Tag Archives: piano

How to Sight-Read On the Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to sight-read on the piano. Sight-reading is one of the most difficult things you can do on the piano. Sometimes it seems absolutely mind boggling that it’s even possible! An accomplished player can take a piece of music they’ve never seen before and play it up to speed almost perfectly. How can they possibly see everything on the page? It doesn’t seem possible.

When I was young, I was a miserable sight-reader.

Even in high school, when I was a fairly advanced player, I wasn’t good at sight-reading. I was playing Chopin ballades and Liszt Hungarian rhapsodies and Beethoven sonatas, but my reading level was almost that of a beginner. I couldn’t seem to crack it. I have a video about my personal story of learning how to sight-read. You can see that video here. I had a revelatory moment when suddenly I realized I could read anything! Of course, I couldn’t get all the notes. I worked for years to get more and more of the notes in my sight-reading.

Keep your eyes on the music.

You can’t look down when you sight-read. You can’t read what you’re not looking at! You have to depend upon feel to a great extent. You must make the connection between what you hear and what you feel. But what I’m talking about today is something even more fundamental.

When you’re sight-reading, you’re not seeing absolutely everything.

It’s virtually impossible to see everything. There’s so much in a score. All the notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing andexpression, you can’t see it all. Even that person you think is reading everything perfectly, and maybe it sounds perfect, are they really seeing everything?

Hvae yeu eevr sein tohse wurd jmubles lkie tihs? Evon touhgh i’ts wrtiten inocrerctly, as lnog as tne frist and lsat ltteers are in the coerrct palecs, yeu can sitll reed it.

There are almost no words there at all! How is it possible to read that? Well, You’re not actually looking at every single letter. You’re looking at key letters that form the words, and you’re surmising what the words have to be in the context of the sentences. That’s exactly what you do in sight-reading! You actually look at what you can digest. You get a grasp of the sense of the harmonies. You surmise what the other notes must be based upon the ones you can see. You get an idea of where the music is going and you make many, many instantaneous decisions about what you can’t see. You flesh out all the notes based upon the skeletal image of what you capture reading quickly. Much like reading those jumbled words, you can make sense and you can even realize the music as it’s written without necessarily seeing every single thing in the score. It’s just like you were able to do a few moments ago, if you were able to read those jumbled words. It’s the same principle. So don’t feel like you can never read because there’s too much to see. There is too much to see, but you see what you need to see. Get the melody, of course. Get the bass and some of the inner lines. Get as many notes as you can, and make intelligent assumptions about what those inner voices must be.

Always look at chunks of music.

As I’ve talked about before, you don’t look from note to note. Just like when you’re reading text, you’re not looking at every single letter. It’s impossible to read that way. You look at words. You guess what the words are when reading text and you guess what the chords are when sight-reading music. You can get incredibly good at guessing if you’re experienced, particularly with composers you’ve played before, or styles you’re familiar with. There’s a certain formulaic type of notation that you can get your head around, and you can get pretty good at reading certain styles. There will always be some music where this breaks down, where you can’t even begin to decipher what the composer means. Maybe you’ve never even heard that composer before and you’re lost. But for a great deal of music, the more you do it, the more you’ll be able to assimilate into your fingers and be able to digest what you’re looking at and make musical sense. The key to sight-reading is deciphering the symbols you can grasp on the fly and fleshing out a performance on the spot. That’s what sight-reading is really all about.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with sight-reading. Share them in the comments at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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How Do You Achieve Smoothly Connected Chords on the Piano?

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin, and this is LivingPianos.com! Today’s subject is about how to achieve smoothly connected chords on the piano. This can be extremely difficult, particularly when you’re playing repeated chords. The whole mechanical nature of the piano is such that for a note to replay, the damper comes in contact with the strings. So it’s virtually impossible to completely connect a repeated note on the piano. You can use the pedal, but even then, because of the percussive nature of the piano’s tone, it never really sounds connected.

The more connected you can play with your hands, the smoother the sound will come out of the instrument.

This is true regardless of whether you’re using the pedal or not. Practicing without the pedal while trying to get repeated chords connected is essential. I’ll explain why in a minute. But first, how do you achieve such a thing? The secret is to keep your fingers in contact with the keys the entire time. Keep your fingers right on the keys. And be sure the keys come all the way up before they go back down again. If the key is down even a fraction of an inch before you play it, it may or may not play. A piano is not meant to have keys play when they don’t return all the way to the top. It’s not a technique you can always rely upon. So keep your fingers right on the surface of the keys, but be sure to let the keys fully return.

The first chord of each group has to be captured on the pedal, but you don’t want to capture the previous harmonies.

If you pedal too early, you’ll capture extra notes. You have a very brief amount of time to capture the chord on the pedal. It has to be after it is played, but also after the previous notes are gone. So by playing chords as long as possible, it gives you the maximum amount of time to grab the chord on the pedal. You want to work to have all the chords played while staying very close to the keys.

In places where you have repeated notes, you can change fingers.

When you change fingers on repeated notes, it’s much easier to make them sound smoothly connected. As one finger is going down, another finger is coming up. Whereas if you use the same finger, it doesn’t sound as smooth. It’s really hard to play with one finger and make the notes sound connected. When you change fingers on repeated notes, you get a smooth sound. You don’t have that luxury when you’re playing chords. You only have so many fingers on your hand! If you’re playing three notes, you have to use the same fingers.

So remember the secret to playing repeated chords is to keep your fingers in contact with the keys. But be sure to come up completely before depressing the chords down again. That should help you achieve smoothness in your repeated chords in any music you’re playing! Thanks again for joining me. I’m 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

Secrets of Improvisation: Improvisation Made Easy

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about improvising using diatonic seventh chords. I’ve been to many conservatories and master classes. Improvisation is almost never taught unless you’re a jazz major. It’s really shameful. As a matter of fact, I remember once meeting a pianist who was doing master’s work at Julliard in piano performance who couldn’t play Happy Birthday by ear! Isn’t that a sad fact? I’m here to show you some very simple improvisation techniques you can use in your playing. If you’re a sophisticated jazz player, this might not be of great value to you, although you might get something out of it. But for those of you who think you can’t improvise, you can! A great deal just comes down to having a command of some basic theory.

You have to know what notes to choose among when you’re improvising.

I’ve talked about simple things like improvising utilizing the dorian mode, but today is a little bit different. I’m going to talk about diatonic seventh chords. Now, that’s a mouthful! What am I talking about? First of all, what are seventh chords? I’ll just give a very quick theory primer, because it’s not that complex. It’s only complex if you don’t know your key signatures and your major scales. You have to learn those first before you can do much of anything with improvisation. It also is unbelievably helpful for your sight reading and learning music. So any of you who haven’t learned your key signatures, I highly recommend it. I’m going to assume you know your key signatures for this lesson, because it’s all based upon that. If you would like a video tutorial on key signatures, just let me know in the comments.

What are diatonic chords?

Well, first of all, what are chords? Chords are notes arranged in the interval of thirds. What are thirds? Thirds are notes of the scale that are three notes apart counting the first and last note. The notes in a scale are all seconds apart. If you skip one note between each scale degree, you have thirds. 7th chords consist of 4 notes: a root, third, fifth and seventh. That’s why they’re called seventh chords! The interesting thing is that you can do this in any major key. If you are in C major, you play every other white key going up from C to form a 4 note chord, C – E – G – B. If you are in D major, you can leave out every other note of the D major scale. You’re left with a D major 7th chord: D – F-sharp – A – C-sharp. You can do this in any key. But that’s just the one-seven chord. That’s a seventh chord built on the first scale degree. What about a two-seven chord? You can start on the second scale degree and have a two-seven. So in C-major, a two-seven will be D – F – A – C. You can start on the third scale degree and have a three-seven chord, and so on.

How does this apply to improvisation?

If you just want to play something really simple, you can go from a one-seven chord to a two-seven chord, back and forth. You can use any note of the scale to make up a tune in your right hand. If you find that easy, you can continue going up to three-seven, then to four-seven, then back down to three-seven, two-seven and finally one-seven. It’s a lot less complicated than it sounds. Here’s the beauty of it: you don’t have to play fast. A lot of times, people see great artists playing a mile a minute and think you have to play fast to improvise. You don’t have to play fast! You just have to make melodies. Strive for something that you would want to sing. It doesn’t have to be fast. It doesn’t have to be technical.

If you find that you’re having difficulty, the difficulty is most likely going to be with your left hand, believe it or not.

It can be challenging keeping the left hand rhythmically coherent, where you’re not changing the chords in random fashion, but holding each of them the same amount of time. You can use a metronome for that. Or better yet, find a drum beat on your keyboard or on YouTube to play along with. The best way is to play with other musicians where there’s give and take. But you can get your feet wet just by finding a drum beat to play along with. YouTube is loaded with drum beats. Just come up with any kind of drum beat you can imagine, like lounge drums, swing, or a shuffle drum beat, and you’ll find them at different speeds (BPM, Beats Per Minute). People have posted just about every kind of beat you can imagine on there! Find one that’s a speed you like, and then experiment!

Try it out for yourself!

Start off in C major. If you’ve never improvised before, just go from a one-seven to a two-seven in C major – back and forth holding each chord for 4 beats. Make sure you maintain the integrity of the comping. In your right hand, just play any white keys. Try to vary how long you hold notes. And play some notes at the same time you play the chords, and sometimes play chords without playing notes at the same time in your right hand. If you have friends who play music, comp for them and let them solo, and then let them comp for you while you solo. Comping is playing the chords behind the solo. Improvising by yourself, where you’re doing both the comping and the soloing is hard at first. If you have musical friends, this can be so much fun for you! When you get into things like blues, and if you learn how to read a lead sheet, which has just the chord symbols and the melody line, it opens up vast possibilities of music for you in a myriad of styles from folk to rock to new age, jazz, blues, country, you name it! This is a great way to get your feet wet. Let me know what you think! I’m 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

How to Find Weak Points in Your Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to find the weak points in your playing. You want your practice to be productive. You don’t want to use a shotgun approach, working on all the parts of your music equally. Some parts will already be in good shape while other parts might need work. But sometimes it’s hard to know which parts need work.

How do you isolate the parts of your music that are likely to fall apart?

Obviously, if something completely falls apart, it needs work. But suppose you play through a piece and everything is pretty good. You’ve done various types of practicing. You’ve gone through meticulously with the score. You’ve worked with a metronome. You’ve practiced without the pedal. You’ve played under tempo. Yet when you perform, sometimes things fall apart and it seems to be in random places. I have a tip for you: Play the music faster than your normal tempo! You’ll find that you can play perhaps 90% of the piece at a faster tempo. The parts you can’t play at that faster tempo are the weak sections. You can isolate those sections and work on them in innumerable ways. A great way is to find a tempo at which you can play them cleanly, accurately and comfortably, and play the sections with the metronome at progressively faster speeds.

It’s good to have a reserve of tempo in your playing.

When you’re playing a piece of music, knowing that you can play it a little bit faster and still hold it together is incredibly valuable for a couple of reasons. First of all, in the heat of the moment in a musical performance, a lot of times when you’re nervous, you don’t realize that your whole physiology speeds up. Your heart’s beating a little faster. You’re breathing a little faster. That’s from the extra energy you get in performance. And you may just take your music a little faster than you even realize. If there are parts that you’ve never played at that faster tempo, you could run into trouble. So play your music a little bit over tempo and see what happens.

Romantic period music has a certain amount of tempo freedom.

In some styles of music, you may use a certain amount of rubato, the give and take of the tempo, where you rush forward in certain places, then hold back to make up the time. This adds an element of excitement to your music. That’s totally appropriate for some styles of music. But maybe during a performance you decide to use rubato in a place you’ve never thought of using it before. If you’ve never played the piece faster, you can’t pull it off very well if you haven’t practiced that one little part of a phrase faster before. So play your music a little bit over tempo to prepare yourself to allow for some spontaneity in your performance.

Sometimes you can play a piece dramatically faster and get a whole different feel for the music!

Let’s say you’ve been playing a piece and you’ve always felt the quarter note as the beat. For example, in the first movement of the Mozart K 545, C major Sonata, you’re thinking in four. But if you play it faster you might feel the half note as the pulse and give a whole different rhythmic feel. So there are a lot of benefits to playing your music faster as an experiment. First of all, you’ll find the weak points in your playing. You can zero in on the parts you can’t play at that faster tempo. You also have more freedom in a romantic period piece where you can give a little nuance of tempo. And lastly, you might feel the pulse of music differently, a slower pulse at a faster tempo which can open up a different rhythm and feel, even if you don’t end up playing faster. There are many benefits to taking a faster tempo.

Experiment with your pieces!

See what happens when you play your music faster. You may find that some pieces work at a faster tempo. There are innumerable benefits to this. So try it out! Let me know how it 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

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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

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Did Classical Musicians Ever Play from Lead Sheets?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about lead sheets. Lead sheets are what jazz, rock, country, new age, and many other musicians play from. It’s simply the melody line and chord symbols rather than all the notes on the grand staff to be played by both hands. That’s what most working musicians read from, not the full score. As a matter of fact, other than Classical and perhaps Broadway musicals, the vast majority of music is not all written out note for note. The musicians kind of make up their part based upon the chord symbols and the melody line. So you might wonder: Did Classical musicians ever play from lead sheets? The answer is surprisingly, yes! Perhaps it’s a lost art, but let’s look back to the Baroque Era, with composers like Bach, Handel, Telemann, Corelli, and Vivaldi.

In the Baroque era music was written very differently.

With Baroque music, first of all, there were very few dynamics or phrasing indicated in the score. It was mostly just the notes, and that’s about it. Not only that, but you’ll notice ornamentation symbols throughout the score. These are squiggly lines that scholars, centuries later, are still trying to decipher what the composers meant by them. There are volumes of books written about how to approach mordents, trills and turns, as well as other ornamentation. The fact of the matter is, everybody has different ideas about them now. Back then, it’s likely that performers had the freedom to decide how much to embellish the score based upon these ornaments that were in the score. Perhaps they even added ornamentation in places that didn’t have any of these markings. There was a freedom to improvise on the music. But it goes much deeper than that.

Did you know that the trio sonata, which so many composers from Corelli to Telemann wrote hundreds of, were not actually completely written out?

Today, if you buy the sheet music to a trio sonata, it’s all written out. But it wasn’t originally written out. What is a trio sonata? A trio sonata was actually written for a solo instrument. It could be a violin. It could be a flute. It could be any instrument. And a basso continuo, which could be virtually any instrument playing the low part. Perhaps a cello, viola da gamba, something that could play the bass line, which was written out. So you had the melody and the bass written out. Well, what about the keyboard part, the harpsichord, in most cases back then? Was that part written out? No. Now, it wasn’t a lead sheet the way we think of a modern lead sheet. It was what’s called figured bass. Figured bass was a type of lead sheet notation, for lack of a better term.

It did not have the notes. It just had chord symbols (in addition to the melody and bass line). The player had to realize the part based upon those symbols. They were improvising based upon chord changes, just like a jazz musician does today! This is the lost art of improvisation of the Baroque era.

Today when you buy sheet music for a Corelli or Telemann trio sonata it is all written out.

Somebody has gone to the trouble of realizing and writing out a keyboard part from those chord symbols of the figured bass. So almost nobody improvises anymore today. There are some early instrument enthusiasts who actually do this sort of thing. But for the most part, Classical musicians are so used to the sanctity of the score, that they don’t even realize that it wasn’t originally written out! These early works were not written out, except for the melody and the bass. The rest of it was left up to the performer to realize. And even the other parts could be embellished with ornamentation.

This is the truth about Classical music. It was much closer to modern styles of music than most people know. But today we look at it almost like pieces in a museum that you shouldn’t touch. They need to be preserved exactly as they were. But these were living, breathing works of music that evolved depending on who was performing them. So you want to approach Classical music in this way.

Cadenzas were originally improvised, not necessarily written out and learned.

The cadenza was a time for performers to showcase what they could do in the middle of a concerto, taking off on the themes that they had just played. Again, this is all but a lost art. During the Romantic period at salon concerts and informal gatherings, people would make up music going back and forth. They would try to outdo each other. This is what keeps Classical music alive and fresh, that spontaneous element. So while I certainly respect the scores of the great composers and fastidiously learn them, at the same time, you want to understand the lineage where this music comes from. You can add an element of spontaneity and inventiveness to your playing, realizing that these weren’t just static, etched-in-stone works. But they evolved, depending upon who was performing them!

I hope this has been interesting 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

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