Tag Archives: piano lessons

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

How to Avoid Commercials on YouTube

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. The subject today is about a way to not have commercials on YouTube. You just want to watch a video and you have to endure these commercials all the time. This week one of my fans contacted me and said they love watching my videos, but the commercials are driving them nuts!

There is a way to not have any commercials on YouTube. It’s called, “YouTube Premium”.

YouTube Premium is a paid program which also includes YouTube Music. YouTube music has a comprehensive library of almost any music that has ever been recorded which you can listen to anytime, anywhere on any device. I have subscribed for years. I think the $11.99/month is worth it just for YouTube Music! I haven’t seen a commercial on YouTube for years either. You can try it out for a month for free here to see how you like it: https://www.youtube.com/premium

The best part is by subscribing to YouTube premium, you also get YouTube music.

YouTube Music is a treasure trove of almost every recording you could imagine which you can listen to it anywhere, any time from your computer to your phone, to your iPad. I’m not paid for this. This is not a sponsored commercial. but my time is valuable as I’m sure yours is. So try it out for a week and see how you like it! If you like it, you’ll never have to watch a commercial on YouTube again! 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 College Piano Sales?

Welcome to Living Pianos. The subject today is about what college piano sales are all about. You’ve probably seen them at your local college or university, and then the next year they have them again. And you wonder how they have so many pianos to sell! Also, you wonder, if these are college pianos, what kind of condition could they possibly be in. (We’ve all seen school pianos!) Well, I’m going to tell you what these sales are all about so you can determine if it’s something of interest to you so you can decide if you’d like to investigate them for yourself.

This is a very common practice. They are events held at colleges, universities and also in conjunction with arts organizations. The way they work is with an arrangement among a piano dealer, a piano manufacturer, a finance company, and an institution, typically a school. The arrangement is made to loan several new pianos (perhaps 6-8 pianos) for a year at no charge. In exchange, the institution agrees to open up their facility (and more importantly their mailing list) to have a limited time piano sale which is marketed with tens of thousands of dollars of advertising. The piano store then engages piano movers to move dozens of other pianos from the piano store into the school, performance venue, or other facility for the sale.

If you research this online, “What is a College Piano Sale”, you will find a lot of opinions on this practice.

These sales are generally held in conjunction with Yamaha, Steinway, or Kawai. If it is a Yamaha event, there will be mostly Yamaha pianos there. If there is a specific model of Yamaha piano you are after, it can be a good place to get a decent price on the piano without the hassle of negotiation which is typical in new piano stores. However, the expense of moving the pianos in and out, along with the heavy promotional costs precludes spectacular deals at these events. It is also not a place where you have much time to try out instruments. They try to create a buying frenzy by limiting time, and fostering an urgency for a buying decision before the pianos are sold (even though most of them go back to the store after the sale is over).

So remember: if you are looking for a new piano, and know what you want, a college sale can be a good way to go. But for narrowing down what you want, you are better off shopping around first. Let us know your experiences on LivingPianos.com and YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Why You Play Too Fast

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is, “Why do you play too fast?”. Most people try to play faster than they’re comfortable. Sometimes you will have a piece you can play just fine, but when you try to play it slower, you can’t even figure out where you are! There’s a great deal of motor memory or muscle memory that is involved in piano playing. Your fingers just seem to know where to go. So you want to go fast enough that you won’t forget where to go next. The problem with this is, unless the music is really secure, your tempo will fluctuate. You’ll make accommodations to the parts you don’t know quite as well, going a little slower. Then you’ll speed up again so you don’t forget where you are.

Motor memory on the piano is akin to touch typing.

I took a typing class in high school. I learned how to touch-type, so I don’t have to look at the keys. Little did I know, that would be probably the most important course I had in high school! In the computer age, it’s so great to be able to type without looking at your hands. But the funny thing is, if I stop and think where a letter is on the keyboard, for example, the letter “W”, I don’t even know! I have to look at the keyboard. If I have to type on a screen, where the keyboard is smaller, and you have to just touch the letters on the screen with your finger, I can’t even find them! Yet on a keyboard, I can type almost as fast as I can speak. I’m a really fast typist. I was the fastest in my class in high school. I guess all those years of piano paid off in my typing class!

Playing the piano too fast is a rampant problem among many piano students.

What you must do is take the time to slow down your playing and figure out what is there. This can be a painstaking process. I’ve talked a little bit about how sometimes when you want to start in the middle of a piece, you may have to speed up just to figure out what fingers to start with. When you’re playing slowly, you might want to play faster just a little bit at first, just to see where you are, and what fingers are on which notes as a starting point of a section.

Every fine pianist I have ever met practices slowly, incessantly.

There are three things that every accomplished pianist does: practice slowly, practice with a metronome, and practice without the pedal. I’ll also add to that, practice with the music! When you memorize a piece, that doesn’t mean you don’t use the score anymore. As a matter of fact, it’s the opposite. I like to memorize a piece first and then do all my practicing with the score, reinforcing the memory, practicing slowly with the metronome with no pedal and really solidifying.

The reason why you play too fast is because you’re not really cognizant of the score.

You play too fast because you don’t really have an intellectual understanding of the score. You’re just going through the motions. Your fingers kind of remember on their own without knowing what they’re supposed to be doing. But that’s extremely dangerous. It doesn’t have a solid foundation. Things can fall apart if you depend upon that type of playing. Thank goodness we do have motor memory! Piano would be so much more difficult if you couldn’t depend upon it at all. But you want to minimize your reliance upon the feeling of the keys and where your fingers naturally go. Slow, deliberate playing is the way to do it. Refer back to the score.

Try slow, deliberate practicing for yourself!

Take a piece that you can play fast, but you can’t play slowly with security. Take out the score and play slowly. You’re going to discover so many things! You will always find more details than you initially remembered. Your music has so many details in it! Let me know how it works for you here in the comments on LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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

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

The Largest Music Store in America!

I recently visited the largest music store in the country, Sweetwater. Located in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Sweetwater is the second largest music retailer in the country with only one location. Guitar Center, the county’s largest music retailer, has 294 stores. Sam Ash, the 3rd largest music retailer in the U.S. has 44 locations.

I met the founder of Sweetwater, Chuck Surack in the 1980’s when his business was run from his home in Fort Wayne. He had a recording studio in his basement in Indiana, as I did at the time! I bought a high-end digital music workstation, an 88-key keyboard, Kurzweil K250 from the back of his van in a parking lot! He recently sold the business for over a billion dollars.

Last Year, Sweetwater Did $1.6 Billion in Sales!

You may wonder how such a thing is possible. I remember decades ago visiting Sweetwater when it was still in Chuck’s home (although it was a bigger, nicer home). He had a network of Macintosh computers with sales engineers fielding calls from people all over the country. He had a thriving mail order business. What separates his business from all the others doing this sort of business was that his salespeople were highly trained professionals. Not only that, but he invested in technology so that all the sales engineers could call up all the information of all the products they sold right on the computer screen along with pictures of the front and back panels. So they could provide customers with an incredible level of support. The transition to online sales was seamless. Each sales engineer undergoes 13 weeks of training before they begin servicing customers.

Sweetwater Has 600 Sales Engineers and 2,000 Employees!

The store in Fort Wayne, Indiana is like a college campus consisting of several buildings including a huge outdoor amphitheater, multiple, state-of-the-art recording studios, as well as world-class performance venues. The store is built like a mall with each department occupying different “stores” within the mall. There is a huge eating area much like a food court in a shopping mall. The distribution center looks like an Amazon warehouse.

Visiting Sweetwater is such an interesting experience. At the entrance, is something akin to a museum of music gear through the decades, from old analog tape recorders, to vintage synthesizers and other gear. These were all products that Chuck Surack had in his personal studio over the years.

You can watch the accompanying video to get a taste of what this operation is like. If you are ever in the area, it is definitely worthwhile checking out the largest music store in America!

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 Sight-Read On the Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to sight-read on the piano. Sight-reading is one of the most difficult things you can do on the piano. Sometimes it seems absolutely mind boggling that it’s even possible! An accomplished player can take a piece of music they’ve never seen before and play it up to speed almost perfectly. How can they possibly see everything on the page? It doesn’t seem possible.

When I was young, I was a miserable sight-reader.

Even in high school, when I was a fairly advanced player, I wasn’t good at sight-reading. I was playing Chopin ballades and Liszt Hungarian rhapsodies and Beethoven sonatas, but my reading level was almost that of a beginner. I couldn’t seem to crack it. I have a video about my personal story of learning how to sight-read. You can see that video here. I had a revelatory moment when suddenly I realized I could read anything! Of course, I couldn’t get all the notes. I worked for years to get more and more of the notes in my sight-reading.

Keep your eyes on the music.

You can’t look down when you sight-read. You can’t read what you’re not looking at! You have to depend upon feel to a great extent. You must make the connection between what you hear and what you feel. But what I’m talking about today is something even more fundamental.

When you’re sight-reading, you’re not seeing absolutely everything.

It’s virtually impossible to see everything. There’s so much in a score. All the notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing andexpression, you can’t see it all. Even that person you think is reading everything perfectly, and maybe it sounds perfect, are they really seeing everything?

Hvae yeu eevr sein tohse wurd jmubles lkie tihs? Evon touhgh i’ts wrtiten inocrerctly, as lnog as tne frist and lsat ltteers are in the coerrct palecs, yeu can sitll reed it.

There are almost no words there at all! How is it possible to read that? Well, You’re not actually looking at every single letter. You’re looking at key letters that form the words, and you’re surmising what the words have to be in the context of the sentences. That’s exactly what you do in sight-reading! You actually look at what you can digest. You get a grasp of the sense of the harmonies. You surmise what the other notes must be based upon the ones you can see. You get an idea of where the music is going and you make many, many instantaneous decisions about what you can’t see. You flesh out all the notes based upon the skeletal image of what you capture reading quickly. Much like reading those jumbled words, you can make sense and you can even realize the music as it’s written without necessarily seeing every single thing in the score. It’s just like you were able to do a few moments ago, if you were able to read those jumbled words. It’s the same principle. So don’t feel like you can never read because there’s too much to see. There is too much to see, but you see what you need to see. Get the melody, of course. Get the bass and some of the inner lines. Get as many notes as you can, and make intelligent assumptions about what those inner voices must be.

Always look at chunks of music.

As I’ve talked about before, you don’t look from note to note. Just like when you’re reading text, you’re not looking at every single letter. It’s impossible to read that way. You look at words. You guess what the words are when reading text and you guess what the chords are when sight-reading music. You can get incredibly good at guessing if you’re experienced, particularly with composers you’ve played before, or styles you’re familiar with. There’s a certain formulaic type of notation that you can get your head around, and you can get pretty good at reading certain styles. There will always be some music where this breaks down, where you can’t even begin to decipher what the composer means. Maybe you’ve never even heard that composer before and you’re lost. But for a great deal of music, the more you do it, the more you’ll be able to assimilate into your fingers and be able to digest what you’re looking at and make musical sense. The key to sight-reading is deciphering the symbols you can grasp on the fly and fleshing out a performance on the spot. That’s what sight-reading is really all about.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with sight-reading. Share them in the comments at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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

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