Tag Archives: piano lessons

The Importance of the Rotation of the Hands in Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about the importance of the rotation of the hands in piano playing. There are so many applications for this. What do I mean by the rotation of the hands? I’ve talked about the weight of the arm, the importance of using the wrist for staccato, octaves, and chord technique. I’ve talked about how the arms are necessary for really massive chords. The fingers, of course, do so much on the piano. So what’s this about the rotation of the hands?

There are certain instances when the rotation of the hands is absolutely essential.

With broken octaves it’s absolutely essential to rotate the hands. For example, in the famous Alla Turca movement from Mozart’s Sonata in A-major K.331. The last movement is in A minor, incidentally. It has the octave sections earlier on, but at the end the octaves are broken. When you play this, your hand must rotate back and forth. That’s the technique you must use for passages like this. It’s not just in this piece, but this is an extreme example. How would you play this without rotating the hands? I have no idea. I don’t think it would be possible. It’s nearly impossible to do this with the fingers alone. But by rotating your hand back and forth, suddenly it comes to life! It’s actually quite easy when you rotate your hand back and forth.

Feeling the weight transfer from one side of the hand to the other is an essential component of piano playing.

Sometimes the weight has to shift from one side of the hand to the other when you’re playing large intervals. But this technique is useful even in something slow, like the famous E -flat Nocturne of Chopin. There’s a certain rotation you need to get the weight of the arm to transfer from the first finger to the fifth finger. You must rotate! So rotation is an essential part of piano playing. It’s not just with extreme intervals either, although they tend to be places where it’s essential.

I want you to try this in your piano playing!

Think about the weight of your arm and transferring that weight smoothly from one side of your hand to the other in your melodic playing. Certainly with broken octaves, you can see this is absolutely instrumental, no pun intended! I hope this is helpful for you.Try it out! If any of you play the Mozart Alla Turca movement, try rotating your hand, and you’ll appreciate the facility this technique achieves. It makes it so much easier to play. 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

How to Play Smoothly on the Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to play smoothly on the piano. The answer: Avoid the impossible! What am I talking about? Playing smoothly on the piano is something you hear great artists do. The way they play is just so pristinely smooth. You wish you could achieve that same smoothness in your playing. But your playing sometimes can sound choppy. You don’t know how to achieve that smooth sound that you hear other people doing. You want it so badly, and you wonder, what can you do about it?

One of the most important aspects of learning to play smoothly on the piano is to practice incessantly without the pedal.

When you practice without the pedal you learn how to connect things with your fingers. That’s the secret, in a nutshell, of how to play smoothly. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Oftentimes there are things that are just not possible to play smoothly. So, what can you do about that? Do you just smear it all with the pedal? No. It will sound awful if you do that. You will hear the beginning of the second movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Sonata as an example in the accompanying video. It’s really hard to connect those opening chords in the right hand. So how do you do it?

The secret is that you shouldn’t try to connect everything.

If you just try to connect everything, you can end up with a mess. There’s no way to bring out any lines. It comes out blocked and choppy. So sacrifice the things that are not as important to connect, for the things that are vitally important to connect, which is the melody! So, in your right hand, you sacrifice the lower notes so that you can connect the melody which is the top line. You can grab a certain amount of those chords on the pedal so it doesn’t sound quite so austere. You purposely let go of the bottom notes so you can connect the top notes. That’s what I mean when I say avoid the impossible. If you try to connect all the notes, you can’t do it. It’s impossible, so don’t even try. If you connect the melody really well, it sounds gorgeous.

Try this in your music!

Whatever you’re playing, when you want to really play smoothly, sacrifice what you can’t connect for what you must connect. That is the lesson for today! Let me know how it works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com, and 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

How To Solidify Your Musical Performance

Welcome to Living Pianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I have a special treat for you! Today’s video is about how you can solidify your musical performance. Sometimes you practice a piece and learn the whole thing, but when you perform it, you just can’t count on it coming out the way you want. Maybe sometimes it comes through in practice, but you’re afraid to play for anyone because it’s not dependable. Sometimes your performance comes out well, sometimes it doesn’t. What can you do about that? In this video I’m going to show you how to overcome those insecurities!

How do you approach a new piece of music?

A few years ago I made a video about how to practice a new piece on the piano. I chose a piece randomly. The first thing I did was to read through it. Then I started learning it from the beginning. I practiced in front of you, showing you exactly how I approach a new piece. You can reference that video here. In that video, and in my general practice, I start from the beginning of a piece. I start with a very small phrase, just a couple of measures. I look at just the right hand and figure out the notes, then the rhythm, the fingering, the phrasing, and finally the expression. In other words, looking at all the details to get that one little phrase memorized. Then I do the same thing with the left-hand. I learn that same little phrase, notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing, and expression with the left hand. Once I get that memorized, I then put the hands together and get that memorized. Then I go on to the next section in the same way, connecting as I go.

What can you do after you’ve learned a piece of music and you have it memorized, but it’s still not really solid?

Let’s say you learn a piece of music, but you don’t feel 100% confident in your performance. Maybe it was solid at one point, but it’s kind of deteriorated over time. What can you do about that? Well, I have an answer for you! Today, once again, I’m going to show you how I practice. I’m going to practice the Liszt Sonata in B minor which I’ve been working on. We just moved here to the Waterloo Arts District in Cleveland. We finally have air conditioning here! It’s been tough making videos because it’s been very hot. So I decided that I would relearn this piece. I couldn’t find my scores, so I have my father’s old score. It’s tattered, but it has all the notes in it!

When you’re practicing, have the music handy, and of course your trusty metronome. Start from the beginning. In this case, I won’t start from the very beginning because the beginning is slow and there’s nothing technically oriented. I’m going to go ahead and start from where the fun begins! I will check with the metronome when necessary. I won’t necessarily use the metronome throughout, but any time there’s any insecurity with tempo or if I need to do metronome speeds, I want to have a metronome handy. This is a great way to practice. I’m going to play slowly and securely with no pedal. I’ll have the score handy. If anything isn’t right in the pocket, I will stop and reference the score.

You may notice how I don’t just work to the point of getting trouble spots to sound O.K., but to be able to play in a relaxed manner. Try stopping just before a place you miss to give yourself a moment to relax. Then, incorporate the memory of the relaxation right at that point, so when you’re playing up to speed:

It’s like having an infinite amount of relaxation in a speck of time.

Another essential technique is to practice in chords wherever possible to reveal the harmonies and discover the best fingering. Also:

Divide difficult passages into manageable chunks of music.

 

Then you can put the small sections of music together. But you can feel like you are starting over at each new chunk of music, again fostering playing in a relaxed manner. My father used to say:

Through strength comes relaxation.

 

There’s a lot of truth to that. Years ago when I first studied the Liszt B Minor Sonata, I didn’t have the strength I have now. I had to sometimes contort my body in order to negotiate some of the most difficult sections of the piece. But over the years, the combination of increased strength, along with practicing relaxing at strategic points has made playing the piano a much more fluid experience. I hope this demonstration of how I work will help you in your practicing!

WATCH VIDEO

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 Most Important Practice Techniques

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about the 3 most important practice techniques. There are hundreds of practice techniques. But the things I’m going to tell you today are quintessentially important. They’re points that I keep making again and again. They need to be cemented in your mind if you want to be productive in your practice. So listen to all three, because they’re all vitally important for taking your piano playing to the next level.

1. When something goes wrong, resist the temptation to go back and start again.

When you’re practicing, sometimes you don’t even have the score. You’re just practicing without the music. But you really should have the score in front of you for reference when you’re practicing. Not that you should play all the time with music. You might want to test your memory to see how things are coming along. But here’s the critical thing: when something does go wrong, resist the temptation to just go back and start again. Maybe it will come out well the next time around, but take the opportunity to check the score! Find your place no matter how painstaking it is.

You may think you could just start back four measures, because it’ll take longer to even find where you are in the music. It will take you longer, but it’s important. Whatever needs to be clarified, you’re not going to be able to understand from just playing the section again. Maybe you will get it, maybe you won’t, but you haven’t really figured out what the issue is. You need to find the solution to that weakness. So when there’s a mistake, study the score! Don’t just try again and hope for the best. By using this technique, whatever confusion you had can be clarified once and for all!

2. Practice slowly.

Any accomplished pianist knows about the importance of slowing down. You must practice slowly, incessantly! Eventually you can get the same level of comfort and security playing at a faster tempo. Playing over and over again just a little bit past your comfort zone only breeds insecurity in your playing. You still want to try things faster to see what they sound like and to isolate the weak parts. It’s very valuable to zero in on the parts that need work. But fundamentally, a great deal of practice is slow playing with the score, reinforcing the memory, and always looking at the score carefully in any place you have insecurities. So read slowly with the music, with the metronome, and without the pedal to cement the performance. This will give you clarity of thought and physiology about what you’re doing at the keyboard.

3. Expand your repertoire!

This is vital! No matter how long you play, if you are just going through review pieces, eventually you’re going to plateau in your playing. There is a vast amount of piano music. Some of the greatest pianists of all time, who learned more music than anyone else, still only scratched the surface. The amount of music that people like Alfred Brendel and Claudio Arrau have amassed is mind-boggling. And yet, it’s only a small fraction of what’s out there. There’s so much great music written for the piano, by composers you’ve heard of and composers you haven’t heard of. So expand your repertoire! You really need to be learning something new every day. You may be bogged down with trying to perfect what you’ve already learned, and that is certainly an essential part of your practice. But take at least a few minutes just to learn something new each day, because you’ll have so much more to show for it.

Why is it so important to learn new music everyday?

Let’s say you want to learn a new piece. But you wait until your current repertoire is perfected before you start, even if it takes weeks. And then all you’re doing is studying a new piece. Do you know how hard it is to learn and memorize something new? There’s only so much you can do at a time before it gets really hard. You get to that point of diminishing returns in how much you can learn in a 10 or 20 minute period. But if you were to do some work each day, when your mind is fresh, you take advantage of that time. Even if it’s only 10 or 20 minutes a day, it’s time that your mind is fresh. You can learn something relatively easily if you’re only learning a phrase or two at a time.

These are the 3 things to remember!

Always have your score handy. When something falters, reference the score. Don’t just try to play it again, study it. Figure out what’s going on. Clarify in your mind and your hands what the correction is.

Slow down. You should be practicing slowly, even with pieces you can play up to speed. From time to time, you must go back and recement the notes, rhythm, fingerings, phrasing, and expression by referencing the score, playing slowly without the pedal, and using the metronome as much as possible.

Be sure to expand your repertoire on a daily basis. You’ll have so much more to show for your work over time if you use these three techniques! I hope this is helpful for you! 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

www.LivingPianos.com
www.Facebook.com/LivingPianos
949-244-3729

The Secret to Fingering: Always Look Back, Never Look Forward

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to give you a really valuable tip for fingering: Always look back, never look forward. If you’re an advanced player, you know that doesn’t make any sense at all, because you have to know what’s coming in order to negotiate a good fingering. That is absolutely true. However, if you’re a student, it’s very different, because the fingering that’s indicated in the score is what you must follow. A good teacher will provide you with good fingering. You must always determine what finger to use by looking back to the last note that has a fingering marked. Put your hand in the position over those notes. Then, whatever finger is over the next note is the finger to use. Because if you look forward, you could run into trouble.

If you want to know what finger to use, always look back to the last printed fingering.

I have a Burgmuller study here called Innocence. It’s a lovely little piece. I want to show you something in the right hand after the second ending. You have your third finger on C, but you have a first finger on the very next C. So if you look ahead you might think you have to have your first finger on the first C. And then the same thing happens again. You have your third finger on E, and then you have another E after that which has the first finger marked. So instead of using the third finger, you may think you need to use your first finger on the first E since the E coming up has a first finger marked. You might think you should use the first finger because you’re going to need it later. But that is not the way fingerings work in music.

So indeed, you would play this passage with the first, second and third fingers, then change your third finger to your first finger on the same E, and then use your second finger on the F. Why? Because the last printed finger was the first finger on E, so you naturally use your second finger on F. You always look back to the last printed fingering to know what finger to use on the following notes. If you look forward, you’ll get fouled up because that’s not the way fingerings are followed in the score.

I hope this clarifies things for you!

If you’re figuring out a fingering because there’s no fingering written, you might want to get a sense of the whole passage to be able to execute a good fingering possibility. But if you’re a student, and you have an edited edition that’s fingered, and your teacher provides additional fingering solutions for you, you must always follow the fingering by looking back to see the last note that had a finger marked. Put that finger on that note and see what fingers are over the next notes instead of looking ahead to see what fingerings are coming. That won’t work. This is something that some of my students have asked about. I hope this is helpful for all of you! 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

www.LivingPianos.com
www.Facebook.com/LivingPianos
949-244-3729

Technique: Maximum Benefit, Minimum Time

Welcome to www.LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about getting the maximum benefit out of your practice time. That’s the way I like to work. I get a lot of people who are really gung ho to learn the piano. They’ll say, “I’ll work hours a day on scales and exercises. I just really want to get better.” But there is a point of diminishing returns with working on technique for technique’s sake. I always believe in working on music. Learning music will help you solve more technical problems than just focusing on technique, and you’ll get more benefit.

How can you maximize the effectiveness of working on technique?

If the primary time you spend daily on the piano involves technical exercises, including fundamentals like scales, arpeggios, octaves, and things of that nature, it doesn’t leave enough time for what’s really important, which is repertoire. You will grow more from learning music than you will from simply playing exercises. Ten minutes a day of really good scale and arpeggio work is a great warmup. You’ll get the maximum benefit with a minimum amount of time.

The secret is consistency.

If you only work once a week on scales and arpeggios, you’re not going to get much benefit. But if you spend a little time each day you will see improvement. Five or ten minutes a day is all you really need most of the time. There may be times you’re having an epiphany and you feel like you’re finally playing arpeggios well. In that case stay with it or you’ll end up with a hump to cross later on anyway. It’s not an absolute science that you spend X amount of time for maximum benefit. But generally speaking, minimize pure technical work.

Use your music as technical exercises.

When you have a part in your score that you can’t play well, figure it out using various practice techniques. You can turn your music into exercises! If you’re playing a Bach prelude, for example, like the Prelude in C Minor from book one of the Well-Tempered Clavier, it lends itself to exercises. It’s most like an exercise in itself. So how could you practice that? Slow practice with a metronome is invaluable. Use raised fingers, delineating every finger that’s down and every finger that’s up. That’s a great practice technique! Another technique is to use different phrasings. For example, staccato fingers. Or you can play one hand staccato and the other hand legato. You can benefit from this because any weakness will evidence itself in your playing. Or you could just do small snippets at a time. You could also play the music with various rhythms, such as dotted rhythms or you can play the music with different accents. There are countless ways you can turn music into exercises. This way you don’t have to resort to mindless exercises that don’t have the benefit of music you can play at the end of the line.

Musical etudes are your best source.

Whether it’s Chopin and Liszt etudes or Heller or Burgmuller studies, these etudes are richly rewarding music that can solve technical problems while offering you great music that you can play and enjoy. So that’s my recommendation! Utilize minimum time and enjoy maximum benefit for pure exercises. But spend most of your time with music and turn problem areas into exercises where necessary in order to improve your technique on the piano. Let me know how this works for you! 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

www.LivingPianos.com
www.Facebook.com/LivingPianos
949-244-3729