Tag Archives: music theory

Assembly Line Practicing

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. I’m here with an incredible practicing tip that will turbocharge the work you do at the piano: Assembly line practicing. What is this all about? I’m going to tell you all about it and how it relates to your piano playing. Early in the 20th century, Henry Ford revolutionized automobile manufacturing by making the assembly line.

The assembly line lets people work on all stages of development simultaneously.

Another great example of this is the post-World War II housing boom. I grew up on Long Island adjacent to Levittown, where potato fields were transformed into whole neighborhoods seemingly in an instant. How was this done? Previously, houses were built from the beginning to the end. Then when the houses were finished, the builders would move on to the next house. Well, there’s a much more efficient way. If you’ve ever been to a neighborhood being built, you see tractors digging dirt. You go a little further and see foundations being laid. Further still you see frames of houses being assembled. Then the electrical and plumbing are being put in. When you get to the very end of the neighborhood, there’s the model home. All the work is being done on all these multiple stages of development simultaneously. It’s an incredibly productive way of building neighborhoods.

How does this relate to your piano practice?

If you have watched my videos, you are probably aware of the way I practice, and the way I teach my students to practice. Rather than practicing a whole piece and eventually trying to memorize it, you flip it. Read through the piece a couple of times, then get right down to work and start memorizing a little chunk at a time. However, this type of practice is incredibly mentally challenging. Everyone thinks that it’s hard just for them, but it’s hard for everyone if you’re doing it right! Let’s say you’re learning a new piece. You learn as much as you can and it’s enough for the day. The next day you can refine what you’ve done the previous day. But you also forge forward.

Eventually you have music at many different stages of development.

The first section is at performance level, like that model home or the finished car coming off the assembly line. Later on, maybe after the double bar in the development section of a sonata movement, it needs further polishing. So you work to refine that. You’re trying to refine what you learned the day before and solidify your memory. Yet you are always memorizing new material to add to the pipeline for the next day.

Your practice becomes exponentially more productive.

You can’t just memorize for an entire practice session. There’s a point of diminishing returns of your effectiveness. There’s only so much you can absorb at one time. So you memorize what you can. Then you refine what you did the previous day and the days before that. The first sections of a piece may be at performance level, especially a multi movement work. You might have the first movement at performance level. The second movement is coming along. This is what I mean by assembly line practice. It’s so effective if you can work on different stages of development all at the same time. Instead of just working on a whole piece and trying to get it up to a high level, then go on to the next piece, you work on all different stages of development within the work. You can even be working on the second and third movements while you’re doing the final polishing on the first movement. I hope this is helpful for you! 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 Failure Breeds Success in Music

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. The subject today is about how failure breeds success in music. When you see somebody who is accomplished on the piano, you might think it’s easy for them. Things must just come naturally to them. They’re so talented! But if you see behind the scenes what it takes, it’s the people who can fail again and again and again, and yet keep trying who become seasoned artists. This isn’t just in music. This covers a wide range of activities.

As a child I took a vacation with my family to the Finger Lakes and we had an opportunity to water ski.

I wanted to stand up on the skis. I tried and I tried. I’d start up and then bam, I’d be down. I was relentless, trying it again and again and again. I didn’t want to give up. I really wanted nothing more than to be successful. I even stood on the skis outside of the water tied to a tree to try to get the sense of it! Try as I might, I could not seem to stay up on the skis in the water. My sister today says that at the time, they didn’t have skis that fit me. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe she’s just being kind, because I guess it could be an embarrassing situation. Although I wasn’t embarrassed. I just wanted to water ski so darn badly! Eventually they had this contraption that was supposed to hold the skis together and then lift up. I used it and it held the skis together, but it never lifted up! There I went halfway around the lake, hunched over. That was the degree of success I had in water skiing. Many years later, I was on a boat with friends and they were offering water skiing. I tried it again and I was finally successful!

How does this relate to piano?

As a child, my hands were very weak. I have small hands even now. But as a child, I could barely reach an octave. Even in my teens I could only reach an octave around the keys. I was playing some pretty sophisticated music and I couldn’t even reach an octave! I rose to the occasion to play the whole Debussy Children’s Corner suite when I was 13 years old, which was really an achievement for me. There was a strong B-flat octave at the very end of the suite (Golliwog’s Cakewalk). And it just sounded anemic. My father actually had me leave out the octave in the left hand at the end and use all my fingers on the key in each hand to get some power to end the piece strongly. That was a really good workaround. I had to struggle for years to develop strength. When I was in Salzburg, Austria, in high school, I spent a summer studying at the Mozarteum. This was a time when I really practiced a lot. I was working on the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6. I spent hours and hours practicing to the point where I had cracked, bloody nails. I was just trying to develop strength. That piece ends with a huge octave section that you’ve probably heard before. So that’s what I did to try to overcome natural weakness.

Other pianists might have completely different obstacles to overcome.

I remember one of my father’s students who was very talented from an emotional level. He had fire in his playing! It was a pleasure to listen to him. But his brain didn’t always cooperate. So his challenge was just holding the cohesiveness of the form together. Holding together an extended work or a whole program was very difficult for him. He had the fire, the passion, the technique, but musical intellect was his challenge. So he worked very hard. He’s a seasoned artist with a career. Everybody has to find what failures they have and build upon them. It doesn’t all come naturally.

It’s how you deal with failure that makes the difference.

If failure makes you feel defeated, and you stop trying, you won’t ever overcome weakness. But if you choose to fight on and not accept failure, that’s the secret to success! It doesn’t happen easily for people. It just seems that way on the outside. So remember, if you’re suffering from failure in your playing or in anything in life, just keep persevering! You can learn from your mistakes as to how to solve them appropriately in the future. The more things you try, the more things you know that don’t work. Thomas Edison once said of his struggle to invent the light bulb, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” That’s what it is with the piano. You try, and keep trying, until you find the answers that solve your problems so you can overcome failure in your music. I hope this is helpful and perhaps even inspiring to 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/RobertEstrinContact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Should You Look at Your Hands When You Play From Memory on the Piano?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about whether you should look at your hands when you play from memory on the piano. This is a really insightful question that someone asked me recently. There are two distinctly different ways of playing the piano. One is playing from memory and the other is reading the music.

When playing with the music, you should strive to keep your eyes on the score the entire time.

You only want to have brief glances at the keys. When you do look at the keys, it must be just your eyes moving. If you play the piano and you are looking at the music ,you can’t look away. You can’t read what you’re not looking at! When playing from the score, you absolutely must keep your eyes on the music.

What About Playing From Memory?

Oftentimes I have students memorize music. At the very first lesson I show my students how to memorize. This is something that almost nobody ever teaches. You think it’s magic that pianists could assimilate all this music. Are pianists some kind of geniuses? No. You just have to know how to memorize. You have to take little chunks of music and build the whole composition bit by bit. When you hear somebody play, it seems like a miracle. But really, if you see what’s behind the curtain, it’s just a lot of little steps that go into it.

I have my students play from memory. The first time they do it, a lot of times they’ll be looking up into space. I always tell them to look at their hands. One of the reasons to memorize music is so that you can look at your hands! When you have leaps, how are you supposed to land in the right place without looking at your hands? Having said that, there are some blind pianists who defy all reason bouncing all over the keyboard. They don’t rely upon looking. That’s great for them. But for everyone else, you have your eyes to utilize so you might as well take advantage!

Looking at your hands is another way to reinforce your memory.

By looking at your hands you see the connections of the keys. You know where to look if there are leaps. A lot of times what you want to do when you’re playing the piano is look at your thumbs rather than the extreme outside fingers. The thumbs can line up everything and they’re close together. When you have leaps, you tend to want to look at the inner part of your hand. That’s one little tip for you.

Does this mean that you should never try to play without looking?

No. The time for that is when you memorize a piece of music. That doesn’t mean you’re done with the score. Far from it. It’s exactly the opposite! The way I learn music, and the way I teach my students to learn music is to read through it a couple of times the first day, then get down to work and start memorizing. The first thing you do is memorize your music, instead of the last thing. Then what do you do? You go back to the score and reinforce the memory by reading the score and keeping your eyes on the music. That’s the time for not looking at your hands. Read from the score to see all the little details that maybe you didn’t catch the first time. Maybe you forgot where a slur ends or a crescendo begins, or the voicing of a chord. You have to constantly go back and reinforce your memory.

Interestingly, you can play the piano without any instrument or anything visual at all.

I have a video about playing the piano from your mind. You can just sit in a chair and play through your music mentally, thinking through every nuance of sound and touch. That is the ultimate practice. You can try it with a piece you know really well. You want to make sure you reinforce that memory. There is no better practice. You don’t have the benefit of finger memory. You don’t have the keyboard to look at or the sound to go by. It’s all in your head. Interestingly, there have been tests of people playing the piano while having their brains scanned. Then they get people to think about playing the piano while doing the same brain scan on the same people. There is zero difference in the brain whether you are playing the piano or thinking about playing the piano. Now, what does this reveal? It tells you that you can practice away from the piano effectively and get all the benefits. You can reinforce the score just using your mind.

How Do You Play the Piano with Your Mind?

I hope this has been enlightening 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

The Best and Worst Pianos to Buy

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to talk about the best and worst pianos to buy. This is a big subject, so where do we begin? I’ll start with the worst pianos to buy, then I’ll go to the best pianos to buy so we can end on a happy note!

What are the worst pianos to buy?

Upright pianos have all different heights. Go back far enough, and they were really tall. They got shorter and shorter over time. There were a whole breed of pianos referred to as spinet pianos. Spinet pianos are no longer made, but they were popular because they were very small and inexpensive. In the 1970s, you could get a brand new Kimball Whitney spinet for a few hundred dollars! Can you imagine? So they were popular for that reason. This was before digital pianos existed. So if somebody wanted something really inexpensive, a spinet was an option.

What’s so bad about spinets?

Let’s break it down. Why is the sound so anemic on a spinet? The piano is so short, the strings don’t have much length. Everything in the low register is really lacking. There isn’t much richness even in the high register because the soundboard is so small. Worse than that, in order to fit the action into such a small case, it didn’t have a full length key to reach the back of the action. So the keys were very short, and there were connecting rods to the rest of the action. This is called an indirect blow action, or a drop action. If you open a spinet at the top you can see the keys end right at the end of the fallboard. There are rods connecting the keys to the rest of the action. So they’re not as responsive. They’re also easier to play, which may be a benefit to some people who have hand problems. But generally, it’s not going to prepare a serious pianist to play other pianos. The repetition is also really slow. There are some spinets that are better than others. The Baldwin Acrosonic was the best of that breed. So that’s one kind of piano that generally you want to avoid.

Sometimes a big old upright can be an absolutely glorious instrument.

In fact, you can get a bigger sound out of a tall upright than some smaller baby grands. Old uprights have long string length and big sound boards. They’re formidable, wonderful instruments. But the problem is, most of them were made over a hundred years ago! What you don’t want is to buy an old upright piano just because it looks pretty, because it might need $15,000 or $20,000 worth of work. This is no joke. These pianos get worn out. If the strings are old and rusty and the felt, hammers, and other action parts are worn out, you can get into hundreds of hours of work trying to restore one of these instruments. When you’re all done, you’d be lucky to sell it for a few thousand dollars, because they’re not as popular anymore.

Occasionally you’ll find an old upright that has already been restored. And if that’s the case, it can be a wonderful experience to have an instrument like this. But I wouldn’t buy one to restore. You can find free uprights, mostly the big, tall, old uprights, on websites like PianoAdoption.com. If you look at enough of them, maybe you’ll find one that doesn’t need everything. But generally, if you’re looking for a quality instrument and it seems like a good deal, check with your piano technician before you commit to it.

What are the best pianos to buy?

So now let’s get to some of the pianos that are worthwhile, and that would be restored American pianos or late model American pianos. Steinway and Mason and Hamlin are the only American piano brands left today. But if you go back to the 1970s, and even into the 1980’s, there were a number of piano manufacturers still making high quality pianos in the United States. Some of these instruments may still have good life left in them. More than that, the methodology of these instruments like Chickering, Knabe, and Baldwin was very similar to Steinway and Mason and Hamlin, which are priced astronomically high today. People are not aware of these other brands as much. Because of that they could represent phenomenal value. These pianos could be worth putting some money into if they’re structurally sound, because they are hand-built, top tier pianos. So it can be worthwhile checking out some of those instruments.

What about Asian pianos?

Older Asian pianos that need work should be avoided. These pianos are inexpensive to begin with, so you don’t want to put a bunch of money into them. Perhaps a late model Asian piano can offer good value if they have been well maintained.

So that’s the long and short of it. American pianos are of such high quality that looking for those in the used market can be worthwhile. Even if you have to put a little bit of work into them, they can be worthwhile to get an instrument of a really high caliber. I hope this has been 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

How to Get Free Sheet Music

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to get free sheet music. On the Internet you can get almost everything for free, from movies and TV shows, to books, and yes, sheet music! Of course, there’s a price you pay for something that’s free, which is not knowing the validity of the score. You don’t know the integrity of anything you get for free. However, sometimes it’s nice to have a variety to choose from. If you just want to check out some sheet music, maybe a free music site is just what you’re looking for.

There are a lot of different websites that have a smattering of free music. But the best place is a website called IMSLP.org.

IMSLP is an incredible resource of not just sheet music but also recordings. When you first go to the site it may seem a bit confusing. As soon as you click on something, it tells you you can pay for a subscription, or you can wait 10 seconds for your download. Then you’ll see all the recordings first. But once you figure out how the site works, it’s a treasure trove.

Fair warning, a lot of it is junk.

With some stuff you’re immediately going to see tattered, old, unauthoritative editions. But if you spend the time, there are nuggets of gold in there. If you just want to see two or three different editions of the same piece, it’s a great resource. You’re not going to buy two or three different copies of sheet music, but this allows you to have a reference.

Another option is VirtualSheetMusic.com.

Many of you may have noticed that I co-brand many of my videos with the VirtualSheetMusic.com logo. VirtualSheetMusic.com is not all free, but for a very small subscription fee you get the benefit of integrity of the scores. It’s also very convenient. You can download music right to your iPad or print out the music There are all kinds of technologies to make it easy with automated page turning, and all sorts of cool stuff. So if you’re looking for just free music, check out IMSLP.org, but if you want something more trustworthy and convenient, check out VirtualSheetMusic.com. 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 Much Should You Mark Up Your Score?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is about how much you should mark up your piano music. There are a lot of reasons to write on your score. Maybe you missed something in your music and you want to circle it, or you need to put fingering in. After a while your whole score could be marked up making it difficult to see the notes!

I have an interesting story about this.

Years ago, when I was at the Manhattan School of Music, I had a friend who was a piano major. She had the Henle edition of the Beethoven sonatas, which are very authoritative and expensive. I was helping her with a particular Beethoven sonata. She opened up the score of this incredibly expensive, thick volume of Beethoven. She turned to the sonata she was working on with her teacher, and it was marked up with several different colors of ink! There were so many markings, you absolutely could not see the score anymore! Things were circled, and there were big blotches of red, green, and blue ink on the score. Can you imagine the injustice of this? Her teacher destroyed her score! There’s no way you could possibly see the notes and Beethoven’s markings anymore. That’s an extreme example of what to avoid.

Only use pencil in your scores.

When I tell my students to mark something on the score I first ask, “Do you have a pencil handy?” That’s rule number one. My father used to have this really cool mechanical pencil. I haven’t seen anything like it that exists anymore. It was a pencil that had four different colored leads in it. He could mark scores with red, green, blue and black. It was such a great way for him to mark scores in a coherent fashion. Yet because it was pencil, the markings could be erased. Why is this so important? Let’s say early on you didn’t see a flat in the key signature, so you put the flat in front of the note. Then maybe later there was something else in that same measure, like a fingering or a phrase marking you missed. You can start making so many circles and marks that before you know it, it doesn’t get your attention anymore.

You want to be able to erase marks you no longer need, and only have the ones that are pertinent.

At a later stage of learning a piece of music, you might want to record it to see what kind of shape it’s in. In doing so, when listening back to the recording, you might want to gently circle the places you want to review. But maybe the mistakes were just one-offs. Maybe you just wanted to reference them after listening to the recording. Your markings are not always something you want to call to attention every single time you’re looking at the score. Fingering is a really critical example. You may work out a fingering and think it’s good. But later, when you’re playing the piece up to tempo, you realize that fingering isn’t going to work at all. As long as it’s in pencil, you can erase it and put new fingerings in. So that’s the most important thing.

Retain the clarity of your score.

Use a pencil! Don’t obliterate your score with too many markings. Erase the markings you no longer need so you have clarity of the actual score. After all, the score is what you need to see and digest. You don’t want to obscure it with too many markings. I’m interested in how you deal with markings in your scores. What do you find helpful? 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