Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s show is about my first recital. It seems like it was only yesterday, even though I was a very young child. Performers know how different it is when you play for other people. In the olden days with in-person lessons, my students would play for me and say, “It went better at home.” But with virtual lessons, what excuse is there when they’re at home on their own pianos? Well, there’s a lot to this subject. Let’s dive right in!

I grew up studying piano with my father, Morton Estrin.

Though my father was a professor of music at Hofstra University in Hempstead, Long Island, he did most of his private teaching right in our home. There was a big addition on the house with two grand pianos. In fact, my father had monthly recitals there. Each month he’d feature a student who was preparing a solo recital. Sometimes he would have multiple students perform. It would be a three, four, or even five way recital, giving students ample opportunities to perform. Because it’s so important to practice performing, for the reasons I’m going to articulate in a moment. In June he had two recitals back to back for all of his students who weren’t ready for solo or joint recitals. That’s where I first had an opportunity to play in a recital.

In my father’s studio, he had professional recording equipment.

There are tapes of my playing from the time I started lessons. I have them in storage right now. One of these days I’ll pull some of them out. I’m sure many of you would be interested in hearing some of these recordings. From my very first pieces, he recorded virtually everything my sister and I studied. I’d have seven or eight short pieces and he’d switch on the tape machine. I’d announce them and play them. We did that for years and years. So there are a whole bunch of tapes. Because of that, you would think that playing a recital wouldn’t be a big deal. After all, it was in the same room on the same piano where I had recorded countless times. But here’s what happened. I remember the first time I performed so vividly! I was playing my father’s piano in his studio, which was in our home. You would think I’d be very comfortable. I knew the pieces really well. I could play without even thinking! By the way, that’s part of the problem, which we’ll get to in a minute.

I got to the piano and it was almost like being in a dream state.

The black keys looked so black and the white keys looked so stark white. I was looking down on all these keys thinking, “Oh my gosh, I have to find all the notes to these pieces I’ve memorized?” It just seemed absolutely impossible! How could I find all those notes among those keys I was staring at? It was a horrifying prospect! My father wouldn’t have me play if I wasn’t really well prepared. And because I was very well prepared, I ultimately was able to play.

It’s amazing how seriously we take our own performances.

During one of my first performances, I had a little blunder. In my mind I had a complete catastrophe! I thought it was just horrific what had happened. My life flashed before my eyes. There is something about playing publicly that gets your adrenaline flowing. I thought it was a complete disaster! But at my next lesson, my father put on the tape of the recital. As I was listening, there was one little tiny blip that went by. I was waiting for the mistake. But then it was over. I couldn’t even believe it. It was a little teeny, tiny momentary thing that I practically didn’t notice listening back to the tape. But at the time, it seemed like the world stopped! There was an eternity of time in that moment.

When you’re performing, you are hyper aware of what you’re doing.

You notice things during a performance in a way that is completely unlike your practice when you’re just playing without giving too much thought. In fact, your thoughts are focused on the music, which is really the key to being able to perform well. But how do you stay focused on the music? There are many ways to achieve this. I’ve talked about the importance of practicing performing. You can start by recording yourself. Then play for a family member or a good friend – just a single person. Then work up to more and more people. Some people will say you should just ignore the audience. Just go out there and pretend they’re not there and just play. While this may work for some people, I’ve always taken the opposite approach.

Visualize the performance as accurately as you can.

Think about the moment you are going to be in front of an audience. Try to get all the juices churning. Try to be in that moment. In my practice, when I do little tryout performances, even with nobody there at all, I’ll pretend I’m at the actual performance. I’ll think about the room. I try to psyche myself into the feeling of performing. It’s almost like a post-hypnotic suggestion. I think about sitting on the bench. I think about the image of the name of the piano. If it’s a Steinway, I think Steinway. If it’s a Baldwin, imagine the Baldwin logo. I just breathe deeply and imagine that moment with an audience there, seeing the name of the piano, so that it’s not a surprise when the moment of performance comes. Then you have some idea of what it’s like. When you sit down at a performance, or even if it’s your lesson on your own familiar piano, suddenly everything feels different. You want to prepare that moment in advance. Then when you come to it, you take that same big breath. You look at the name of the piano and it brings back that state of relaxation that you practiced beforehand. This is a great technique to get you centered.

Take things a little slower during a performance.

When you are nervous, you tend to go faster. Your entire physiology speeds up. Your heart rate goes a little faster. You might have sweaty palms. If you just go a shade slower than you think you should, you probably will be right where you should be, right at your normal tempo. One of the reasons why you may have difficulty when you’re playing for somebody is you’re going slightly faster than you’ve ever gone before but you don’t even realize it. Then things start messing up. And once things mess up, if you get into a thought of, “What’s coming next?” It’s a disaster. Because the amount of material you learn is awe-inspiring when you think about it. It’s amazing that you can remember all that music! Even if you’re playing with a score, it’s amazing that you can digest all of those notes coming at you furiously. You have to make sure you have enough time. So give yourself that little extra time by taking a slightly slower tempo.

You can rely on motor memory, to a certain extent.

Physiologically, your fingers know where to go. I liken this to watching a toddler learning how to take their first steps. The concentration on their faces is unbelievable. But of course, once you learn how to walk, you can walk while thinking about other things. The same thing is true for driving. The first time you drive, everything is incredibly intentional. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t concentrate while you drive. You absolutely have to! But the human mind can’t really think about more than one thing at a time. You just go back and forth very quickly. And that’s what you do when you drive. You’re looking in front of you, you’re checking your mirrors, you’re keeping track of what’s around you. At your musical performance, it’s the same thing. You’re watching certain things. But if you’re playing something that’s really fast, how can you possibly think of all the notes? Of course, you try to think of all the notes. But if you’re playing a whole piece, or a whole program, there will be moments of distraction. Maybe there’s a noise in the audience, or something where you’re not100% on top of every single thing that’s happening. It’s almost like freewheeling, and it’s very dangerous! And yet, we all depend upon it to one extent or another. But you always have to have part of you looking down at yourself, making sure you don’t take a wrong turn. You have to continually reaffirm your concentration.

Listen to the music and let it draw you in.

If you listen to what you’re doing, your audience is compelled to listen also. It keeps you in the moment, which is the whole secret to having a coherent, solid performance. If you start thinking about what’s coming later it can be a disaster. You can’t really think that way. If you make a mistake, you can’t dwell on it. Once again, you have to be right where you are, focused on what you’re doing, listening and trying to make the most beautiful music you can. You want to reach people with your love of the music. The reason why you spend so many hours achieving the level you do is so you can share your unique take on these pieces. Take advantage of that moment. Let the audience inspire you! Take that energy and use it positively to keep you focused on the score, listening and creating beautiful music, and you’ll do great.

In your practice, don’t just depend upon your motor memory.

Go back very slowly with your foot off the pedal, playing with the metronome. Double and triple check your work, hammering each note clearly, delineating and exaggerating everything. Particularly dynamics, because one of the things you’re going to find in your performances, when you listen to them, is that things that you thought were really exaggerated, strong accents and short staccatos and loud fortes and quiet pianissimo, are not going to be nearly as extreme to the listener from 10, 20, 50 feet away. You have to exaggerate everything! Practice that exaggeration in your slow practice so you learn the sound and the feel of exaggerating everything. So that when you lose your concentration momentarily, your fingers still remember, and your ears remember the sound you’re after. I hope these tips work for you!

Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here 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

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.

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

This is LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin asking the question: What is the most productive practice routine? I’m sure this is important to many of you. If you spend a lot of time during the week practicing the piano, you want to get as much accomplished as possible. People often ask me, “How much time should I spend on this or that? Should I be doing exercises?” People sometimes feel lost deciding what to practice. They don’t know if they’re spending the appropriate amount of time on each discipline. I’m going to give you things you should be doing in your practice daily, or almost every day. Certainly, the ones at the beginning of this list are going to be things you should do every day, and towards the end of the list are things you should do every week. I’m listing them in order of importance of how much time you should spend on the following tasks:

As a pianist, learning music is of paramount importance.

You should spend the vast majority of your time memorizing music, or if you’re a collaborative player, learning scores of accompaniments or chamber music. This is the hardest part of practicing, and you have to spend the majority of your practice time doing it. There’s no shortcut to this. I wish there was some way the works of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Ravel, Debussy, Chopin, Liszt, and others could be embedded in my head and in yours! But there isn’t. You have to just painstakingly practice bit by bit assimilating music. That is the primary thing you should be doing in your piano practice on a daily basis.

Refine the music you have learned on previous days.

Whatever you’ve learned the day before isn’t solidified yet. As a matter of fact, when you first sit down to practice, you might think, “Did I even learn this yesterday?” It may seem quite foreign. Mostly, you’ll find that when you’re reading through the music, it will come back to you quickly. But a lot of times it doesn’t. You’re not alone! There’s nothing wrong with you. If you have to relearn the music you just learned the day before, welcome to the club! It happens. But don’t fret, because when you just go through the same steps of relearning, it comes back much more quickly than the first time you learned it. Just go through the memorization steps again, and the second time you learn it, you will retain it much better.

Review your pieces.

What else is there besides memorizing new material and reviewing the music you learned days before? Well, there’s always review pieces you should work on. If you don’t work on review pieces, you’ll never have the familiarity of something that you’ve lived with and played many times. Reviewing your pieces keeps them at a high level. Then, at any time, you’re ready to play at least two or three pieces on a high level because you play them nearly every day. From time to time, you should take out the score. Take your foot off the pedal. Look at the score carefully, and play slowly. Use the metronome, reinforcing your memory. But at the very least, you should play through a few pieces every day. It’s of tremendous value keeping your music in shape and simply moving your fingers. It provides good exercise for you as well, which seamlessly leads us to the next topic:

Play through exercises regularly.

What exercises should you do? Primarily scales and arpeggios. If you’re not up to scales and arpeggios yet, you can do simple Hanon exercises just to strengthen your fingers. When playing exercises, slow practice is vitally important. You actually get more physiological benefit from slow practice than you do from fast playing. Plus, it trains your fingers. You will feel which fingers are down and which fingers are up by exaggerating the finger motion. You get clean releases of the notes so you avoid muddiness in your playing. You should use the metronome when practicing Hanon exercises, as well as scales and arpeggios. Always practice slowly with raised fingers first. Then playing two notes to the beat, and finally four notes to the beat staying close to the keys, and playing lighter. Play at four notes to the beat many times so that you’re used to playing a lot of notes quickly and evenly. It’s a godsend for your technique!

There’s also wrist exercises. At the beginning, I like to teach simple exercises in thirds. Once again, use the metronome. Make sure you identify your wrists separate from your arms. You don’t want to move your arms up and down when working on wrist technique. You want your arms to place your hands exactly in the right position over the keys. Why? Because slow practice is preparation for being able to play faster for articulated staccatos and such. Eventually, you’ll be working on octave technique which also comes from the wrist. I have a little octave exercise you can reference. You can even work on scales in octaves! You can work on fingers all day long, but If you don’t work on wrist exercises, you’re not going to develop your wrist technique which is essential for piano playing.

Sight reading should be a part of your daily work as well.

It can be fun exploring new music or playing different styles of music that you like but don’t ordinarily play. Just pick up the sheet music and read through it! Find music on your reading level. It’s not going to be the same level of pieces you’re studying. Pieces you’re breaking down bit by bit, hands separately, then putting them together, and working through methodically, are going to be far more complex than pieces you can simply read accurately after playing them through maybe two or three times. If you can’t play the music you’re sight reading perfectly after two or three times slowly, then it’s not the appropriate level for you to sight read. Your reading level will grow if you do it every day. Better yet, find people to play with. When you’re forced to keep going, that is the best way to develop your reading abilities.

Improvisation is awesome!

If you’re not fluent with improvisation, just do anything, even if it’s just abstract chords. You can experiment with various styles of improvised music, whether it’s blues, jazz, or new age. Just come up with anything. Have fun with it! You’ll be developing your ears while you’re doing this. It provides great value. You don’t necessarily have to do this every day, but it can’t hurt. Experiment with it. It not only helps you to improvise better, but it’s a lifesaver when you develop a connection between the keys you play, and what you hear. If you ever have a memory slip in performance, you can feel your way back because if you have improvised a great deal, you will know what sounds are going to be created from the keys you play. You develop a connection with the keyboard. So do a little improvisation. Even just a few minutes a day can help your piano playing tremendously.

Take some time for theory.

What are you going to do with theory? Well, your teacher might guide you, and you can also simply study your music. If you have a piece, you can take time to study the score and figure out what it’s all about. For example, you can figure out what the harmonies are doing. Or if you’re doing a sonata, you know it changes keys in the second subject since all sonatas do. Determine where it changes key. Look at the accidentals to be able to figure out where the piece is going to the dominant (the key starting on the fifth note of the key of the piece). Study your scores. It will help you to learn them better and avoid taking wrong turns in performance.

Are those all the things you can do in practice?

No. Make practice an exciting journey! You can sing. You can improvise while singing. That’s an excellent test to know if you are hearing what you’re playing. If you can sing what you’re playing, then you know you’re hearing it. That is really key to being able to solidify memory in your classical playing. This is just the tip of the iceberg. These are fundamental things you should be achieving in your daily work. Remember, learning new music is number one. Refining what you did the day before is number two. Number three is playing review pieces. Enjoy them! There’s time for scales, arpeggios, octaves, wrist exercise, things of that nature as well. Then reward yourself with some sight reading for fun and just make some music up with improvisation. Then delve into some music theory. Study the music that you’re learning or music you want to learn. These are all great things you can do on a regular basis to keep your practicing productive, rewarding, and engaging, which is the most important part!

Whatever you do, make sure you’re not just going through the motions.

Be sure you’re actually involved in the process. After all, practicing is a mental activity. If you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing, it really isn’t practicing no matter how long you sit at the bench. Make sure you’re getting something done with your time. Thanks so much for joining me. I’m 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

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why it is so hard to start in the middle of a piece of music. Have you ever had that situation? Maybe during your practice something fumbles. So, you want to start from where you left off. You try, but it’s too hard, so you just go back to the beginning. Worse yet, you’re in the middle of a performance, and you have a finger slip or a moment of memory insecurity. Then you try to start in the middle, and you just can’t do it. You have to go back to the beginning. It feels so terrible! The audience is fidgeting because they already heard you play that music. This is a real issue. So, first I’ll explain why this happens, then I’m going to offer you some solutions.

It has to do with the way the human mind works.

Learning things sequentially is much easier than random access memory. For example, have you ever seen memory geniuses who can remember thousands of digits? Some of these people are just unbelievable. Or, they can remember countless unrelated items. How do they do it? The secret they use is relating the things they are trying to remember to each other. If you had random objects and you wanted to remember them sequentially, the first visual image that comes into your head can really help. So let’s say you want to remember car, toaster. Imagine a toaster with a car popping out of it. That’s a really weird image that came to my mind. So now I have a car and a toaster. And then you go on. What’s next thing on the list to remember? How about car, toaster, orange. The car is popping out of the toaster and there is an orange on top like the light on a police car. It can be anything. The more outlandish the visual images, the better. You can do a chain of dozens of unrelated things so long as the visual images are so ridiculous that you can’t forget them. The more abstract the better.

There is a sequential nature to memory.

In school growing up, I learned all kinds of music because my father taught me how to memorize. From my first lesson when I was a young child, I had to memorize all my music, and didn’t think anything of it. But in school in social studies, we had to memorize all kinds of dates, wars, generals and battles. I had no idea how to learn that kind of stuff! The sequential nature of learning is so powerful. I wish I had known about this technique back then!

What do you do when you want to start in the middle of a piece?

You get so used to going through a piece all at once, there’s a certain amount of motor or muscle memory. Your fingers themselves remember where to go! Once you get off track, they have no idea where to go anymore. There are a few things you can do to remedy this. Number one: in your practice, whenever there is a problem and you stop to fix it, find your place in the score! I know it can be painstaking to do that sometimes, but by finding the place in the score and making yourself start there, you will gain the ability to start from that place. If you had insecurity one time, you may have insecurity another time. If you know how to start from the point of insecurity, it can be a lifesaver in performance. Anytime you have a problem with something messing up in your practice, that’s an opportunity to learn how to start right at that point. That’s a terrific way of solidifying your music.

There’s more you can do! Practice incessantly with the music even after you’ve memorized something! Look at the score as you play slowly without the pedal. Utilize the metronome where appropriate, and go through to solidify your memory. Let’s say you have a piece you’ve memorized, and it’s pretty secure, but you still have issues with it. What can you do to make it totally solid so you are able to start anywhere?

One of the best techniques is to be able to play a piece without the benefit of playing it on the piano.

First, try just playing it on a tabletop or in your lap. Have the score nearby so when you get to a point of insecurity, you can find your place in the score. Go back a little bit and pass that point until you can play the whole piece away from the piano. Then, the ultimate, is to be able to play without even moving your fingers! Think the piece all the way through. When you can do that, you will gain great security in your playing. That’s why for example, memory problems often happen when you have leaps in music because your fingers have a memory all their own. But when you have to jump from one section of the keyboard to another, you have to be aware of where you’re jumping! Worse yet are pieces that have repeated sections in different keys. When you have a sonata where in one section you modulate from one key to another key, and later the same thing comes back, but it goes to a different key, you have to be very deliberate. Study your score to remember (for example), first time D, second time A, or whatever it may be. Lock it in your brain, and then be present enough in your performance to know, yes, the second time go to A. You have to have that information ready in the back of your brain, looking down on yourself while you’re playing so you’re not all just on automatic pilot! You can’t always trust finger memory. It is a godsend having it. If people didn’t have that to work with, I don’t think pianists could memorize massive amounts of music nearly as easily. But you can’t depend upon it completely.

Conductors have to memorize scores.

Conductors have to know their scores without the benefit of muscle memory. Of course, many conductors are pianists, so they may flesh out a lot of the music on the keyboard first. But for all you pianists out there, take advantage of the music you know by playing mentally. The sound of the music, the feel of the keys as well as the vision of the keyboard. The whole playing experience away from the instrument can be an awesome learning experience. In the meantime, as a first step, make yourself find where you are in the score when you have insecurity in your playing so you can learn to start from there. That’s going to help you if you ever have problems in those particular places during a performance. Thanks so much for joining me. I’m 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

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to share an important tip with you. More motion equals more volume and less motion equals less volume and more speed. It’s as simple as that. This applies not just to finger work, but to wrist technique as well. I’m going to illustrate both for you today!

The answer is, it really depends upon the context.

Sometimes you want to be able to play delicately and quietly. For example, in the B flat minor Nocturne of Chopin. If you play it with a lot of finger motion, not staying close to the keys, with raised fingers, you will hear a great deal of sound generated from the sheer motion. But if you want to achieve a real pianissimo, you’ll use less motion and stay close to the keys. You don’t even need to use the una corda pedal, the soft pedal! You can get so much control when you’re close to the keys! You get a really soft sound. Now the converse of that, if you want more volume in your playing, simply use more finger motion. Raise your fingers higher. It’s very simple physics really. If you want to bang a nail into the wall, you’re not going to strike from right next to it. You’re going to give some momentum and strike from above. Well the same thing is true with chord technique on the piano.

How does this apply to wrist work?

Let’s say you want to be able to play light and fast chords in the Military Polonaise of Chopin. If you try to use a lot of motion, it’s going to be very loud, but it’s going to be difficult to play fast. You get a lot of volume, but you can’t achieve much speed. Speed is related to how much motion you use in your playing. Staying closer to the keys, using less wrist motion, you have more control, more speed, with less volume.

The amount of motion affects the volume and speed of your playing.

This applies to the wrists as well as finger technique. So remember: when you want to play a true beautiful pianissimo, stay close to the keys. The same is true of anything with staccatos. If you want light action from the wrist, staying close to the keys is going to give you a crisp light sound, whereas more motion is going to give you more power. For fast playing, stay close to the keys and use a minimum of motion in fingerwork or wrist action.

So now you know how to get power and how to get lightness and speed. Staying closer to the keys enables quieter playing and quicker response. To achieve greater power, use more motion. That’s the tip for today! Try it out in your piano playing! Let me know how it works for you in the comments below here on YouTube and LivingPianos.com. Thanks so much for joining me. I’m 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