Tag Archives: bach

All Beats Are Not Created Equal – Part 2

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you why all beats are not created equal. Did you know that typically in 4/4 time, the strong beats are the first and third beats? The weaker beats are the second and fourth beats. In particular, the fourth beat is not as strong.

The way you count should reflect the feel of the music.

Instead of counting rigidly, you end up counting with accents on the first beat or the first and third beats. I’m going to demonstrate this with a Haydn sonata in D major, so you can hear for yourself. First, I’m going to play it with all the beats absolutely equal to hear what it sounds like, then I will play it with accented beats.

Watch the video to see the demonstration!

When you play with all the beats equal, it doesn’t have a bounce. It doesn’t have a pulse. It just kind of plods along. By playing with accented beats, you give your music a pulse. This isn’t only for 4/4 time. How about 3/4 time? You certainly wouldn’t play a waltz with all beats equal. It would lose the feel of the music.

You have to figure out where the strong beats are.

Typically, the strong beats are one and three in 4/4 time and the first beat in 3/4 time. In a waltz, the third beat is also pretty strong, but not as strong as the first beat. Each piece of music has its strong and weak beats. You must identify which beats are strong so you can give emphasis to those and propel the music forward so it doesn’t get bogged down. All beats are not created equal! I hope this is enlightening for you! Let us know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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

The 3 Essential Elements of Sight-Reading

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about the three essential elements of sight-reading. I know so many of you want to read better, and you’re wondering what the secret is. I’m going to tell you about three different skills that you must have working together in order to be successful at reading music.

Sight-reading is all about what you see, feel, and hear.

Naturally, there’s what you see in the score. You have to really see what you’re reading, which is why you can’t be looking down at your hands while you’re reading. Which leads us to the second thing: You must have a certain feel for the keyboard. So you’re seeing the music, you’re feeling the keys, and the last thing, which is the most important, is what you hear.

All three of these things work together as a system.

You can’t look at your hands. You can occasionally glance for a moment, but you have to keep your eyes on the score. As soon as you’re not looking at the score, you’re not reading anymore! So you have to keep your fingers moving on the keys. If it sounds wrong, you must adjust by feel. You have black keys and white keys, so you can feel where the correct keys are and make the adjustments. If it sounds wrong, go a little higher or lower. You might think that that’s imprecise, but anybody who’s a really good sight-reader knows that you have to make those kinds of adjustments when you’re reading something difficult. Even if you don’t play perfectly, you get the basic idea across.

You have to keep going.

If you are accompanying a soloist, they don’t want you to stop when you miss a note. That’s not going to do it for them. It doesn’t give the satisfaction of understanding what the piece is like with the piano part. So you must keep going and feel your way by listening, watching the score, and recreating what you see based upon what you feel and hear. The best way to do that is by playing with other musicians, because it forces you to keep going. You have to keep going. You must keep your eyes moving. You must keep your hands and fingers moving, and you must keep listening.

The way to develop your reading on the piano is by doing it!

Find appropriate-level music. If you can find anybody who has some accompaniments that are not outrageously difficult, to where you have a chance of being able to play a good chunk of the notes accurately, offer to play with them. You can even accompany children or friends singing songs they know. Find music that is on your reading level and offer to accompany them! Use the essential elements of what you see, what you feel, and what you hear. You will become a great reader over time, I promise you. If you have epiphanies about how to become better at reading, let us know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Why You Must Front-Load Your Practice

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you why you must front-load your practice. What am I talking about here? Sometimes you sit down to practice the piano, and you have certain issues. You get it pretty good, and you go on to the next part. And you keep working through it in this manner. Well, let’s erase that whole idea. Instead, with the first issue you have, go to extraordinary lengths to resolve it!

Spend as much time as you can correcting issues early on.

Go as far as you possibly can with your corrections. This is great when you’re starting a new piece. Maybe there’s something early on in the piece that isn’t gelling. You might think you can just skip it for now and get to it later. Well, here’s the secret for you: It’s okay for you to spend an inordinate amount of time on small issues. It may feel like you’re never going to get to everything else, but what you learn from taking something to the nth degree early on in your practice will have tremendous benefits for the rest of the piece.

All pieces of music evolve from the motifs that are introduced early on.

These motifs develop throughout the piece. So if you don’t solve those issues early on, as you go on with the piece, the problems compound themselves. That’s why you should spend a tremendous amount of time early on resolving issues that you have. You want to really solidify things to the maximum degree. By doing this, later you will be able to go through vast amounts of music without having to spend nearly as much time. That’s what I mean by frontloading your practice.

Put the time in during the early part of your music and the early part of your practice to get things really refined.

This process is going to help you master other parts of the same piece of music and will even transfer to other pieces with similar technical or musical challenges. Try it in your practice! Let us know how this works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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

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

Practicing Your Scales in Contrary Motion

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. I’ve made so many videos about scales, arpeggios, and exercises. But here’s one for you that I’ve never shared, and I think you’re going to enjoy it. The subject today is about practicing your scales in contrary motion. One of the biggest challenges when you’re playing scales is making sure your two hands are landing squarely together. When playing with both hands, it’s hard to hear the differentiation of each hand separately. Maybe one hand is louder than the other, or there could be unevenness.

When you play your scales in contrary motion, you hear everything clearly.

I learned all major and minor scales this way in conservatory. It’s a great way to practice scales! You play your scales with both hands going up. Then, once you get to the two-octave point, you come back down with your left hand while your right hand continues up. Then both hands come down two octaves at which point they go in opposite directions again. Then they come back together and when they reach the middle of the keyboard they go down again. You can watch the video to see how this is done.

Keep in mind that you should always practice your scales with a metronome.

There’s never a good reason to practice scales without a metronome. You want to measure your work and strive for evenness. When you are practicing scales, it isn’t music; it’s strictly technique. Finger work is all about the evenness—the evenness of the attacks, the evenness of the releases, and the evenness of the volume. By playing your scales in contrary motion, you can hear things more clearly. Try this with your scales! Let me know how it works for you here in the comments on LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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

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

Are You Killing the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs in Your Practice?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m asking: Are you killing the goose that lays the golden eggs in your practice? Boy, it’s horrible to think that this could be possible. What am I talking about here, anyway? Well, it’s important to cover the most vital subjects in your practice and to work out exercises and technique. Some things are fun to work on, and some things are drudgery. You must strike a balance, or you risk the possibility of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs!

The goose that lays the golden eggs is your passion for the instrument.

If you force yourself to do things that you know you need to do in your practice, but you feel like it’s drudgery to sit down at the piano because the stuff you need to do is so distasteful, then what do you have left? If you don’t love the instrument, then you’re not going to want to practice it anyway. In your practice, of course, you must do certain vital things. And there are some things that maybe you’d rather not do. Maybe you don’t want to work on scales or memorization.

Find time for the important things and balance it out with things that bring you great joy on the instrument.

You have to have some enjoyment, so it’s not all work and no play. You should do some things just because you love to do them instead of falling into a routine that you think you have to do because it’s important. Find the balance between what is productive and what is enriching! That will take you much further than beating yourself up and driving something into the ground until you don’t even want to do it anymore. Make time for what’s important. And if you make the time for playing and enjoying your instrument, then you’ll be able to balance the time spent on important things that may be very challenging. The challenging aspects of your practice can give you a bit of a sickness in the pit of your stomach if you do them too much. Let me know in the comments how many of you have faced this issue! I know it’s a tough thing, particularly for younger students.

Most kids hate to practice.

If they’re forced to practice and they hate every minute of it, they might just want to quit altogether. So they have to have some fun. Maybe they want to make up some music or play some popular songs. Some teachers don’t let them do that. You must strike a balance in your piano practice between hard work and the things you find enriching. With anything in life that you have a passion for, make sure you take time to enjoy it! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

2 Methods of Piano Practice: Why One Is Better

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we’ll be discussing two methods of piano practice, and one is clearly better. I’m wondering which one you do. What are these two macro-methods of piano practice? One is the shotgun approach, and the other is the band-aid approach. I want to explain what each of these methods entails and why one is clearly better than the other.

What is the shotgun approach?

Some of you probably like to sit down at the piano to practice your music and go through the whole piece. Then you start over, and you go through it again. You try to work through the whole piece because you want to cover everything. I would describe this as a shotgun approach. You’re kind of covering everything because you know everything is important.

What is the band-aid approach?

You start your piece, but instead of going through the whole thing, you zero in on where you know the weaknesses are and focus on what needs work. Then, after you’ve gotten that section nailed down, you can go back and try to connect it with the previous section. After that, you can go back further. As soon as you come to a section where something doesn’t feel secure or doesn’t sound quite right, once again, you’ll focus your attention on that. The band-aid approach is strategic practice.

You don’t need to practice everything equally!

You will get so much more done using the band-aid approach. I know it’s gratifying to play the music and try to cover all your pieces because it makes you feel like you’ve really accomplished something. But it’s definitely not the most efficient way to get things done when your time is limited, which is the case for most people. I know that when I sit down to practice, I want to get as much done as I can for every minute I’m practicing. So I go right for what I know needs work. I spend the vast majority of my time that way. It’s the 80-20 rule: spend 80% of your practice on 20% of the material. Perhaps it’s more like the 90-10 rule. You could spend 90% of your time on 10% of the material. It makes a world of difference to gain security where you really need it.

Remember: avoid the shotgun approach!

The shotgun approach is not in your best interest most of the time. Occasionally, you will want to go through all your music as a check to see where to focus your next practice session. Then you can use the band-aid approach, as I described. What practice method works for you? Let us know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! We have thousands of videos and articles about almost every subject you can imagine! You can also consider joining our Patreon, where we make videos just 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