Tag Archives: bach

Do You Have to Be Able to Read Music to Play the Piano?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about the importance of reading music. Do you have to be able to read music to play the piano? Many of you know that I have a deep background in classical music. I am a second generation concert pianist. My father, Morton Estrin, taught me and my sister piano from a very young age. We were taught how to read notation, music theory, and all the rest of it. So you would think my answer would be yes, you must read music to play the piano. But I’m going to surprise many of you by telling you that, no, you do not have to read music in order to play the piano!

There are many pianists who can’t read music.

There are many accomplished players of country, folk, jazz, rock, blues, new age, and other styles, who can’t read music. Maybe they just read a lead sheet, which I’ll talk about in a moment. You’ll never be able to play the blues convincingly reading note for note. First of all, the rhythms are really hard to read with syncopated music like jazz, rock, blues, country and other styles like that. Secondly, the way that kind of music is created in the first place is with an improvised form. You are coming up with your own arrangements and playing by ear.

What about classical music?

I would never have wanted to believe this, but I have encountered quite a number of people who have become quite accomplished at playing sophisticated repertoire, learning note for note, following somebody else on the keyboard. They go on the Internet and watch videos of notes coming down on the keys like a video game. Does that really work? Well, it works to an extent. To get through a piece? Sure. Naturally, that technology doesn’t offer all the nuance of the notation, exactly how long notes last, the phrasing, how they’re connected and detached, and a myriad of other things. But talented musicians who don’t want to learn how to read music sometimes have good ears. They can watch the video, figure out where the hands go, and do a reasonably good job at recreating those pieces of music.

For anybody who wants to play classical music at a really high level, notation is a must.

For anyone looking to play classical music at a concert level, you will need to be able to read scores. But for those of you just wanting to play music and not be encumbered by the complexity of reading scores, particularly those of you who are interested in other styles of music, you can embrace it! I’ll go so far as to say that this is something that’s sadly neglected in conservatory training.

There are so many concert pianists who can’t improvise the simplest tunes by ear, because they’re never expected to.

As soon as they graduate, they discover that most of the gigs out there are not playing Beethoven sonatas and Chopin etudes. It’s really hard to find venues that are going to pay you to play that kind of music. So even if you are a classically trained musician, you owe it to yourself to explore improvised types of music. It’s good to be able to play music without necessarily reading it. A lead sheet is what most musicians utilize and most gigs expect you to be able to read. A lead sheet is just the melody line and the chord symbols. You come up with the arrangement. That’s the way so much music is created in this world! I’ll talk more about that in the future. Express your interest so I know how much of these videos you want to see! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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

How to Play with Rubato

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about rubato. How do you know if you’re playing too much rubato? Rubato is a practice of expressive playing in romantic music. It involves speeding up to the top of the phrase, and slowing down coming away from it. This adds to the emotionalism. When it’s done well, it can have a very profound effect upon the feeling of the music.

When rubato is done correctly, you should be able to tap along to the beat.

You might feel the music pulling you along and holding back. But you should be able to tap to it. How do you know when you’re doing too much rubato? If you try to tap along with the music, but you just can’t quite stay with it, the rubato is excessive. This is how you can check rubato to make sure it isn’t excessive.

Record yourself playing a piece, then go back and see if you can tap your foot to it.

If you can tap along with it, it might not be excessive. As long as you can feel where the beat is, you pull your listener along with you. But if you can’t tap to the music that you play, or somebody else plays, then it might be self-indulgent. Going too far with rubato loses the whole pulse of the music. So that’s the way you can check rubato in your playing. Record yourself and tap along! I hope this little tip is helpful for you. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Why an Okay Hand Position is Ideal

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to talk about why an okay hand position is ideal at the piano. Now what do I mean by this? Wouldn’t you want a great hand position at the piano?

I don’t mean an okay hand position, I mean the okay hand position.

You probably know this gesture. Your thumb and index finger are touching, forming a circle, while your other three fingers are gently outstretched. This hand position, believe it or not, is the ideal hand position on the piano!

Why would you want your second finger curved like this?

By having the second finger curved more than other fingers, you actually are in an ideal position for octaves and chords. If you just take your hands and drop them on the piano without using any muscles at all, you’ll find they naturally will go into this position. So this is the position you want to be in on the piano. An okay position is the ideal position on the piano! You can use that as a little reminder as to how your hands should be placed on the keyboard.

It’s not a tight position.

You’re not trying to keep your hands in that position with force. In fact, your hands will automatically stay in that position if you just let them come down naturally on the keyboard. With no force at all, your hands will fall into that position. Because it takes no effort to maintain, it is the best position on the piano. What’s great about this is by rounding your second finger more than the others, you can accommodate chords and octaves with much greater ease. I hope this little tip 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

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

What is a Chord?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. What is a chord? That’s the question for today. Is a chord just any notes played together at the same time? Well, yes and no. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s have a little primer.

Chords are typically built in intervals of 3rds.

Simply put, chords are built upon every other note of a scale. For example, a C major scale has all the white keys from C to C! If you play every other note of the scale, playing C, skip D, play E, skip F and play G, you have a C major chord, C – E – G! (It consists of a root, a 3rd, and a 5th.) You can keep going adding B, D, F and A. to form a 13 chord (adding the 7th, 9th, 11th, and 13th). Once you get to A, if you went up one more 3rd, you get back to C, your original note. So, that’s the total number of notes you can have in a chord. Now, here’s the interesting thing. There are 7 different notes in that chord C – E – G – B – D – F and A. And how many different white keys are there? Also 7. When you play a 13 chord, you’re playing all the notes of a scale! But if you just play all the white keys at the same time, it doesn’t sound like a chord? It sounds more like a cluster of notes. You may wonder why this is. Well, this has to do with voicing.

Voicing is everything in chords.

Voicing is how the notes are arranged. It was Rameau in the 1700s who theorized that by putting the bottom note of a chord on top, it’s just an inversion of the same chord. So even though it has a 4th in that arrangement, it’s still a chord. It’s just an inversion of a chord. Now, when you get to 7th chords, it gets more complicated. When you get to 9th, 11th, and 13th chords, you’re generally not going to play all the notes.

How would you voice a 13 chord?

If you voiced it with 4 notes, you would have to have the root and the 13, because otherwise it’s not a 13 chord. The important notes are the 7th and the 3rd. For nice voicing, you want to have the notes closer together on top and more distance between the bass note and the rest of them. So you can take the 3rd and put it up an octave. Now you have a nice voicing of a 13 chord. C – B – E – A. (If it was a more typical dominant 13 chord, the B would be B-flat.)

There are some exceptions to the idea of 3rds being used in chords.

First of all, 3rds can be augmented or diminished. (They can be raised or lowered.) So, for example, in a dominant chord, you could have a lowered 5th. That’s still a chord, even though you have a diminished 3rd instead of a minor 3rd. You could have other types of chords built on different intervals, like quartal chords. Quartal chords are built on fourths! So there are other possibilities. But generally, chords are built on intervals of 3rds, and voicing is what makes them work. Otherwise you would have tonal chaos! We should be thankful that composers craft such beautiful music, utilizing chords primarily arranged in 3rds so creatively. I hope this is interesting 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

Why You Can’t Sit Too Close to Your Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about why you can’t sit too close to your piano. Oftentimes I see people sitting too close to their pianos. You might think it’s nice to be close to the music. Well, there’s a very big problem with that when you’re trying to play in the extreme registers.

When you sit too close to the piano you end up with an extreme angle of the hands.

You can’t possibly play comfortably. The bend is tremendous! Your elbows push into the sides of your body. It’s a nightmare trying to play this way. So sit back a bit. You’ll know you’re at the right distance if you put your hands straight out with your wrists bent and they reach the fallboard. That means your elbows are in front of you, not next to you when you’re playing the piano. That enables you to play in all registers of the piano easily.

You don’t need to scoot around on the bench to reach the extreme registers.

I see many students move over on the bench so they can play the high register. Then they scoot back over to play the low register. What happens if they’re playing something that goes quickly from high to low register? You can’t possibly be jumping around the bench to get to different areas of the keyboard.

From a central position, you can reach all the keys!

The keys are not that far apart. So find a central location far enough from the keyboard that your elbows won’t get in your way. That way you can comfortably play in the high register and low register on your piano. You’re going to be in great shape this way! If you haven’t been sitting at this distance, try it for yourself. See how it makes you feel, particularly when playing the extreme registers on your piano. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

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

How to Feel Dotted Rhythms

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to feel dotted rhythms. What does a dot do to a note? That’s a good question. A lot of people say a dot after a note adds half the value of the note. That can be kind of confusing because if you have a quarter note, half of a quarter is an eighth. Particularly if you’re teaching piano to children and you say, “How much is a quarter plus an eighth?” You’re going to get a glazed look in their eyes. So another way of looking at what dots do to notes is to say that a dot after a note adds the value of the next faster note.

All the note values are half the value of each successive note.

 

A whole note contains 2 half notes. A half note contains 2 quarter notes. A quarter note contains 2 eighth notes. An eighth note contains 2 sixteenth notes. So a dot on a whole note adds a half note to the whole note. A dot on a half note adds a quarter note to the half note. A dot on a quarter note adds an eighth note. You get the idea. It’s always adding the next faster note. There’s another way of looking at this.

A dot after a note adds the next faster note, but it also equals three of those notes.

If you have a dotted whole note, that makes a whole note plus a half note. That’s a total of three half notes. It’s the same thing. A dotted half note equals a half note plus a quarter note, which is three quarter notes. Why am I bringing this up? Because a dotted rhythm usually means that you have a dotted note, followed by the shorter note. So, for example, if you have a dotted eighth note, that’s an eighth note plus a sixteenth note, which is 3 sixteenth notes. Usually it will be a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth. So you have 3 sixteenth notes basically tied together, followed by another sixteenth. So in counting in 3/4 time, for example, in Clementi’s Sonatina in G major Opus 36, the second movement has a dotted rhythm. If it was a fast enough tempo, imagine having those 16th notes ticking on your metronome. That would be ungodly fast! Metronomes don’t even typically go that fast. Trying to play with that would be hard. So what can you do about that to make it easier?

First, I want to show you what the danger is with dotted rhythms.

 

The dotted rhythm is a total of four subdivisions, three plus one. So it can be very easy for your rhythm to degenerate into a triple division like in 6/8 time. For example, having a quarter followed by an eighth. A quarter note contains 2 eighth notes. So this should be a total of three divisions, two plus one, instead of the three plus one that a dotted rhythm is, as I explained earlier. So how do you get the precision of the dotted rhythm so it doesn’t sound like a triple division?

I have a dotted rhythm hack!

Instead of having the metronome ticking 16th notes, suppose you have just the eighth notes ticking. Put the metronome at half the speed. But I’ve got another further little trick for you. Put it even at half the speed of that! Just have the second eighth of each beat ticking. Then you just have the 16th come between the tick and the next note. That eighth note is the pulse you have to feel in order to fit the dotted rhythm in so it’s not approximate and it doesn’t degenerate into a triple feel. You can experience this for yourself with the accompanying video.

So that’s the way to feel dotted rhythms!

 

Feel that second eighth note and just fit the 16th between the second eighth and the next beat. I hope this makes sense to you! If you’re trying this on your own, I suggest you first have eighth notes ticking and practice just by clapping. Put the metronome on with eighth notes ticking, and then fit the sixteenth notes in where they belong. That’s the dotted rhythm tip for the day. I hope it’s helpful for you! Let me know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and 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