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3 Ways Active Listening Improves Your Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today you’re going to learn about three ways that active listening improves your piano playing. What do I mean when I say active listening? Aren’t you always listening when you’re playing the piano? Well, it’s actually very difficult.

Active listening keeps you engaged in your performance.

Let’s say you’ve been working on a piece for several weeks, maybe even months. You practice it all the time. Then, finally, you’re giving some kind of performance. Maybe you’re playing it for your teacher or for friends. Or maybe it’s a public performance. How can you stay engaged in the whole process? The secret is listening to what you’re doing. Now, that might seem silly. Of course, you’re listening. But are you really actively listening, or are you just passively playing? Maybe it’s become routine because you’ve done it so many times before. This is a tremendous challenge with something you’ve played so many times.

Listen with fresh ears and allow the music to unfold.

Try playing your piece in ways that you haven’t played before. This can be a scary proposition if you’ve never done it in your practice. So active listening is something that you want to do in your practice. Take the music to new places. Listen to inner voices. Maybe you’ve always been listening to your right-hand melody. Well, try listening to the left hand. You could even try bringing out different voices. If you’ve always favored the right hand, favor the left hand just to hear what’s there. Keep yourself engaged! The more ways you can play your music, the more creative you can be in a performance. And once again, listening to what’s happening keeps you engaged. So that’s one important benefit of active listening.

Active listening is the secret to keeping your audience engaged.

If you’re not listening to your performance, nobody else will either! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at concerts where there’s been an accomplished concert pianist playing, and I found myself getting bored. I’m thinking, What’s the matter with me? I’m listening, and everything sounds fine. There’s nothing wrong at all. Then there’s a memory slip, and I realize that the performer wasn’t actively listening. If they aren’t really listening, you can’t stay engaged either. So the secret to being able to have a performance that’s compelling to listen to is for you to be listening to what you’re doing. So that’s the second benefit. You keep yourself engaged, and you keep your listeners engaged in the process.

The third benefit, which is maybe the most important of all, is creating a beautiful sound.

You practice so much. You’re focusing on what you’re doing with your fingers. You’re focusing on the keys. You’re focusing on counting, fingering—a myriad of things. But the actual sound you’re creating is the most important thing of all! And it can easily be neglected. Now, this is particularly important if you’re playing on a different piano from the one you practice on all the time. Let’s say you’re at a friend’s home or you’re playing a recital somewhere, and you sit down at a different piano. You must listen! Maybe that piano is a lot brighter than yours at home. You may have to completely change your approach to the keyboard in order to get a beautiful sound because you might overplay the instrument. Of course, the inverse could be true as well. You may have to use more energy to project sound on a piano that has a kind of dead sound compared to the piano you play at home.

So these are three important benefits of active listening.

Practice active listening in your playing at home! Try to go to different places with your music. Play at different tempos and bring out different hands and different lines in your playing. Try different things to keep yourself engaged in the process. Your audience will be rewarded, and you’ll be able to create a more beautiful sound in your playing. I hope this is 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

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrinContact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Why You Must Not Overthink Your Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we’re going to talk about why you must not overthink your piano playing. Now that might seem like a strange thing for me to say, with thousands of articles and videos about piano playing, technique, how to practice, memorization, how to digest a score, harmony, and so many more. Isn’t that all about thinking? It is. And there is a time and a place for analysis, and there’s a time for intuitive playing. And you must have a balance between the two in your performances. So what am I talking about when I say you shouldn’t overthink your playing?

When you’re performing, you have to have a presence of mind.

You need to make sure you’re sitting in the right place and that your hands are in the right position. You need to listen in order to achieve the proper balance of sound. But if you make the mistake of really thinking about what you’re doing, it can drive you crazy. You might completely lose the ability to play at all! When you’re playing a piece of music, there are thousands of notes, different rhythms, articulations, phrasings, and dynamics. There’s so much going on. If you stop just for a moment to think about what you are doing and look at your hands, you might question if you even know what the next note is because you’re doing things almost on automatic pilot to some extent. Hopefully you’ve learned your music well enough that you can think it through, even away from the piano which gives you great security. You’ve referenced the score, you’ve studied the score, you’ve played slowly, and you’ve done all these things so you have security. But if you start thinking about what you’re doing while you’re doing it, you can get completely psyched out.

Stay in the moment while performing.

You’re playing a piece, and you’re in the moment. It’s great. But suddenly, you start thinking about how the next section goes. You take yourself out of the moment by overthinking. If you’re not right where you are, then you get completely fouled up. Because when you get to that part, you’ve thought it through and you’re not sure if you thought it through right or not, and you might second-guess it wrong. These are the kinds of mind games that can completely destroy you in a musical performance.

Remember, the time for analysis is in your practice, but when you’re performing, don’t overthink it.

Stay in the moment. Listen to what you’re achieving. Try to go with the sound of the music and keep your head on your shoulders. Think about where you are and let the music flow naturally, like you’ve done hundreds of times in your practice. Sometimes that’s the greatest challenge because when all eyes are looking at you in a performance, or even if it’s just a friend or your teacher you’re playing for, you start thinking more about it in a way that you aren’t used to in your practice.

Another thing you can do is practice performing.

Play through your music and pretend people are watching you. Pretend you’re playing for your teacher or your friends, and see if you can keep your wits about you. Try to psych yourself out and see if you can still hold things together. Because inevitably, when you play for people, it just feels different. Your whole psychology changes; so don’t let it overtake you. Stay in the moment in your playing, and you will be rewarded with fine performances. 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 Use the Pedal on the Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to use the pedal on the piano. This is such a deep subject. I have other videos on the finer points about pedaling, how it imparts changes in tone, when to use it, when not to use it, and how to use the sustain pedal in conjunction with the soft pedal. But today I will cover the fundamentals. If you’ve ever wondered how the pedal works, you’ve come to the right place!

The interesting thing about the pedal is that it does not go down rhythmically.

If you’ve just started using the pedal the hardest thing about it is that it is not used rhythmically, because you want to tap your foot on the beat. It’s the most natural thing in the world! Yet that doesn’t work on the piano. It doesn’t work because if you push the pedal down when a note plays, you will capture the harmonies of the previous notes that were down. It’s a mess. Why is that? The fact of the matter is, when you push the pedal down, whatever notes are held down are going to continue holding down. When you play a note, you’re still holding down the previous notes to some extent, particularly if something is slurred.

How do you create a slur on the piano?

A slur is a glide between notes. A singer or a French horn player does it very naturally and the notes between the slur are all there. On the piano, you can’t do that. So you tend to overlap notes, and that’s the way you create the illusion of a slur. But what happens when you pedal on the beat is the previously played notes are going to be held. If I play middle C and then a C sharp and I pedal at the same moment as I play the C sharp, you’re going to hear the C and the C sharp together. You will hear dissonance. The pedal must go down right after notes plays.

But here’s some good news for you, the pedal comes up exactly on the beat!

The pedal goes up exactly when you play a note. But the pedal goes down right after the note, arrhythmically. It’s important that you understand that, otherwise, you’re going to hear dissonance. It’s the nature of the pedal.

There’s so much more to the pedal. As a matter of fact, I will put links in the description of some other videos I have on pedaling. Decades ago, I made 50 hour-long presentations live on the internet, for a company in Irvine. My show was called Keyboard Kaleidoscope. One episode is an hour long show on the pedal that I will share with you in the notes below, in the description, and on LivingPianos.com! 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

HOW TO USE THE PEDAL ON THE PIANO – KEYBOARD KALEIDOSCOPE – ROBERT ESTRIN

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How to Keep Your Review Pieces on Performance Level

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to keep your review pieces on performance level. I talk to so many people who wonder how they can learn new pieces without forgetting old pieces. People can end up studying the piano for years and still only have one piece they can play, the piece they’re working on that week! So, how do you keep old pieces in shape? How can you possibly have time to learn new pieces when you’re reviewing all your old pieces?

Of course the answer is, you can’t keep every piece you’ve ever played in your hands and in your head all the time. It becomes impossible! Once you amass a repertoire of five or six hours of music, you can’t possibly keep everything in shape. However, it is vitally important that you keep at least the last few pieces you’ve studied in your hands and in your head. Because there’s a pleasure and an ease you gain with music you’ve played for a long time. So, how do you do that without taking up all of your practice time?

The best, easiest, and most fun way of keeping your review pieces in shape is to play them!

Play your pieces all the time! play them every day! Why not? Obviously, if you have pieces like the Hammerklavier Sonata of Beethoven or the Bach Goldberg Variations, they’re going to take a while to play through. So, there are certain limitations depending upon the level you’re on. But certainly you should keep playing the pieces that you’ve studied within the past few weeks.

Let’s say you’re working on a brand new piece, and you have the piece you did at your last lesson. Well, it’s better to have the last few pieces, at least three to five pieces. Otherwise, as I said, you could be playing the piano for years and never have anything really secure. Because there’s nothing like the security of playing a piece that you’ve known for a long time. The ease and security you gain from living with music is tremendous. If you never review those pieces, everything is kind of tentative and you never have that pleasure.

Simply playing through your pieces, is that all you have to do?

Playing through your pieces isn’t all you have to do, but most of the time that’s enough. On a daily basis or at least every other day, play through your review pieces. Play through a bunch of them. It’s fun because they’re pieces you already know. What’s the purpose of all this practicing if you’re not going to have anything you can play? You should enjoy playing the piano, not just practicing. You put in all this tedious work of learning music and working out all the technical details. The reward at the end of the line is being able to play! So of course play them, and play them for people. You’ll get better at performing simply by playing for other people.

Now, if you keep playing your pieces over and over again for weeks on end and that’s all you do, they will deteriorate over time. Because there are slight changes that happen. Which is why you must go back to the score on a periodic basis with your music if it’s something you’ve memorized. Put the score up and play with your foot off the pedal so you can hear the underlying performance without the benefit of the pedal which can obscure things. Sometimes you should use a metronome to make sure you’re playing at a constant tempo. This is a great way to reinforce your playing. Playing with the score slowly to a metronome with no pedal reinforces everything that you’ve learned before. It’s a refresher. I recommend it highly for all of your review pieces. This is particularly helpful with pieces you’ve recently learned that you’re trying to get on that ultimate level. This is a terrific way of doing that. You can actually work at different speeds. Start very slowly with the score, because it’s hard to read something you’ve memorized, particularly if it’s a piece that’s above your reading level. You undoubtedly read through it when you first got it just to see what it was about, and then you got to work and learned it. Going back trying to read it is a tough task, but it’s also vitally important if you want to keep your performance on a high level. Otherwise, it’s like a game of telephone where the message gets so garbled it ends up being a whole new message. If you play your piece over and over enough times and never refer to the score, you can end up with a whole different piece! So, it’s incredibly important to reference the score.

Choose wisely which pieces you keep in your repertoire.

Definitely keep at least the last two or three pieces you’ve learned in your repertoire so you can really solidify them and enjoy the fruits of your labor. You might also select some choice pieces that you’ve learned that you never want to forget. Play them often enough that they don’t get too far gone. If you find that they’ve deteriorated to a great extent, go back to the score. You might have to practice some sections, but don’t let them get so far gone that you have to practically start all over to learn them again. But even if you do, you’ll find if you’ve really learned a piece of music and committed it to memory, relearning it is much faster than initially learning it. So, that’s the good news for any of you out there who haven’t done this. Go ahead and relearn some of those pieces. At first it’ll seem arduous, but then you’ll quickly assimilate the score once again.

There are pieces I’ve learned and relearned multiple times. They become cemented almost as a part of my permanent repertoire. There’s a number of pieces that I just have all the time. Even if I haven’t played them in years, they’re still there. But it takes a long time to get to that point. In the meantime, play through your pieces on a regular basis and have fun with your music! 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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Can Playing the Piano Make You Smarter?

This is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store with a question. “Does playing the piano make you smarter?” I hope so. I’ve been playing a long time and wonder what I would be like if I didn’t play the piano! This is a serious question. Indeed there have been studies, like famous Gordon Shaw – Frances Rauscher studies at UC Irvine. These studies showed:

With a control group of children studying the piano, compared to other groups studying computers, as well as a control group studying nothing, the children who studied piano showed an increase of math and science scores and even increase in English skills!

That is exciting to think about! Later on, they even discovered the “Mozart Effect”, which had some controversy. They simply played recordings of Mozart while kids were taking tests and found that there was a temporary increase in IQ scores just from listening to the music! Temporary is the keyword here. Later on their findings were diminished when they found it was just a temporary boost, but that is exciting enough!

Why should playing the piano increase your intelligence? Did you know?

Playing the piano uses more parts of your brain than any other human activity.

This is according to the New York Times in article years ago about the human brain that showed piano playing as the single most complex endeavor of the human mind. How can this be? Think about it. You have short-term memory, long-term memory, tactile memory as well as visual and aural cues.

You have just about every part of your brain firing when playing the piano.

It is a fantastic opportunity to develop your mind. Of course if you play with other musicians you also develop social skills. It is endless. Just playing music is a great way to expand your mind. The discipline of practicing and the organization it takes to digest a piece of music make for an incredible opportunity to explore aspects of your own mind in ways that are richly rewarding. At the end of the line, you have something to show for it. You can play a piece of music or many pieces of music!

As if that isn’t enough of a reason to play the piano, being able to increase your intelligence is a benefit too! Everyone should study the piano, don’t you think? Let me know how you feel about this. I wonder how many of you are on board. I suppose if you are reading this there could be skewed results because many of my readers might already feel this way!

There are studies that prove an increase in intelligence just from playing the piano.

Spend more time with the piano and your brain will thank you! Once again, this is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

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What is a Tone Poem?

What is a Tone Poem?

Tone poems are programmatic pieces which are based upon stories.

They are typically large orchestral works, sometimes approaching an hour or more in length. Richard Strauss, Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life) is one such epic work for symphony orchestra. Richard Wagner also composed tone poems as did Debussy. However, it was actually Franz Liszt who first developed the tone poem earlier in the 19th century even though he is known mostly as the quintessential virtuoso pianist and composer of brilliant piano works.

Since early childhood, throughout conservatory and beyond, I played both piano and French horn.

So, I have always been enamored with tone poems. The great tone poems of the late Romantic era are in my blood! I hope you enjoy the tone poem I have created for you. info@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729