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What Makes a Great Teacher: Interview with William Fitzpatrick

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I will be talking with William Fitzpatrick about what makes a great teacher. I’ve had the good fortune to study with great pianists John Ogden, Ruth Slenczynska, Constance Keene, and I started my piano studies with my father, Morton Estrin. I want to talk a little bit about our guest. William Fitzpatrick was the founder and first violinist of the New York String Quartet. He has a dual career in France and the United States. As a matter of fact, he was the director of chamber music at The American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France. Long ago, he graduated from The Juilliard School, where he studied with the seminal teacher, Dorothy DeLay. Most recently, he held the esteemed Temianka Chair as professor of violin at Chapman University Conservatory of Music. He’s now living in France.

I want to introduce to all of you someone who’s very close to me, William Fitzpatrick.

Robert: William, welcome to LivingPianos.com. It’s great to have you!

William: It’s great to be here, Robert. Thanks for inviting me.

Robert: We’ve been great friends for years, and I want people to understand our connection, which is my daughter, Jenny Estrin. When we moved to Orange County, she was trying to find another teacher because she had started violin at the great Indiana University Young Violinist program. We figured in Southern California, there had to be good teachers. We went through so many people until we finally found you. You were life changing for Jenny, your whole concept of teaching. I want you to talk a little bit about your feelings about teaching. Why don’t you tell people a little bit about your background and your ideas about teaching. I think it’s unique the way you approach students, and I think people would really be fascinated to learn more about that.

William: The way I approach students is sort of a reflection on how I was taught by Ms. DeLay. One of my friends said it very well: “When you talk to a bunch of DeLay students, it’s like talking to blind people around an elephant. They’re all touching the elephant, and they’re going, ‘Oh, that’s an elephant.’ And somebody’s touching the tusk going, ‘Oh, that’s an elephant.’ Everybody’s got their take.” The reason for that is that she was different with everyone. She really tried to understand and zone in on the needs of that individual, with what they needed, and where they wanted to go. For myself, I felt like that was just incredible. For me, it was really helpful. I try very hard to reflect that in the way I look at the students who come to study with me.

I don’t have a cookie-cutter kind of methodology about teaching.

I try to figure out the best way to get them to understand the information from their point of view. And I think that’s one of the most important traits of a teacher. It’s not about giving the information. It’s about how you give that information so that someone understands and believes it. It’s them that have come to those decisions, because that’s the only way they’re going to do it.

Robert: Watching you teach Jenny was really an enlightening experience. Sometimes you would say things that almost sounded like riddles, getting her to think—not feeding her the answers, but getting her to realize these things herself. Interestingly, I come from a different background. My father was really not that type of teacher, and yet he was a great teacher. I think his methodology of teaching comes down to the fact that he didn’t have his first good teacher until just before his 18th birthday. So everything he really learned on the piano, he learned as an adult. As a result, every aspect of piano playing and music theory he figured out step by step in a very logical fashion. That’s the style of teaching that my father had, and I embrace that style of teaching as well. Certainly, with the violin, there’s an order of steps from how to hold the instrument to tone production and intonation. How do you reckon with this duality of having the lessons tailored to each person and having a regimen of steps involved in mastering the different facets of the instrument? How do you come to a balance between those two elements?

William: For me, I think it goes back to when I started teaching in France. First off, my French was awful. But somehow or the other, I managed to get a job. It was difficult because it was a language that I didn’t know at the time. And certainly, attitudes towards music, towards this whole thing of playing the violin were very different. What happened for me was that I had to interrogate myself. How did I learn something? Because I couldn’t translate it into French until I knew exactly what I did. It turned out that I never had really done that. For me, a lot of what I did was very intuitive as a player. So I didn’t question it; I just sort of did it. But to teach it, I had to know why and how I got to that point.

Robert: There are so many virtuoso pianists, violinists, and other musicians who grew up as child prodigies with a great deal of natural ability. Of course, they put in hard work. But you think of somebody who’s playing on a concert level of performance as a young child. As an adult, how could they possibly relate to the average student? I wonder how people like that approach teaching. You mentioned that things came very intuitively to you, and you had to break it down at some point. How many teachers actually go through that process, particularly ones who were child prodigies?

William: I sort of put myself, as a teacher, in a place where I wanted to prepare students to be able to deal with teachers like that, knowing that that teacher probably wasn’t going to do the rudimentary work. It was more about this feeling, this flow, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s very difficult to react, to respond, and to do what that person is saying. So my feeling was always, how do I get them to a point where they can actually deal with that?

Robert: At the conservatory level, many of the teachers are really more coaches than teachers, as you describe. You need somebody in the trenches with you at some point in your development, showing you step by step how to practice, how to learn music, how to assimilate things, how to produce tone, and all of that. And then you can be enriched with different flavors of interpretation, sound production, and rhythmic feel. I was very fortunate to have a phenomenal French horn teacher, Hugh Cowden. He had played in the Chicago Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the Boston Symphony. But this was at a point later in his career when he was a freelance New York musician. He was a mentor to me. He made me do things that I was convinced I couldn’t do!

I think that’s a sign of a great teacher—somebody who enables you to do things that you didn’t think you were capable of doing.

I’ve worked with a lot of teachers, teaching them how to teach. My father taught me how to teach, and he taught my sister how to teach because we assisted him in his teaching when we were both in high school. But you brought up getting inside somebody’s head so that you can reach them where they are. Can that be taught?

William: How much of teaching can be taught? That’s a really tough question. It begs of someone to be willing to trust the journey, to have a journey, to make a decision about where they want to go and what they want to do, but not be so bound and myopic in that vision that they can’t open themselves up to going to the left instead of the right.

Robert: I think it’s kind of like musical talent. There’s a certain amount of natural ability that people have. It could be kids who are at an intermediate level. One or two of them will play perfectly fine, and then one of them plays, and everyone in the audience just gets this rush of emotions. Can that be taught? There’s a certain amount of innate ability that people have in reaching people on an emotional level as a performer, and as a teacher being inspiring.

I think, to a great extent, it comes down to really caring about the student.

I won’t mention any names, but one of my teachers was not particularly emotionally supportive, but was a great teacher nonetheless. If I had had that teacher from my formative years, maybe it wouldn’t have been the best fit. But as I was already an accomplished player, I took the criticism well. It was a growing experience for me. So I think finding the right teacher at the level that you’re at is really important. Whether it’s a teacher who is going to show you the fundamentals and help you grow into an accomplished musician or somebody who’s going to do the refining and the fine touches. I think a lot of the university and conservatory teachers are really of that latter style. They really aren’t great teachers of the fundamentals, but they do that honing and refinement. Those are the teachers who get noted for all the contest winners because their students come to them already at a high level. They get to do that final polishing, which is an enviable position to be in!

William: Something you said brought something into my mind, which is that, in terms of looking at myself, it’s important to understand that I really sucked as a violinist when I was a kid. When I was 16 years old, a Handel sonata was like a mountain for me. And for me, getting to the top of the mountain didn’t mean it was good. It just meant I got to the top of the mountain. So I’ve always had the attitude that every child has talent. The deal is to help them find out how to channel the talent that they have.

Robert: That’s exactly right. You know, with piano playing, there are so many different skill sets, and nobody’s got every single one at the top level.

You have to work with students to develop their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses.

I won’t mention any names, but one of my teachers was not particularly emotionally supportive, but was a great teacher nonetheless. If I had had that teacher from my formative years, maybe it wouldn’t have been the best fit. But as I was already an accomplished player, I took the criticism well. It was a growing experience for me. So I think finding the right teacher at the level that you’re at is really important. Whether it’s a teacher who is going to show you the fundamentals and help you grow into an accomplished musician or somebody who’s going to do the refining and the fine touches. I think a lot of the university and conservatory teachers are really of that latter style. They really aren’t great teachers of the fundamentals, but they do that honing and refinement. Those are the teachers who get noted for all the contest winners because their students come to them already at a high level. They get to do that final polishing, which is an enviable position to be in!

William: Something you said brought something into my mind, which is that, in terms of looking at myself, it’s important to understand that I really sucked as a violinist when I was a kid. When I was 16 years old, a Handel sonata was like a mountain for me. And for me, getting to the top of the mountain didn’t mean it was good. It just meant I got to the top of the mountain. So I’ve always had the attitude that every child has talent. The deal is to help them find out how to channel the talent that they have.

Robert: That’s exactly right. You know, with piano playing, there are so many different skill sets, and nobody’s got every single one at the top level.

You have to work with students to develop their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses.

No two people have the same strengths and weaknesses. The other thing is being willing to let the student guide to a certain extent. Right now I have a student, and he was working on some literature that was pretty basic classical repertoire, not intermediate, but then he wanted to do some Ravel. And I said, “If you really want to do it and your heart’s in it, let’s see what happens.” Next week he comes in, and he’s got more than half of the Ravel Sonatine, one of the movements, going just beautifully. And I’ve had students in the past who jumped from levels that they shouldn’t have been able to do. If somebody’s heart is really in it and they have embraced the methodology of how to learn music, which is what I teach, sometimes they can go from here to there. So many teachers are so methodical in their repertoire. I think going with the natural inclinations of the student is best, as long as they’re not trying to play pieces that are just completely above them, which naturally is not in anybody’s best interest.

William: Like I said, when I was 16, Handel was an issue. I went to college when I was 17. When I was 17, my big accomplishment was Beethoven’s Romance in F, which, in fact, your daughter did. I had difficulty even playing that. Now, what’s really fascinating to me is that when I was 19, I got into Aspen Music Festival. I was playing the Tchaikovsky Concerto. I had the luckiest thing happen because my teacher, Stephen Clapp, was open to what I wanted to do. He knew what I needed to do, but he allowed me to get there. He didn’t try to harness me; he just allowed me to roam. I remember once I went to his studio and I saw Galamian’s book on the principles of violin, and I started reading it. I saw this thing about bow grips. He walked in, and he said, “William, you found this book?” “Yes. Mr. Clapp. And you know what? I’ve decided that I want to hold my bow this way.” I was mimicking what I was seeing in the book. Stephen didn’t say, “No, do it my way.” He was not only encouraging me but also helping me find out how to do what was in the book. He had spent a year trying to get me to hold the bow one way, and here I’m doing it another way, and he’s helping me to do it! To me, that’s really somebody who has the student at heart and will allow that student to go as far as they can go.

Robert:

It’s a real balance that teachers have to have with guiding students but not pigeonholing them into one way of playing.

For example, when I studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, I had a French horn teacher there who was an absolute virtuoso, magnificent player. But he would teach every single student how to play the Mozart Horn Concertos note for note, phrase by phrase, exactly the way he played them. There are a lot of teachers who do that. Now, I will say that sometimes on the very elementary level, if a student has no clue how to craft a musical phrase, you can spoon feed them note by note so they understand the architecture, and at some point they’ll get it. But when you get to the conservatory level, you have to let the student’s own inclinations come through.

William: This brings up a story of a student. I assigned a student a new piece of music at the end of the lesson, and the student looked at me and said, “Could you play it for me?” And I was really sort of surprised and asked why. They said, “Because I want to know how it sounds.” So I said, “Just go around the corner; there’s a music store with a bunch of records. You can buy a couple and see.” They said, “I don’t have that much money to do that.” So I said, “Oh, okay. Well, if you go to the library, you can just listen to everything.” And the student finally looks at me and says, “Oh, I get it. I’m going to do everything, and you’re going to do nothing!”

Robert: They have to discover for themselves, don’t they?

William:

Ultimately, I don’t think you can surpass what you hear.

So you’ve really got to open up. If I can do something as a teacher, it’s to open that aural horizon so that they can hear what goes on. Another story comes to mind. I had another student who came in, and they held their bow in a funny kind of way. But I knew that they had studied with someone who held the bow correctly, so I thought it wouldn’t be a problem. I’ll get them to go back to what they did. But they didn’t want to. They kept saying they liked the way it sounded that way. And we fought for three years! I realized I let my ego get in the way because I wanted to have that student play this way. I didn’t listen to what they wanted to do. In fact, if I really wanted them to change, then what I needed to do wasn’t to show them or try to get them to do this or that, but get them to change how they heard it. Get them to listen to things, and in their effort to try to make that happen, they will come to their own conclusions about what they need to do to make that happen.

Robert: Exactly. It’s all about listening. That’s the key. Along those lines, for a lot of my students, I give them a piece of music, and the first thing they do is latch on to some performance on YouTube and listen to it incessantly.

When I learn a piece of music, I purposely don’t listen to anyone until I have it on performance level.

Then I go crazy and listen to every performance, and drive my wife, Florence, crazy!

William: My wife knows a lot about that!

Robert: I encourage my students and any of you out there, if you’re learning a piece of music, do yourself a favor and come up with your own convictions first. It’s really hard, once you become highly influenced by hearing it from somebody else, to come up with your own impressions.

William: I played a concert when I was in France at the American Church in Paris with an organ. They had just had this beautiful organ installed. I was so happy. But I listened to the recording the next day, and I went, “Oh, that really sucked.” I had this long conversation with myself, and the brunt of it is I decided I needed to change. So for a month I would move this, I would do this, and finally I found a position that was helping me to do what I wanted to do. I listened then every day to Rabin playing Bruch Scottish Fantasy, and I tried to emulate it. That’s what I did for the next month. I didn’t look at the music, I just, you know, from ear tried to sound like him. I remember about a month and a half later, I was doing a festival, and I was sitting in a room practicing. I started to play Scottish Fantasy, and I said, “You did it. That sounds like Rabin!” And I remember sitting down and I said, “Cool. Now you can sound like you.” I needed to understand physically what was going on. The goal was not to be Rabin. My goal was to be me. But I wanted to understand another perspective on how to do that.

Robert: If you want to be able to produce a tone that you imagine in your head, to emulate somebody where you can quantify that you can do that process is a perfect study.

William: Right, but you don’t want to be that person. It’s not about that. I mean, I’ve loved Perlman all my life. He’s been such a model for me, but I don’t want to play like Perlman.

Robert: I listen to the unbelievable performances of Horowitz, but nobody can play like Horowitz. It’s futile to try!

You have to find your own voice, your own physiology, and your own psyche.

That’s really what it’s about.

William: For me, that’s what a teacher can do. They can help the student identify how to do those things.

Robert: That is a beautiful statement because that ultimately is the ideal of teaching—helping each student find their own voice. And if you can do that, it’s the most gratifying thing in the world.

William: I could not agree more.

Robert: Before you go, I just want to thank you for taking the time from your busy schedule to come join us here at LivingPianos.com.

William: Thank you very much.

You can find more from William Fitzpatrick here

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 Have a Piano While Traveling

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to have a piano while traveling. Sometimes I go on vacation, and it’s frustrating not having a piano. I finally have time to devote to the piano, but there is no piano to play! What kind of vacation is that? Maybe you feel the same way. You’re busy all the time, and then when you finally have some free time, there’s no piano. Not that you want to spend your whole vacation practicing the piano, but you certainly want a piano you can play. How can you achieve such a thing?

Bring a digital piano with you!

One way you can have a piano on vacation is by doing what I do. I have a high-quality, very lightweight digital piano that I can take with me. It weighs just 24 pounds! If you have a simple folding X-stand, it takes up so little room. If you like, you can even take some headphones with you so you don’t have to disturb anybody. You can just put it in your trunk along with your other stuff. I’ve taken that piano with me to all kinds of places. What about if you’re flying? This is a big problem, but I have some tips for you!

Do you know that you can search Airbnb for places that have pianos?

You’ll find that there are some places you can stay that have pianos in them. There’s even a website that has places you can stay all over the world that have pianos in them. So that’s an ideal situation. Stay in a nice house, apartment, or condo that has a piano. Maybe you want the amenities and convenience of a hotel. Well, a lot of times, bigger hotels have pianos in them. I’m pretty brave in that respect. I will sneak into rooms and find a piano. You might get kicked out, but you might just be able to play for a while. People might even appreciate it! Sometimes there’s a piano in a bar or a restaurant, and you can possibly play it when they are not that busy.

There are different places you can steal time on pianos, if you’re lucky.

If you have any friends in different cities who have pianos, that is obviously a great way to get some time with a piano. Piano stores are probably not the best place to try to play pianos because they have an agenda of selling pianos. If you’re in there practicing or even playing, that’s probably not going to be conducive to their business. Sometimes a school will have pianos, but getting into schools can be tough. So I recommend finding hotels or Airbnbs that have pianos.

There is another option, but it’s not a very good option…Yet!

This is an option I’m hoping will improve over time, which is folding pianos. Yes, there are folding pianos. I have one. There are times when I’m traveling and I still want to do my teaching. If I’m traveling by plane, I obviously can’t take my digital piano with me. The good thing about folding pianos is how compact they are, but the bad part is that they have horrendously bad actions. It’s not possible to do serious playing on folding pianos. For memorization, music theory, composition, and even teaching, where you’re just demonstrating things, these folding pianos get the job done and are very inexpensive. I’m hoping someday somebody comes out with a decent quality folding piano you can fit in the overhead bin on a flight. Wouldn’t that be great? In the meantime, take the little tips I gave you. If you’re traveling by car, get a digital piano to take with you with an X-stand. Look for hotels or Airbnbs that have pianos. In a pinch, you could do some work on a folding piano. If anybody has any other ideas, let me know in the comments! 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

Will Playing by Ear Hurt Your Classical Playing?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about playing by ear. Will playing by ear hurt your classical playing? There are many teachers who tell their students they must not play by ear because it will mess up the precision of their classical playing. The only ounce of truth to this is if somebody is learning classical repertoire by ear and not studying the score. You’re never going to be able to play Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, or Bach as intended if you do it all by ear.

Is playing by ear intrinsically bad for you?

Not only does playing by ear not hurt your classical playing, but I’ll go so far as to say that all playing is by ear! You may take it from the sheet music initially, but ultimately, with all the music you play, you’re playing by ear. You first learn it from the visual representations on the page. But then you hear it and create it on the piano. So playing by ear is essential for piano playing. Not only that, but for most styles of music, it’s absolutely necessary to play by ear because the written score is not how that music was conceived to begin with. You’ll never be able to play blues faithfully from a score. You have to be able to play by ear.

What about playing classical music by ear?

Ultimately, when you play your classical music, even though you’re playing the notes faithfully to what the composer wrote, you should be essentially playing by ear. In fact, one of the biggest fears when playing a memorized piece or program is having a memory slip. But if you can play your classical music by ear, how can you possibly have a memory slip? It’s virtually impossible to have a memory slip because even if you forget where your hands go for a moment, you’ll know where you are and you can keep going. You can get back on track instantly because you know what it’s supposed to sound like.

I encourage all of you to play by ear!

Play your classical music by ear. Even though you’ve digested the score from the sheet music, you must transcend the visual and turn it into an aural experience that you can share with your audience. I wonder if any of you disagree with this assessment about playing by ear and how it affects your classical playing. Be sure to let me know how you feel about this in the comments!

Will playing swing rhythms in jazz or blues affect the integrity of your classical playing?

The difference between how you approach 19th-century music compared to 18th-century music is stylistically extremely different. If you can play those styles, which are different from one another, why shouldn’t you be able to expand to other styles of music that have different rhythmic feels? My personal feeling is: the more, the merrier! If you can play more styles of music, you will enjoy music more, and you will be a more well-rounded musician. 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 Recharge Your Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today, I’m going to show you how to recharge your piano playing. Have you ever gotten a piece to a really high level and played it on a regular basis, but somehow it goes stale? It’s just not quite there. It’s not like there are trouble spots you can practice. The whole thing just doesn’t have the spark that it once had. How can you get it back into shape? I’m going to show you today. There are some very basic techniques that are going to do the job for you.

Slow practice is one of the most important aspects of piano playing.

I have had the opportunity to study with some absolutely stupendous piano teachers, including my father, Morton Estrin, Ruth Slenczynska, Constance Keene, and John Ogden. They all practiced slowly. Every fine pianist I have ever met practices slowly. Even when you can play something up to tempo, going back and practicing slowly is absolutely essential on the piano. You should also take your foot off the pedal. Listen to what your fingers are doing. The pedal covers so much. I can tell you that these two tips I have just given you are so fundamental that every great classical pianist uses them.

Use the score.

Even if you have a piece memorized, it’s not good enough. You have to reinforce your memory. Do you think you can remember every single detail, like where a slur ends, where a crescendo begins, or the exact voicing of every chord? You must constantly reinforce your memory!

Use the metronome.

Practice with a metronome to keep yourself honest. Put the metronome on a nice, slow speed. Play with no pedal and keep your eyes on the score. The amazing thing is that just going through it slowly like that a few times will already clean up your playing enormously. But if you really want to develop a stellar technique, you can do all the speeds in between, where necessary. You might not have to do all the speeds everywhere. But any place that doesn’t come out consistently or feel comfortable, do progressively faster metronome speeds on those sections.

I remember watching my father practice when he was preparing to record his Brahms album. I used to watch my father practice all the time. I loved it! It was really enriching. I remember he got to a point where he was playing through everything just slightly under tempo without the pedal. It was totally relaxed and clean. That’s what you want. You want to get to the point where you get it up to tempo and it’s all comfortable. The notes are just there. You don’t have to work to make it come out. And because you study the score again and again, slowly seeing every detail, you really perfect your performance.

This is a great way to get any piece back into shape!

If you have a piece that’s gone stale or a piece you’re performing and you want to make sure it’s still in good shape, this technique is bulletproof. Practice slowly, with the score, no pedal, and using a metronome. Try it in your practice! You’ll be amazed at what this can do for your playing! I hope this is valuable for you! Let me 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.

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

Do You Need a Practice Checklist?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why you need a practicing checklist. What’s this all about? A lot of my students want to have a routine in their practice to do a certain number of things in a certain order on a daily basis. And while this is commendable in one sense, a routine can sometimes work against you because you want to take advantage of the discoveries in your practice. You might go off on a tangent and think you’re spending too much time on something because you need to get to other things. So you might not take advantage of an exploration that could lead to an epiphany in your playing.

Instead of a routine, a checklist offers something really valuable for you.

When you practice, you might get to a point where you’re thinking, “What am I supposed to do now?” If you don’t have a routine, you’re kind of lost. But if you have a checklist, you know you want to do certain things every day. I offered this idea to one of my students, Jancarlos, in the Dominican Republic. I asked him to come up with a practice checklist for himself. I said, “You should come up with a checklist that has things you really want to do on a daily basis and then things you do on a weekly basis, maybe not every single day, but something that you don’t want to go too long without visiting in your practice.” So this is what Jancarlos came up with. See how many of these things resonate with you! I’d love to get suggestions here in the comments on LivingPianos.com and YouTube.

Jancarlos starts his checklist with memorization of new material.

I stress this all the time. Why is it so important to memorize new material on a daily basis? Because cramming memorization doesn’t work! Let’s say you’ve gone four or five days without doing any memorization. You think you can just make up for it in a few hours, but it’s not so easy. When you first learn a phrase, it’s not that hard. You learn the second phrase, and it comes along okay. But by the third or fourth phrase, it starts to get really taxing. How much can you cram into your head in one sitting? It’s tough. So take advantage every day when your mind is fresh to learn something, even if it’s just one phrase. You’ll be rewarded! Take a look at the score of whatever music you’re working on and figure out the smallest phrase that you could learn; maybe it’s four measures, and then multiply that by seven and then deduct any measures that are the same. You’ll discover that you might get a page or a page and a half of music learned just by doing a phrase a day. So make that a priority in your practice. What else should be done every day?

Reinforce material from the previous day.

Obviously, you need to solidify what you learned the previous day. You might have to relearn it. The good news is that you’ll be able to learn it much faster. Not only that, but if you learned four measure phrases the previous day, you might be able to learn eight measure phrases when you relearn it because it’s already there.

Another thing you really should be doing on a regular basis is playing scales and arpeggios.

If you’re not up to scales and arpeggios, you should at least do simple Hanon exercises to strengthen your fingers. If you learn one new scale a week or one new arpeggio a week, you’ll have them all learned in a year. That is a good foundation for your playing. And if you already know them all, solidify them. Take them to the next level in speed, different articulations, or doing them in contrary motion or in intervals. You can keep working on scales and arpeggios your whole life. There’s always value in doing so!

Another thing you should do is review your old pieces.

Go through slowly solidifying pieces you can already play. This is a great way to keep them in shape and to check your work so things don’t degrade over time. By doing this, you always have music you can play on a high level. Also, make time for free playing. Play old repertoire or improvise, just to keep your fingers moving. You can keep pieces in shape just by playing them, and improvising develops your ear and your connection to the keyboard.

Another thing that you can do on a regular basis is sight-read.

Sight-reading is a vital aspect of strengthening your reading because you might learn more and more music and still have a beginning reading level. So make reading something you do on a regular basis. Finding sight-reading material on the right level for you is the most important part. If it’s something you struggle just to get through a line or two, it’s not going to be that valuable. It’ll be painstaking for you, and you’re not going to want to do it. And you’re not going to get the fluidity and sense of reading and maintaining a tempo. Finding easy enough music for sight-reading is a challenge for many people because many people do become somewhat accomplished, yet they still have the reading level of a beginner. I was in that category when I was a pretty advanced player in high school because I didn’t do enough sight-reading. So make that a part of your regular study.

Go through theory on a regular basis.

It can be something as simple as just going through your sharps and your flats. You don’t want to just memorize by rote. That’s not that valuable. Frankly, it’s better than nothing. But you’re better off figuring out the intervals you’re playing. Why is this so important? Imagine trying to solve quadratic equations in algebra while not being fluent with your multiplication tables. That’s not going to work very well. You have to be pretty fluent with all your tables before you can approach higher mathematics. The same thing is true with music theory. You better be really solid with your key signatures and all your major scales before doing chords, intervals, and all of that. So spend some time with that on a regular basis.

Explore other styles of music.

It can be incredibly valuable to explore other genres, whether it’s jazz, salsa, pop, blues, etc. You’ll make discoveries, and you’ll understand the structure of music better. It ties in with music theory. All of these skill sets relate to each other. That’s why the more of them you do on a regular basis, the more productive your practice is.

Make a checklist for yourself!

Make a checklist so you never get stuck in your practice. If you’re not getting anywhere, change it up and do something different. You can come back to what you were doing the next day, and maybe it will resonate more genuinely with you at that time. Have your checklist on hand, either on your phone or on a piece of paper, so you can make sure you practice all these fundamental skill sets on a regular basis. Thank you, Jancarlos, for sharing this with everybody! Share your musical checklist 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

What Are Primary Chords? Why You Need Them

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why you must know your primary chords. What are primary chords? Well, I’m going to break it down for you today. I’m going to show you something called diatonic chords first, because that’s how you can discover what your primary chords are.

Diatonic chords, simply put, are chords built on every note of the scale.

The simplest chords are triads—three notes arranged in thirds. What are thirds? Thirds are every other note of a scale. If you play every other note of a C major scale, you have a C major chord. If you go up the scale, you can play all your diatonic chords. So D-F-A is also a diatonic triad. E-G-B, and on up the scale forming all the diatonic triads. This is essential to understand, and it can help you immensely in digesting a score if you’re reading or learning it. It’s also valuable just for listening to music.

I’m going to show you what are referred to as primary chords.

If you are vaguely aware of this now, this is going to be a revelatory moment for you. So let’s go through. We start with the one chord, and you notice that you have four half-steps on the bottom between the C and the E. That’s called a major third. Now on the top, there are three half-steps between the E and G. That’s a minor third. When you have a major third on the bottom and a minor third on the top, that is a major triad. This is really fundamental to music. We’re going to go up and discover where the major triads occur in Diatonic Chords. So far, we’ve established that the one chord is indeed major. That is the first primary chord. Where is the next one? If you go to the two chord, on the bottom, you have three half-steps between the D and F, which is a minor third, and you have four half-steps on the top between the F and A, which is a major third. So that’s a minor triad. So the two chord is not a primary chord; it’s a secondary chord because it’s not major. What about the three chord? I bet you can figure this out now that I’ve shown you the secret. You have three half-steps on the bottom and four on the top, so that is a minor triad again. The three chord is also a secondary triad. The four chord has four half-steps on the bottom and three on the top, so it is a major triad. So the one chord and the four chord are both major triads; therefore, they’re primary chords. Are there any other primary chords? The five chord has four half-steps on the bottom and three on top. So that’s another major chord.

The one chord, the four chord, and the five chord are your primary chords.

The six chord has three half-steps on the bottom and four on top; therefore, it’s a minor triad, another secondary chord. We have one more left. The seven chord has three half-steps on the bottom and also three on top. What the heck is going on here? That’s not a major or minor triad. Two minor thirds forms a diminished triad. It’s the only place where a diminished triad occurs in a diatonic chord. To recap, you have your major triads, which are your primary chords, the one, four, and five; you have your secondary chords, which are the two, three, and six, which are all minor; and you have your leading tone, the seventh chord, which is diminished.

Why is this so important?

Those basic one, four, and five chords are intrinsic to Western harmony. It’s a classic, authentic cadence and a great way to establish the key. You can go through all your keys this way. It’s a great way to gain comfort in all the major and minor keys. It’s a terrific way to have your primary chords literally at your fingertips! It makes reading music, understanding the harmonic underpinnings of your music, and learning music much easier.

You should know your primary chords in all keys.

It will really help you to have a good grasp of the harmonic structure of your music. From there, you can expand to your secondary chords and all sorts of interesting chords. But you should absolutely cement your primary chords. I hope this is valuable for you! Let me 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.

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