Tag Archives: piano playing

Should You Strike From Above in Your Piano Playing?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The topic for today is about why you must strike from above in your piano playing. However, this is not always the case. I’m referring to a very specific technique. In fact, striking from above can create a harsh, unpleasant sound in some circumstances.

When playing large chords, striking from above can sound brash.

When you strike from above using the arms, you have no control and end up with a crass sound. Instead, what you want to do is strike from the surface of the keys and drop the weight of your arms all at once. By doing so, you will achieve a gorgeous sound that will not be harsh no matter how hard you play.

Should you strike from above when doing finger work?

For slow practice, raised fingers can be a good way to delineate which fingers are up and down, so you get clean releases of notes. This is useful when practicing scales and arpeggios. However, when playing more quickly, you must stay right on top of the keys without raised fingers or you’ll never gain the speed. But to practice the release of notes, practicing with delineated fingers down with other fingers up and out of the way is a terrific exercise, akin to stretching before working out, as I’ve discussed before.

The real place where striking from above is vitally important is with staccato!

When practicing slowly, you might be tempted to play with your fingers close to the keys. The problem with this is that you won’t get the crisp staccato you’re aiming for. Playing faster using that technique will produce a muddy sound. Striking from above gives you a crisp staccato sound. So, you must strike from above in your slow practice to prepare yourself to play quickly and achieve precision and power in your staccatos.

It’s the wrist that is doing all the work.

Make sure you don’t let your fingers go down to notes before you play them. You want to strike from above in one smooth motion using your wrist. That way, you get the clarity of the staccato and the power from the wrist. Another thing to avoid is using the arms for the up and down motion. The arms are too big and heavy, which will result in a clumsy sound. You won’t get the crisp sound you desire. The arms are too slow, and it just bogs down. You should move the arms side to side to get over the right keys, but there should be no up and down motion.

You can achieve a light staccato with the wrist as well.

By utilizing the wrist staying closer to the keys, you can get a light, fast staccato as well. So remember: for more power, use more motion, and for light, crisp staccato, use smaller wrist motion. But always use the wrists when trying to achieve a short, crisp sound.

So that’s the tip for the day!

Remember to strike from above in your staccato, and you will be rewarded with a crisp sound. Doing this, you can achieve speed, fluency, power, and lightness. I hope this has been helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Faster is Not Louder

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how faster isn’t always louder. It may seem obvious that playing faster does not mean playing louder. But you would be surprised at how much of the time when you see a crescendo, you naturally speed up! This can be detrimental to your playing for so many reasons. Let me give you an example from Clementi’s Sonatina in C major Opus 36 no 1. In the second line of the piece, there’s a crescendo. Many pianists struggle with this passage because they tend to speed up during the crescendo, making it even more challenging to play. So, how can you mitigate this problem?

Always trust the metronome.

Work with a metronome to ensure that you maintain a steady tempo throughout the piece. You may find that as soon as you get to the crescendo, the metronome seems to be dragging. Well, drag along with it! The metronome is king. By following the metronome, you will be able to play with more security. When performing the piece, it’s natural to feel a bit excited, which can cause you to speed up during crescendos. To counteract this, you can intentionally slow down slightly when you find yourself playing faster. However, you must also check your work with a metronome to make sure you’re not overcompensating and slowing down too much.

Sometimes, getting faster during crescendos can be called for.

This is especially true in 19th-century music where rubato is used to create a sense of ebb and flow. Sometimes it can actually work, so long as then the pendulum swings the other way as it gets softer. Rubato can be effective in that respect. However, you must be careful not to lose or gain time on the beat. Practicing with a metronome is essential for ensuring that you stay on track.

Fingering is of vital importance.

Good fingering is fundamental. One of the best ways to discover good fingering is by playing in chords. By playing in chords, your fingers naturally fall on the right keys. You will know what fingering is going to be most effective by working in groups of notes played together in chords whenever possible in your music. It also gives you an opportunity to understand the harmonic underpinnings of your music. You can practice in different rhythms, accents, or in groups of notes. Each of these techniques will help you to assimilate your music. I hope this has been helpful for you! 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 Single Greatest Challenge of Piano Playing

Welcome to Living Pianos. I’m Robert Estrin. In this article, we will be discussing the single greatest
challenge in playing the piano. There are many aspects to playing the piano, such as playing with both
hands, playing multiple parts, playing fast, and playing scales, arpeggios and repeated notes. However,
there is one aspect that is the Achilles heel of piano playing, and that is the envelope of the sound
produced by the piano.

The Piano’s Sonic Characteristics

If you listen to just one note played on the piano, what do you hear? You hear a sharp attack, a quick
decay and a slow, quiet sustain that gradually decreases in volume. This presents a major challenge for
playing the piano since it is difficult to play melodies which imitate the human voice. After all, the human
voice is the original musical instrument of all time! Wind instruments have the benefit of using breath to
create musical lines. Violins and many other string instruments have bows to sustain notes. But on the
piano, in order to overcome this limitation, you must master the art of illusion!
How to Create the Illusion of a Continuous Line on the Piano
One of the techniques for creating a singing line, or sustained line, is to use the weight of your arm. The
arm has weight and, by using it as an analog to the breath, you can create a smooth line. You can
transfer the weight of the arm smoothly from note to note, rising and falling like the breath, with more arm
weight in the middle of the phrase, and less arm weight in the beginning and end of a phrase. This
technique can be enhanced with the use of the pedal. But before we discuss this, let’s talk about
something I refer to as, “The Phantom Pedal.”

The Phantom Pedal

The Phantom Pedal refers to the use of finger technique to hold down notes with your fingers instead of
relying upon the pedal. This allows you to sustain notes with your left hand while adding emphasis to the
melody notes in your right hand with the pedal. This creates a much more sustained melody, without the
risk of creating clashing harmonies or muddy sound.

Bonus Tip

As a bonus tip, we will discuss the use of the una corda, or soft pedal on a grand piano which is the
pedal on the left. Una corda means, “one string” because in early pianos, there were 2 strings on each
note. Depressing the pedal shifted the hammers so that the hammers only struck one string on each
note. Modern pianos have 3 strings on each note in most registers. The hammers still hit all the strings,
but not directly. This results in a softer initial attack. Yet the sustain is just as rich because of sympathetic
vibrations. By combining this pedal technique with the use of the arm, as well as the other techniques I
described earlier, you can overcome the inherent limitation of the piano’s sonic characteristics.
In conclusion, the single greatest challenge in piano playing is the envelope of the sound produced by
the piano. However, by mastering the art of illusion, and combining techniques such as using the weight
of the arm and using your fingers to hold notes (phantom pedal), you can overcome this limitation and
create a beautiful, sustained sound. This is the secret of artistry in piano playing.
I hope this has been helpful for you! Leave your 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 or want more information about pianos. I have many
resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

How Much Should You Stick To Routine in Your Practice?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how much you should stick to routine in your piano practice. Years ago, I made a video about how you can make practicing more enjoyable. It was a guide on how to organize your practice to make it as productive as possible. I described how you should have an appetizer of scales for warming up, then a main course of memorization and refinement, and then you can have a dessert of review pieces! You can see that video here. But what I’m going to talk about today is something quite different. And it’s the flip side of this!

Don’t get too attached to your practice routine.

All too often, students get married to their routines. They love their routines so much that they don’t realize they might be missing out on discovery. Truth be known, my practice is anything but organized! I don’t necessarily stick to a regimen in what I do. In fact, sometimes I find a specific area that needs work and I’ll spend an inordinate amount of time on one specific problem, maybe ten times more time than I spend with anything else in the practice session. It could be a very small section of music. Maybe there’s a certain technique that you’re working on. Or there’s a part of the music where you’re discovering new possibilities in the score. Maybe you’re finding a new way of approaching the keyboard. Maybe you are after a different sound out of the piano. You might think it’s important to stay on task and get to your scales or to your new piece. You might feel you need to get to all those regimented aspects of practice. But it’s more important to feel engaged in your practice.

Anything that engages your mind is ultimately the most productive practice you can do!

Don’t fall into the habit of routine for routine’s sake. You may find yourself doing the same thing almost to the point of mindlessness. Don’t just go through the motions because you think it’s important. You may be getting some physical benefits, strengthening your hands. It could even be productive to play over pieces so you don’t forget them. But the real practice is that of discovery.

Remember, practicing is a mental exercise.

Practicing is a thought process. So if you find yourself spending way too much time on something, but you’re getting somewhere with it, go for it! Because you’ll find, after spending a tremendous amount of time on something small, it will translate to other aspects of your playing. You can get great benefit from spending a tremendous amount of time on something that’s seemingly very small. It all relates to everything else you do on the instrument.

Routines are good, so you don’t forget important aspects.

Work on your sight reading every day, or at least every week. You don’t want to forget your review pieces by neglecting them for a week or two. So it is important to keep up with the basics. But ultimately, you should go off on tangents that engage your mind. You shouldn’t feel like that is wrong. So long as you’re accomplishing something, it is worth the time! Keep your practicing interesting to you and you will accomplish even more in the work you do at the piano! 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 Playing Fast Is Easier Than Playing Slowly

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how playing fast is easier than playing slowly. You might think that’s crazy. Of course, it would take more work to be able to develop speed in your playing. There is some truth to that. But once you do have some speed and fluency in your playing, have you ever tried to go back and play slowly again? It can be really difficult! There are a lot of reasons for this. We’re going to discuss this and what you can do to help your playing.

Once you’ve played a piece many times, your fingers just know where to go.

Years ago I made a video about how playing your scales should be on autopilot. I likened it to learning how to walk. You see toddlers taking their first steps. The concentration on their faces is unbelievable! Of course, once you learn how to walk, you really don’t think about it. It’s almost involuntary. You can be thinking about other things while you’re walking once you learn how to do it. Well, the same thing is true of scales! It’s also true of all the music you play. You get to a point where your mind is wandering, but your fingers keep going. That’s actually a good thing in some respects. If you didn’t have that to rely upon, it would be hard to be focused 100% of the time. But naturally, you can’t depend upon that motor memory, finger memory, muscle memory, whatever you want to call it.

When you play slowly, it’s harder to think through everything.

When you slow things down, every single note becomes very obvious. But there’s another reason why playing fast is easier than playing slowly. I’m not even talking about the solidity of how well you know the score. I’m talking about musical considerations. When you’re playing slowly, it’s very difficult to even know where the line is. For example, Chopin’s E Minor Prelude. Playing that piece slowly and trying to get a sense of the rise and the fall of the line is all but impossible. It’s very difficult to maintain a line playing under tempo.

All music really is reflective of the human voice.

All instruments are an extension of the instrument we all carry with us. Naturally, wind instruments are a direct analog to the human voice, because the breath is involved. It’s a natural extension. Bowed instruments, like a violin or cello, have the continuum of the bow against the strings. On the piano, it’s a challenge to create that continuum of sound. But imagine a wind player or a singer trying to sing a song much slower than its normal speed. It would be hard to sustain the phrase. You would run out of air! It would be hard to get a sense of the line. That same Chopin prelude played at a faster tempo, with the pulse of the quarter note or even the half note, makes it much easier to feel the musical line.

Once you know a piece, it’s so much easier to play it faster, because you can get a sense of the line.

The challenge is gaining enough fluency that you can play up to speed. Sometimes it helps just trying to play something up to tempo. Even if it’s not totally polished, playing it up to tempo helps you know what you’re working for. Of course, you don’t want to repeat sloppy playing again and again. You may even want to play just the right hand, just to get the feel of the phrasing. Once you understand the intention of the music, your practice is so much more productive. You want to know what you’re aiming for. So think of your music up to tempo, even if you can’t quite play it yet. Try to play it up to speed so you get a sense of the music. Your practice is always in service of the music.

That’s the message for today! I hope this works well for you. 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