

All of this is in its infancy and it’s very exciting, but the type of A.I. I’m talking about is artificial general intelligence (AGI).

With artificial general intelligence, instead of just being able to complete a specific task, it’s really more like what humans are able to do. What does this have to do with Ray Kurzweil? Well, he has been predicting thE singularity will occur sooner rather than later. His vision of singularity goes even one step beyond, where man and machine merge. It seems like a scary concept. There are hints of this out there with things like Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company. This technology could have great ramifications for people who have lost limbs, being able to use their thoughts to control prosthetic devices. Already there has been some progress made in this direction. But imagine your mind being hooked to the Internet. Instead of picking up your phone to have all this information, the electrical impulses from your brain are directly connected to everything. This is a frightening concept and an exciting one all at the same time.

Ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity will occur by 2030.

He believes this singularity will occur such that there will be nanobots going through your body repairing cells. So for every year that you age there will be a year of repair, eventually reaching a state of immortality where you’re aging at the same rate at which your body is being repaired by these nanobots. This sounds like science fiction, and we all hope that Ray is right! He’s been correct so many times before, but this is a wild assertion, naturally. I just thought I’d get this discussion going about AI in general, how it’s impacting music, and whether you feel that it will replace musicians. It is perhaps more likely that A.I. will provide tools that musicians can use as bouncing off points for inspiration, much like ChatGPT is doing for writers.

Do you think Ray Kurzweil is a nut, or do you think there’s some validity to what he’s saying?

Let me know how you feel about Ray Kurzweil’s prediction about the singularity in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. And in general, how do you feel about A.I. and music and the whole direction things are going in the creative fields? Who would have thought that artificial intelligence would be taking over in creative fields before anything else? It’s pretty wild stuff, isn’t it? 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

Musical Solutions to Technical Problems

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about finding musical solutions to technical problems. My teacher, John Ogden, tied for first prize in the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition with Vladimir Ashkenazy, two legendary pianists. I remember John Ogden talking about how he really was taken with Ashkenazy’s performance of the famous first Chopin Etude in C major Op. 10, No. 1, and how he had a lightness to it that he thought was really an interesting way of approaching the piece, because so many people play it really strong. Then I remember hearing an interview with Ashkenazy, who had rather small hands, saying his approach to that etude is because of the nature of his hands. It just falls under his hands better playing more lightly. John Ogden didn’t realize that this was a technical consideration. Ashkenazy came up with a beautiful, musical solution to a technical challenge. This is what it’s all about in piano playing!

Find what works for you with your physiology, your psyche, and your makeup, and find something that is musical.

There is no absolute when it comes to how something should be played. You want to find a way that you can accommodate the music. It’s the same with everything in life. Everybody has a different gait. The way you walk is not the same as the way I walk. Everybody has a unique way of approaching a myriad things in life, and piano playing is certainly no exception. Let’s use the Beethoven Sonatina in G Major as an example. Sometimes students have difficulty with the end of the first phrase because there’s a crescendo, and maybe they don’t have enough strength to be able to pull it off. But there is a great musical solution to this problem! Come way down right at the start of the crescendo so that you can easily achieve it. I think it actually sounds better that way. The crescendo can unfold naturally without having to force anything or struggle at all. This technique applies to a wide range of music.

There are ways you can give your performance more power without expending more energy.

For example, Chopin’s powerful Military Polonaise. Playing that piece in a very loud, strong manner takes a lot of energy. If you take all the repeats, it is a true tour de force, because it goes on and on with very few places where it comes down that much. By coming down wherever you possibly can, it gives you a reserve of energy. You can make it sound more powerful, not less powerful. Having a reserve is the secret to a powerful performance. If you’re at the limit of what you can produce, it sounds weak, no matter how much energy you’re putting into it. But when you have that reserve and you let it go here and there, just little flares of excitement, it leaves the listener wondering how much power is undulating under the surface that could fire up at any time!

Use selective energy in your playing.

For example, by playing the fast chords of the Military Polonaise very delicately, when you land on the strong chords, it gives you a lot of power. By doing this, you have tons of energy reserves. You can play through the whole piece without even breaking a sweat! Trying to play everything strong takes a tremendous amount of energy and bogs you down. Instead, play everything you possibly can lightly. You want to use selective energy, another musical solution to a technical problem.

Discover what works for you and make a convincing case for it.

You can discover countless ways of negotiating scores that are intrinsic to your physiology, instead of struggling for some preconceived notion of the absolute way a piece should be played. That’s what a great performance is ultimately all about. Try this in your playing! Maybe you don’t have a lot of power, or a big reach, or maybe your fingers are so big and clumsy that you can’t play lightly, but there are tons of ways to accommodate your physiology.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses.

My father, for example, had massive hands. Rachmaninoff just came naturally to him. He played all the preludes in a public performance at Lincoln Center! Can you imagine such a thing? It was like nothing for him. But playing a delicate Schubert impromptu was another story, with his big, fat powerful fingers. His secret was to delineate the notes by playing them separated. They weren’t actually as light as you might have thought, but he created the illusion of light fast playing by separating them with staccato fingers. So he found a solution that worked beautifully for fast light pieces that didn’t come naturally to him. Find your strengths in your music and bring them to your interpretation. That’s ultimately what great performing is all about! 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

How to Create Tonal Shadings on the Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to create tonal shadings on the piano. The piano is such a great instrument, but it has some inherent limitations that I’m sure you’re all aware of. One such limitation is the fact that the notes fade out relatively quickly. What can you do about such a thing? Well, one of the things you can do is to take advantage of that in your music, and I’m going to show you how to do it!

Here’s a technique that will add continuity to your musical lines.

I’ve talked before about how to create the illusion of the breath on the piano using the weight of the arm. Utilizing this technique gives a rise and fall to the line like you hear from a singer or wind player using the breath. Today I’m going to show you a different technique, and I’m going to use the Chopin A-flat Waltz to demonstrate. In this piece, you have fast notes, then long notes going to shorter notes. As the long notes fade out, you want to catch the next notes at exactly the level the long notes have diminished in volume. By doing this, you can make the long note flow into the following note, creating a very interesting tonal color. The long notes seem to melt into the shorter notes by catching the natural decrescendo of the acoustics of the piano. The quarter note that follows the half note is at the exact volume the half note has reached at that point.

Vladimir Horowitz utilizes this technique a tremendous amount in his recordings.

You can hear how he takes the characteristic of the piano, which for some people is the biggest weakness, and turns it into an amazing strength! He creates tonal colors and shadings that somehow magically work, even though when you try to analyze them they don’t seem to make sense. The point isn’t to play an overarching rise and fall as much as to take advantage of the nuance of the natural tonal properties of the envelope of the sound of the piano. I want you to try experimenting with your music! Let me know how this works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. What pieces do you think lend themselves to this sort of tonal shading? We can all experiment together to see what’s possible on the piano by taking its biggest shortcoming and turning it into the sparks of creativity in the tonal shadings in your playing. 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

4 Ways to Develop Speed in Your Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to show you four ways to develop speed in your piano playing. You hear people who play dazzlingly fast, but maybe you’re just struggling to get a piece up to speed. Is there anything that you can do to develop more speed? Absolutely! There are a number of things you can do. Of course, working generally on different repertoire, scales, and arpeggios is helpful. These are essential building blocks of technique on the piano. But what I’m going to show you today are specific things you can incorporate in your practice to help develop speed.

I’m going to use Ballade of Burgmüller as an example. The part I’m going to focus on is the end, where you have a fast pattern of notes in both hands. What better place than this to demonstrate the myriad ways you can practice? Today I’m just going to cover four specific ways of developing speed, to not overwhelm you.

1. METRONOME SPEEDS

One of the most fundamental ways of working with the metronome is to do progressively faster metronome speeds. You find the speed at which you can play the passage absolutely faithfully, and then work up the speed one notch at a time. Why one notch? Because you won’t even notice the difference in speed! You find the speed at which you can play it perfectly, comfortably and securely, repeatedly. Then you put it up a notch and do it again. I would never suggest trying to get a whole piece up to speed by going one notch at a time, but when you have just a few measures like this, it’s an ideal opportunity to do metronome speeds.

The key is to make sure you don’t raise the metronome at all until you have absolute security.

That’s the important thing. Now, you may think it’s going to take you forever, because it takes you so long to really get it solid. But spend the time at the front end to get it absolutely secure! You may have to go hands separately at first and pick a much slower speed than you think is necessary. But don’t even think about raising the metronome speed until you can play it ten times in a row, not only where it’s perfect, but where it feels comfortable. You want to play every note with absolute security and definition. Once you get that, then raise it up a notch. Then once again, keep playing it until it not only sounds perfect, but it feels comfortable.

As you get faster, remember to lighten up and stay close to the keys with rounded fingers.

When you play with flat fingers, you don’t get the benefit of all the joints of your fingers like you do when you’re playing with rounded fingers. Your fingers will naturally go into this position if you just allow them to. And that position gives you much more ease because you have the benefit of all the joints of the fingers. Plus, the thumb is in alignment with the rest of the fingers.

2. NOTE GROUPS

Practice small groups of notes, repeatedly. You can work on a few select notes at a time, even just two note groups! And the secret is to play up to speed. Take different groups of notes and find the ones that allow you to land on notes that are insecure. Ultimately this is training your fingers where the hands play together. Listen strategically to where the hands are playing together and when they aren’t. You can get a lot done just by finding the right notes to land on. When you land on notes, avoid tension. You want to land on them with total relaxation. Practice relaxation in your playing, even if you have to play just two notes! Find groups of notes that help you land securely with hands precisely together, and you can accomplish a tremendous amount.

3. ACCENTED NOTES

Playing with accented notes can be really valuable. You can accent different notes within a phrase. This can be done in innumerable ways. You can do different numbers of notes or any type of accents that help you feel relaxed. You don’t want to be pushing with the arms, just use your fingers. By doing this, you train yourself where the fingers play together and where the hands play together. You’ll discover tremendous things. You might come upon certains accents and realize you don’t know where your hands play together! Those are the places to focus on.

4. RHYTHMS

Rhythms are another great tool. Depending upon the passage, there are many different rhythms that can aid in developing speed. You want to find whatever rhythms solve your issue. Try playing passages of even eighth notes as dotted rhythms, dotted eighths followed by sixteenth notes. Then you can reverse the rhythm playing sixteenths followed by dotted eighth notes. You want to discover where the hands need to be together. If you don’t know where the hands play together, you might be able to play your right hand fast or your left hand fast, but you really don’t know where they land together. So this is what trains your hands to play precisely together.

These are four techniques that can help you develop speed in your playing!

Remember, working on scales and arpeggios is incredibly valuable. That gives you an opportunity to just focus on your fingerwork. You can work on pure technique, devoid of music. It’s a great thing to have all your major and minor scales and arpeggios under your fingers. That will be incredibly valuable for you. Remember, the faster you play, the lighter and closer to the keys you must be in order to facilitate speed, because it takes a lot of work to raise fingers when practicing slowly. Raising the fingers can be valuable, so you can feel which fingers are down and which fingers are up initially. As you get faster, lighten up and stay closer to the keys with rounded fingers. Remember these four methods of developing speed: metronome speeds, note groups, accents, and rhythms. Let me know how this works for you! For those of you who have other techniques, share them 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

How to Bring Out Voices in Your Music

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The topic today is about how to bring out voices in your music. The great thing about the piano is that it’s almost like a whole orchestra! You have so many different voices. Because of this, you want to call attention to different melodies intertwining within your music. I’ve talked about many ways of doing that in the past, which I’m going to refresh you on right now. Then I’m going to show you an intrinsic skill that transcends everything I’m about to tell you.

One great practice technique is to work on music with different articulations.

Try playing the melodies legato while playing accompaniments and parts you want softer with a gentle finger staccato. This way you can clearly hear the melody. You don’t want all the notes to sound equal. You want balance so that you hear the melody and the bass while keeping the inner voices delicate, yet everything may be in a piano context. The way to practice this is by playing the melody legato and those gentle, undulating notes in the middle with a gentle finger staccato. By doing this you train your hand which notes are melody, and which notes are accompaniment. It’s very difficult to quantify loud and soft, but short and long are very binary. You can hear the short notes on the bottom and the long notes on top. If you can do that, then you can play and control the balance of all the notes.

How do you draw the listeners attention to the voice that you want them to hear?

I’m going to show you a hack for drawing the listener’s attention to the voice you want them to hear. The secret is delineating the very first note of the melody you want the listener to be attached to. Once they hear the first note, they can follow it through. You want to make it very clear on the first note of a new line. After that, even if it’s not brought out that much, the listener is already aware that they should be listening for it. As soon as that first melody comes in. the listener is listening for it and they’ll follow it through. And you don’t even have to punctuate the melody that much anymore, because they’re already attuned to it. It’s in their consciousness.

Sometimes a melody or a counter melody can be contained within the texture.

Maybe the counter melody is at the top or the bottom, as is the case in the middle section of the Chopin Ballade No.3 in A-flat Major. In this section, there is a counter melody in the tenor voice, on the top of the left hand. You can accentuate the very beginning of it, and then just let it float. You don’t need to punctuate it that much after that, because it’s not necessary. The audience will already be listening for it. Once they hear the first note, they’re listening for where it’s going to go next. So it can be a more gentle inner voice, just punctuating that first note so the listener is aware that something new is there to listen to. Just play the beginning of that with some substance to the sound, and then let it be more in the background so that you don’t lose the melody on top, which is the main melody.

So that is the tip for today!

Aside from practicing with different articulations so you have control over all the notes in a texture, remember when you want to bring out a line, bring out the first note and the listener will latch on to it. This is particularly helpful when playing counterpoint like Bach fugues, for example. Whenever the fugue subject starts, articulate that first note. Then the listener doesn’t have to work hard to find the melodies of the subjects of fugues. It’s handed to them on a silver platter! They can easily follow it through even if you don’t punctuate it that much. It doesn’t have to sound labored. It can sound fluid and beautiful, and yet the listener has the experience of understanding the structure of the music, which greatly enhances the appreciation of the score. 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