Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how dynamics are like orchestration in your music. The piano is an amazing instrument because you have all the parts of a whole orchestra right under your fingertips! You want to think of your playing as orchestrating the sound and getting the quality of different sections of an orchestra—the strings, the brass, the percussion, all of it.
Thinking of your playing as different sections of an orchestra will help you play more expressively.
It can be richly rewarding for your audience to hear these kinds of dramatic changes in dynamics and tonal colors. I’m going to demonstrate this by using the beginning of Mozart’s Sonata in C Minor, K 457. This is a really good example because of the stark changes in dynamics. You can imagine the opening statement as a full orchestra with big, booming strings and brass. The next part is much quieter, so maybe you just have woodwinds. Then again, a full orchestra, followed again by delicate winds. Think of your music as orchestrating each section. Get a different tonal color and a different balance in your playing.
Whenever you’re playing, think of orchestrating.
This goes for every composition you play! Some can be more subtle than others. Not all music is going to change this often from one texture, sound, or dynamic to another. However, this also holds true when you’re playing a texture. This isn’t changing orchestrations for each bar or measure, but having a different sound for each strata of music. The treble might be a clarinet; the lower notes could be cellos; and in the middle, it could be violas. So you try to get different sounds on all the different lines you’re playing.
There are two kinds of orchestration.
There’s orchestrating different sections dynamically, and there’s orchestrating which lines of music you’re bringing out. Think of your piano music as being orchestrated, because after all, that’s exactly what the piano offers! That’s what’s so great about the piano—you can play compositions that would take a whole orchestra. Take advantage of that and discover the sounds and sonorities you can achieve in your playing! I hope this 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
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we’re going to talk about the flywheel effect in your piano playing. This is an essential element that you must embrace in your musical performance. Your audience will appreciate it, and so will you!
It’s important to not stop your performance in the middle.
In a play, occasionally, one of the actors will forget a line. It can happen. If the performer just wings it and improvises a line or two, unless you’re really familiar with the play, you won’t even notice. But just imagine what would happen if they missed their line and then went back a line so that they would get it. It would be obvious to everyone in the audience that they had made a mistake. Now suddenly, instead of absorbing the story, you’re thinking about the performer. It takes you away from the magic. Well, it’s exactly the same with your musical performance!
You must think of your performance as a train. A train keeps going!
Let’s say a train gets slightly derailed for a moment. It could be a complete disaster! But imagine if it just got off for a moment and then bounced right back on track. It wouldn’t be a big deal, would it? It’s the same exact thing with your piano playing! Your performance should be like a train that keeps going. Imagine you’re performing, you have a momentary glitch, and you correct it by stopping and restarting the phrase. The flow of the music is interrupted. It’s like a trainwreck in your performance! Anyone tapping their foot along is jarred by the experience. They might also start to wonder if you are going to miss something else. They might feel sorry for you. It takes them away from the whole experience.
Push through your mistakes.
The secret is to keep going! Use the flywheel effect so the mistakes come and go as quickly and inconsequentially as possible. Unless somebody is intimately familiar with the score, they probably won’t even notice. It’s just like a play. Most people don’t know all the lines of the play. If the actor just improvises something for a moment, it’s fine for almost everyone in the audience. You must do the same thing with your musical performance.
You don’t want to disrupt the flow of the music.
Ignore the mistakes! (That can wait until your next practice session!) Just focus on where you are in the score and let the music keep unfolding. The performance will be fine. It doesn’t have to be perfect; but it must have continuity. The show must go on! I hope this 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
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how all beats are not created equal. This almost sounds like blasphemy, but it’s absolutely true! What am I talking about here? Well, it depends upon the nature of a piece of music, the time signature, the period style, and so many other things.
There are different types of emphasis within a time signature.
Even in 4/4 time, the beats are not always evenly emphasized. Instead of a monotonous sequence of one – two – three – four, the emphasis can shift and create rhythmic diversity. Oftentimes, the “1” is the strongest beat, the “3” is the second strongest beat, and the “4” is the weakest beat. By playing with emphasis on the “1” and “3,” you get a more elegant sound.
There are many dance forms in music, and they are a great way to demonstrate this concept.
What better way to show how beats are not equal than in a dance movement? When people are moving to music, they’re making different motions depending upon what beat is playing. A waltz, for example, Chopin’s B minor Waltz, is in 3/4 time as all waltzes are. The “1” is the strongest beat, and the “3” is the second strongest beat. Just imagine a ballroom filled with people dancing the waltz. The “1” is the big motion, and the “3” is the second biggest motion, bringing it back to the “1.” This can help you intrinsically understand the idea that not all beats are created equal watching the motion of dancers. Some beats involve more movement than others.
Interestingly, other pieces in 3/4 time have different emphasis.
For example, in the famous Mozart C Major Sonata K545, the second movement is in 3/4 time. There is a little bit of emphasis on the one, but not like a waltz. Another example of this is the last movement of Mozart’s C Minor Sonata K457. This one is faster, like the Chopin waltz, but with a completely different emphasis of beats. It’s really two-measure phrases with emphasis on the first beat of every two measures! So beats aren’t created equal, not just in emphasis, but even in the amount of time they get, to some extent.
There’s a certain style to dance movements in particular that creates energy and emotion.
This is true of just about all music. It’s very unusual to have a piece where all the beats are exactly the same. It’s a rare quality in music. It’s akin to your speech. When you’re speaking, your intonation isn’t the same for all words. You have natural emphasis for some words. It’s the same with music. So start thinking about where the strong beats are in your music. Usually “1” is the strongest beat in most music, but even that is not always true. You will discover this as you experiment with your music trying to feel where the strong beats are!
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
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about memorizing piano music. I’m going to give you strategies and techniques for long-term retention. This is a really important subject. Have you ever learned a piece and gotten it to a high level, but after some time you don’t remember it? You put in all that work, and now you can’t remember how to play the piece! Now what do you do? You can go back to the score and play it slowly. That might help you rekindle the music. But today, we’re talking about how to keep pieces in shape.
How many pieces can you keep in shape?
There are only so many pieces you can keep in shape. If you spend too much time with your review pieces, you don’t have time to learn new music. So you have to prioritize which pieces you’re going to keep in shape.
How do you keep pieces in shape after you learn them?
The most obvious thing of all is to simply play them on a regular basis. If you don’t play the pieces you learned before, they’re going to elude you after a while. So play them on a regular basis. If they’re short pieces, play them every day! People do all kinds of exercises just to keep their fingers in shape. Instead, you can use the pieces you’ve learned as good physical exercise for your hands. That way, you get the added benefit of keeping them in your memory.
Is playing through your pieces regularly enough to keep them in shape?
Sadly, just playing through your pieces regularly is not enough to keep them in shape. Did you ever play the game Telephone as a kid? You whisper a message to somebody next to you; they whisper to the person next to them, and it goes on and on. By the end of the class, you end up with a whole different message! The same thing could happen with your music. If every time you play it, it’s slightly different and you don’t realize it, you can end up with a whole new piece!
You have to refer back to the score.
The best thing you can do is get out the score, take your foot off the pedal, and play slowly, delineating everything in a very deliberate manner. You may also want to work with the metronome. For example, let’s say you’re working on the third movement of Mozart’s K. 545 C Major Sonata. You want to practice that piece slowly, exaggerating the staccatos from the wrist and using raised fingers so that the fingers that are up are up, and the fingers that are down are down. By doing this, you’re not just using motor memory. You’re deliberately playing each finger in a relaxed manner. You shouldn’t have any tension playing with raised fingers. It’s just like the stretching of an athlete. If you stretch to warm up before exercising or dancing, it doesn’t add tension. Quite the contrary, it’s a relaxation technique if you do it correctly. Playing very deliberately and slowly, absorbing the score, and solidifying the fingers and the sound is a fantastic way to solidify your review pieces.
You can also just think through your scores!
If you ever have time when you’re waiting in line somewhere or taking a shower, you can play the music in your head! Keep the sound of it, even just the sound of the melody, in your head so that you don’t forget it. Ultimately, the sound is the most important part of your music! Listening to recordings is a great way to keep a piece familiar while expanding your interpretive possibilities. Keep your music fresh by playing it on a regular basis, practicing it, listening to it, and thinking it through. You will be rewarded by having music you can play! What is it all about if you don’t have music you can sit down and play? If you do this enough, and take pieces that you have dropped and re-learn them again and again, then you really will have pieces in your permanent memory! I hope this 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
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why you must exaggerate your playing when practicing slowly. Why would you want to exaggerate? Shouldn’t you try to play exactly the same way slowly as when you speed up? Yes, that’s a valuable technique, but there are many times when you want to exaggerate dynamics and phrasing in your slow playing.
If you don’t exaggerate your slow practice, you may end up with a watered-down performance.
If you’re practicing a piece slowly without exaggerated dynamics, when you play it up to speed, it can sound dull. Since you had so little definition of dynamics and phrasing, it all but disappears when you go faster. You naturally lighten up in order to facilitate speed. Those differences in dynamics and phrasing become diluted. So instead, when practicing slowly, exaggerate all the elements of the music. Then, when you play faster and with ease, your hands know what to do. The fingers are staying closer to the keys. The wrists are not making such exaggerated motions because they are already solidified. It still comes out because you have trained your fingers and wrists to delineate the phrasing and dynamics with such definition that when you speed up, staying closer to the keys, and lightenening up, the dynamics and the phrasing are still there. You can play with ease, and you don’t lose the expressiveness of your playing!
Try that in your practice! Let me know how it works for you 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
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question is: What makes a piano great? I have come across thousands of pianos in my life. I literally grew up with pianos. We had four pianos in our home growing up because my father, Morton Estrin, was a concert pianist and a Baldwin artist at that. We had three Baldwins at one time, a Steinway, a Sohmer; we had different pianos at different times, but I grew up with all of those pianos. I got to try out my dad’s pianos before recitals at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. During his recording sessions, whenever he took breaks, I’d play these magnificent instruments that were prepared to such a high level.
I started selling pianos after graduating from music conservatory.
I was teaching piano, and so many people calling me for lessons didn’t own pianos! The first question I would ask is, “Do you own a piano?” Half the time, people would say, “No.” I would tell them they were better off with a piano and no lessons than with lessons and no piano. How can you learn if you don’t have an instrument to play? So I wouldn’t take students who didn’t have pianos, but I was losing out trying to start my career. That’s why I started seeking out inexpensive pianos that were worthy of restoration, mostly big, tall, old uprights, consoles, and spinets. The need for that has been so great that, my entire life, I’ve always had pianos in my home, at one time a large live/work loft, and have had piano stores as well. I’ve always literally lived with pianos!
I have a real perspective on what makes a great piano.
I’m going to share some tips with you. If you’re looking at pianos, you may wonder if the one you’re looking at is worthwhile. Well, of course, there’s a lot to that subject, and condition is of paramount importance. But what I’m talking about is not really the condition of the piano. Sometimes, we take in pianos that need complete rebuilding, which can take six months to a year! Yet some of them are good candidates, because I can tell the seeds of greatness are in there. Many just don’t have much potential and aren’t worth rebuilding.
How do you know if a piano has the potential to be great?
First of all, the condition of a piano has to be such that you can tell what it sounds like, unless you’re an expert who has vast experience with pianos. If it hasn’t been tuned in ten years and the strings are rusty, you might have no idea if it has any kind of potential at all. But I have an interesting story for you. A few years ago, I had a repeat engagement with the Piano Teachers Association. On stage, they had two brand new nine-foot concert grand pianos. I sat down at one, and it was an absolute dream. The other piano was nothing special. It really didn’t have the magic. So what is that magic? What makes one piano a gem and another one not so great?
Even with brand new pianos, some have more potential than others.
Piano soundboards are hand-built. Even though there are specifications for how they’re built, no two trees are the same. Every soundboard is unique! They are usually tapered on the edges, and they’re built with an arch in the middle, referred to as crown. You can measure crown, but that’s not going to tell you very much. You can run a string under the soundboard to see if there’s a little gap in the middle to check if it has that arch, but the tone of the piano is the way you can tell how good the crown of a soundboard is.
A large old piano might have a thunderous bass, but it’s in the treble that you most often lose the sustain of the tone.
Sometimes a piano will have good sustain in one register but may be lacking in another. By simply playing single notes with no pedal, you may be able to tell the potential of a piano. My personal piano is a late 1930s Steinway S, the smallest baby grand Steinway makes. My grandfather bought this piano for my father, and we rebuilt it a number of years ago. It has the original soundboard without even a hairline crack in it! That is very lucky, since this piano has grown up in a number of environments, yet it has pretty amazing sustain and projection. Listening to a single note with no pedal, you can hear how long the tone sustains. When you get to the really high register, that’s where a lot of pianos really lose it.
There are all sorts of techniques that can be employed to try to increase the sustain of the tone. First of all, you can restring a piano if the strings are old and tired. Just tapping down the strings at the point of termination at the bridges to get good, clean contact from the metal to the bridge can really help. But if you play note to note and none of them have really good sustain, you’re probably not going to get very good results. If you find some of the notes have good sustain and others don’t, there’s hope!
In the middle register on a great piano, the sound of the notes seems to almost get bigger after the initial attack.
You can hear how notes in the middle register open up after the initial attack. That is a sign of a great piano. If you have that in all registers, you’re in great shape. Now, if you’re looking at a piano you may want to buy that has not been prepped and you’re wondering what potential it has, listen to several different notes in various registers. If a good number of the notes have that quality of sound, the piano may be worth restoring. But if you have a whole register that is lacking in that expansiveness of tone and sustain, you’re probably never going to get great results out of it. Sometimes you can replace a soundboard and bring that vibrant life back to a piano; however, that’s very expensive because it involves rebuilding the whole piano. Just the soundboard can cost in excess of $10,000!
That’s how you can determine if a piano is great!
Obviously, a great piano is one that has the potential, has had the work done, and is in magnificent condition inside and out. If you have that, you have the ultimate piano! 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
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
