Tag Archives: piano playing

Do You Need a Weighted Action Keyboard?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about the advantages of a weighted action on a keyboard or piano. You’ve heard these terms, of course. You might wonder, what is this all about? Can you get more expressiveness out of a weighted action just like you do on a grand piano?

All pianos have weighted actions because you’re moving a lot of mass.

Keyboards don’t have much mass. You don’t necessarily need a heavy action to get good control on a piano. Some pianos have heavy actions. Some have lighter actions. As long as the regulation is top notch, you can get tremendous control out of a lighter action, just as much as a heavier action.You might wonder why would you want to have a weighted action if you can get good control without it. The fundamental reason is that piano is different from most other instruments since other instrumentalists can carry their instrument wherever they go. If you’re a guitar player, a flute player, or trumpeter, you just take your instrument with you! No big problem. Well, obviously pianists can’t do that.

You must learn to adjust to any piano you encounter.

Whether it’s at lessons, school, church, recitals, friends’ houses, any piano you encounter, you have to be able to sit down and play whatever piano you encounter. If you’re practicing all the time on an action that isn’t weighted, you’re not going to have the strength to play an acoustic piano, because it takes more effort. You have to push down about 50, sometimes as much as 60 grams of down weight just to get the key down! So if you have a feather light action, you’re not going to be prepared physiologically to play other pianos. You’re not going to develop the muscles for it. So it’s really important to have a weighted action. I would recommend an 88 key weighted action.

You also hear the term weighted graded action. What does that mean?

If you look inside a piano, you’ll notice that the keys on the higher end are shorter and the hammers are thinner. In the bass, the keys are longer and the hammers are bigger and fatter, because they have to excite a much thicker, longer string. So indeed, pianos get lighter and easier to play as you get to the higher end compared to the lower end. On some pianos it’s a subtle difference. On other pianos it’s a dramatic difference. Is this important in your piano practice? Some people would say it is important. But to me it’s really not the most important aspect of a keyboard or digital piano action. The key travel is more important. When you have a keyboard that’s very small, the keys are short beyond the fall board. So when you’re playing black keys, or the white keys between black keys, the key travel is minimal. It’s just like being close to the center on a seesaw. It’s difficult to gain leverage. So to me, that’s more important than whether it’s graded or not. The action should have a substantial feel.

A real piano has what’s called escapement.

Try pushing a key down very slowly on your piano and you will notice at a certain point there’s a little bit of resistance that you have to push to overcome. This is normal. Pianos have what’s called a double escapement mechanism. It was a harpsichord builder named Cristofori, around the year 1700, who came up with the first harpsichord that could play soft and loud. He called his instrument, “Gravicembalo col piano e forte”, which translates to, “Harpsichord with soft and loud”. It could play soft and loud from the touch, and it had the essential escapement mechanism. What does that mean? Well, before then, there were no keyboards where a hammer or other implement could hit a string and escape it. On a clavichord, for example, the strings kept in contact with the blades that struck the strings. With a piano, as soon as the hammer hits the strings, it escapes the string!

Modern pianos have what’s called a double escapement.

When you play slowly, the hammer travels its full distance. But when you play quickly, there’s a back check that catches the back of the hammer, so the hammer doesn’t have to travel so far allowing for more speed. It’s an ingenious invention that came about thanks to generations of keyboard builders, as well as composers working hand in hand with piano builders. During Beethoven’s lifetime, the piano evolved substantially with the demands of the music being written for the instrument.

These are the important things to look for in your digital piano or keyboard.

Look for an 88 key weighted action. If it’s graded, great! But more importantly, is the feel and the key travel. And if you’re serious about playing the piano, you’ll want a weighted action even if you’re not playing other pianos that much. Your hands will develop more strength. You will accomplish more by doing the same amount of practice. If you’re like most people, it’s hard to find enough time to practice. So you might as well get as much done as you can for the time you spend!

I hope this is helpful for you! Let me 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

How to Develop More Stamina on the Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Have you ever wanted to develop more stamina on the piano? That’s the subject for today. Many of my students, and people who contact me, wonder how to develop more stamina, to be able to play longer periods of time without wearing out. Some people find if they play through a longer piece, by the time they get to the end of it, their hands are giving out. They wonder, Is there anything they can do about that? I’m going to give you two tips today to develop more stamina in your playing!

Play more and vary your practice.

You may find that if you play for a certain amount of time, your hands get tired. Your abilities start to fall off on what you’re able to do with the instrument. Well, here’s a tip for you: Vary your practice between things that are technical and physically oriented, and things that are more mental. Memorization comes to mind. If you’re learning solo music, memorizing takes a great deal of time. Even if you’re playing music that you’re reading, you need to practice the music, figure things out, and intellectually understand the score. For example, let’s say you’re working on a really tough passage, spending a good deal of time with it. Take a break! Move on to other things. Absorb new material or read through some of your new pieces, which might be very slow going at first. This won’t be nearly as physically demanding. But at the same time, you’re practicing for longer periods of time. Just like in exercising, the varied amount of work you do with interval training (alternating between high and low intensity activities) is beneficial to your muscles and your general well-being. It’s the same thing with your piano playing! So vary your practice.

Another thing that is incredibly valuable is just playing through your pieces.

Let’s say you’re working on a new piece, but you have several older pieces that you still have in shape to some degree. Play through your pieces each day! By playing through your music, you get used to playing for longer periods of time. Not only that, you have the tremendous benefit of solidifying your performance! If you’re used to running through your pieces again and again and again, when an opportunity comes to play for people, it’ll be second nature for you.

The other technique has to do with how you approach the keyboard.

You can actually play lighter on the piano. There are times when this is incredibly valuable. In your practice, of course, at times, you’re going to play slowly with firm fingers to make sure every note is secure. But when you’re performing, you flip that. You play lightly, staying close to the keys, with rounded fingers. Why rounded fingers? There are two fundamental reasons. Number one is the fact that if you play with flat fingers, you’re using one joint, just the knuckle joint. When you play with rounded fingers, you’re using all the joints. So the load of working to push the keys down is spread among more joints and muscles. The other thing is if you just let your hands rest on the keys, they’re naturally going to go into a rounded position. It takes effort to keep your fingers flat! So just let your hands go into the natural rounded position, and you’ll get the benefit of all your joints working together to play the piano with ease.

Stay close to the keys.

It takes much more effort to raise your fingers. In practice, using raised fingers helps to delineate what keys are down and what keys are up. It really helps your hands feel the notes and all the reaches. That’s a great way to practice. But when you’re performing, you want to lighten things up and stay close to the keys. This is also true with wrist work with staccatos and such. You use your wrists in order to achieve a crisp staccato and speed. But by staying closer to the keys, you play lighter. Staying close to the keys takes much less effort and it enables you to go faster.

Developing more endurance involves practicing intelligently.

To recap: try to play through a lot of music on a regular basis. Take breaks if you get tired, but come back to it again and again. You could just take breaks from intense practice that uses a lot of physiology and do more mental work. Intersperse the physical with mental practice. When you perform, lighten up. Stay close to the keys with rounded fingers and don’t use excessive wrist motion for octaves, chords and staccato technique. This should help you develop more endurance. Let me know how this works for you! Any other tips? You can post them here 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

What are Minor Scales?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about minor scales. What are minor scales? When you have a piece of music, how do you know if it’s in the major or in the minor? You’re going to learn that today! I have another video on key signatures and also on major scales, which would be very helpful for you in preparation for this video if you don’t already have a solid grasp of that.

Major scales are a series of whole steps and half steps with all whole steps, except between the
3rd & 4th and the 7th & 8th notes.

On the piano, the C major scale is obvious because it is all white keys. You have half steps between the 3rd & 4th, and the 7th & 8th notes which are E & F, and B & C which have no black keys between them. So I’m going to use C major first as an example. If you have a piece with no sharps or flats in the key signature, it may be in C major. But suppose it was in a minor key. What key would that be? How would you know it’s in a minor key if it has the same key signature?

The sixth note of the major scale is the tonic, or the root, of the minor scale.

You take that C major scale and count up to the sixth note, which is A. Play all the notes of a C major scale starting on A and you’ll end up with the A natural minor scale. So when you see a piece of music without any sharps or flats, it may be in C major, but it may be in A minor. How do you know? Well, the minor is rarely found in its natural or pure form, unless you go really far back before major/minor tonality was really entrenched in Western music, starting in the Baroque era in the 1700s. Before that, modal music was very popular in Renaissance music and such.


In post-modal music, there are two forms of the minor that are prevalent:
The harmonic minor and the melodic minor.

This is how it works. The piece might be written with no sharps or flats, but accidentals are written in the score wherever they occur. The harmonic minor has a raised seventh. The seventh note is raised by a half step. So you go back to what we started with. Go to the sixth note of the major scale. Play the minor scale, but when you get to the seventh note of that minor scale, raise it by a half step. You can hear the strength of the raised seventh propelling you up a half step to the tonic. It begs for resolution! So if you have a piece of music with no sharps or flats, and you have G sharps all over the place, it could very well be in A minor, the relative minor of C major.

Another form of the minor that’s also very common in Western music is the melodic minor.

The melodic minor has a raised sixth and seventh. However, it descends using the natural minor. So if you have a piece with no sharps or flats, you would be looking for G sharps in particular, and possibly F sharps. If there are a lot of them, and you look at the harmonies, and there are a lot of A minor chords, and the piece ends on an A minor chord, it is undoubtedly in A minor, not C major.

How does this help you with other key signatures?

If you have two sharps, you might know that two sharps would be F sharp and C sharp. Go up a half step from the C sharp. That could be D major. But if it’s in the relative minor, you go to the sixth note of that major scale, and form the relative minor. So if you have two sharps in your key signature, it might be in B minor. The B minor scale would have a raised seventh. Instead of playing A natural, the harmonic minor would have A sharp. If it was in the melodic form, it would have a raised sixth and seventh, and it would descend in the natural minor.

Any time you have a key signature, figure out the major key first.

Once you know the major key, go to the sixth note of that major scale. Play all the notes of that major scale starting from the sixth note to that same note an octave higher. When you get to the seventh note of that minor scale, raise it a half step to figure out the accidental to look for. It won’t always be a sharp. It could be a natural that would raise the note. If the seventh note was already a flat, then you would raise it a half step by making it a natural. I hope this makes sense to you! If you have questions you can address them here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube in the comments section. I will try to answer as much as I can for you and make future videos based on your questions! 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

2 Ways to Solidify Your Musical Performance

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’ll be sharing two ways to solidify your musical performance. Say you have a piece of music you’ve worked on for a long time. You can play it pretty well, but not every time. Maybe when you’re alone at home, it comes out perfectly sometimes. Then, for no reason you can discern, things fall apart. It’s just not dependably solid. Is there anything you can do about that? Yes! I’m going to give you two completely different methods for solidifying your musical performance.

Take out the score and play slowly with raised fingers.

Whether it’s a piece you’re playing with the music or a piece you’ve memorized, get out the score, put it on your music rack, get out your metronome, take your foot off the pedal, and play slowly with raised fingers. What’s this about raised fingers? When you play with raised fingers, it trains your hands which fingers are down and which fingers are up. Everything is exaggerated. When you play a piece over and over again, after a while, your hands just naturally go to the right keys. But then you’ve done it so many times, you don’t even know what your hands are doing. They’re kind of doing it all on their own! You lose sense of the intellectual understanding of what you’re doing.

When you take out a metronome and you play something slowly with raised fingers, it ingrains the music into your hands and into your ears.

This is a great way to solidify your performance. You would be surprised how productive it is going through your music even once like that. And obviously, if there are any parts that you can’t play perfectly at that slow speed, then it’s going to show up like a sore thumb! It’s like putting your playing under a microscope when you play that slowly and intentionally. Anything that isn’t solid is going to be obvious. So that’s a great way to solidify your musical performance. The other way I’m going to show you is completely different.

Take a piece you can play and play it faster than you usually do.

Take a piece that you can already play and you want to solidify. You can play the piece, but every now and then something falls apart. It seems very random where things fall apart. How do you figure out what to practice? Go through your music faster than you usually do. When you miss something, that is the weak point. Zero in on the ten or twenty percent of the piece that you can’t play at that faster tempo. Those are the weakest parts. Then you’ve just zeroed in on what to practice! A shotgun approach to practicing is not very efficient. You don’t need to practice equally on everything. This is a great way to discover what needs work.

You can practice those trouble sections in innumerable ways.

You can practice hands separately. You can do progressively, faster metronome speeds, starting from a slow tempo and working your way up a notch at a time. You can practice little snippets and put the little snippets together. There are many different ways of practicing. But for identifying where to put your practice time in, this is a great technique!

So to recap, there are two ways you can solidify your pieces of music that you can already play.

One is to play with raised fingers. Use the score and a metronome with no pedal. Really delineate and articulate everything with precision. Sink in and feel every finger. Then there’s the polar opposite. Play everything a little bit faster than you usually do. See what places you can’t keep up and focus your practice on those sections. These are two tips 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

Steinway VS Baldwin: Listening Test!

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’ll be doing a piano test drive! I have two of the great American semi-concert grand pianos, Steinway and Baldwin. In the past, concert artists had a choice. Baldwin supported concert pianists around the world with their concert instruments. Of course, Steinway won the marketing war. They became the only de facto choice for touring artists, because putting concert grands in every major city in the world is a very daunting task.

In their heyday, Baldwin was making amazing pianos!

I’m going to play a brief excerpt of the Chopin G Minor Ballade. First I will play it on the Steinway Model B from 1981. Then I will play the same excerpt on the Baldwin SF seven foot semi-concert grand from 1967. I’m really interested in your opinions! Leave your comments here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. I want to know your impressions of these two magnificent American semi-concert grand pianos!

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Advanced Pedal Techniques

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about advanced pedal techniques. It’s absolutely not what you would expect at all. I guarantee it! I could talk about half pedaling, which sometimes you do to get a certain sonority. I could talk about combining the una corda pedal, the soft pedal, with the sustain pedal. I could talk about engaging the sostenuto pedal, the middle pedal, to hold some notes when maybe you don’t want to blur everything together. Then you can combine that with the sustain pedal. I could talk about using little dashes of pedal to bring out certain notes. There’s a wealth of pedal techniques that you couldn’t possibly even write in, and even if you could, it wouldn’t be that helpful. Because the piano you’re playing on, the acoustics of the room, not to mention the music you’re playing, all enter into these advanced pedal techniques.

What I’m talking about today are next level pedal techniques.

I will use the slow movement from the Mozart K 545 C Major Sonata as an example. I’m talking about the second movement. I know many of you purists out there might say, “Why use pedal in Mozart at all? Mozart’s piano didn’t have a pedal.” This is true. However, there are two reasons why you might consider using at least some pedal in Mozart. Number one, although Mozart’s piano did not have a sustain pedal, it did have a lever operated with your knee that did exactly the same thing as a sustain pedal. So there was a certain amount of sustain that could be achieved, much like with the pedal. Secondly, when you’re playing on a modern piano, it’s so drastically different from a Mozart era piano that it essentially becomes a transcription for modern piano. The sound, the sustain, and the whole quality of the instrument is so different from what Mozart heard out of his piano. Arguably, you’re playing on a whole different instrument! You might as well take advantage of what the modern piano offers you.

What kind of techniques am I talking about?

I’m not talking about any of the pedal techniques I brought up before. So what am I talking about? In pedaling this, you might be tempted to pedal so that the chords in the left hand get blurred together. Why not simply change the pedal whenever the harmonies change? It’s a very simple technique. The problem with that is when you add the right hand, the right hand notes become blurry. You don’t want the right hand to be blurry. But you want the left hand to be sustained, giving that bed that the melody can float on. Well, here’s the technique. It doesn’t involve the pedal. Not at first.

Use your hands to simulate the sound of the pedal!

In the left hand, you want to hold the bass notes longer. When you do this, the left hand is sustained without having to depend upon the pedal for it. Why is this so helpful? Because then you can use little touches of the pedal to articulate certain notes in the melody, to make the melody more sustained. These touches of pedal on the melody are really subjective. They’re not going to be the same for everyone. It depends upon the room, the acoustics, and the piano. By using little dashes of pedal on the melody while playing the accompaniment with this phantom pedal technique, you can capture the long notes on the melody to make them sing longer.

Simply pedal the long notes in the melody so they sustain longer.

With your left hand, use the phantom pedal technique holding the notes that fall on the beat so that you can use the pedal to enhance the melody instead of trying to pedal the chords to make them sound more lush and sustained. This opens up dramatic possibilities for using the pedal in a more subtle fashion to enhance the melody rather than connecting the accompaniment. This isn’t just in Mozart. This goes for a vast array of musical styles. Try it in your playing. You’ll be richly rewarded with a far more musical performance! You will get a sound that’s cleaner because you’re doing more with your hands. You won’t have to depend upon the pedal to connect what you can connect with your left hand. This opens up great expressive possibilities with the pedal in your piano 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