Tag Archives: piano lessons

3 Reasons to Play Music by Ear – Special Guest, Scott Houston

We have a great show today with special guest, Scott Houston; The Piano Guy! A lot of you may know Scott from his many appearances on PBS television. Scott is the perfect person for this series because he has educated countless people all over the world in how to play piano by ear, playing with chords, and dealing with popular styles of music. My background is primarily in classical music. So we’re going to have a real treat for you. There will be tips on both sides for people who play by ear and people who have never tried to play by ear.

The first thing to consider is being able to play popular songs.

Why do you need to play by ear in order to play popular music? Popular songs oftentimes are first conceived by jamming together and later on after the record is produced, somebody goes and transcribes it into sheet music. If you ever try to decipher the sheet music, often times it just doesn’t sound quite right because it’s not the original. Also consider that often, sheet music is just a piano/vocal arrangement where the original was a whole band. So it doesn’t always translate well.

So there is a good place for being able to play by ear or to pick something up and make your own arrangement. People who have traditional classical training may feel a need to see the written score in order to play it. A lead sheet which has the melody line and the chord symbols allow you the freedom to play stylistically correct. It’s not like classical music where the original manuscript is the complete work. In the case of pop songs, Taylor Swift, for instance, may write a tune and by the time it gets out on a piece of sheet music you’re reading, a staff arranger may have produced the sheet music after the record was produced. What Taylor Swift may have done, was to write a melody line and chord changes. That’s the DNA of the song. Arrangers, producers, and musicians may have fleshed out the rest.

There are a few intrinsic piano parts that should be played verbatim if you want them to sound like the recording. The other 95% may just require comping chords that highlight the melody line. By learning to build upon the essential chord structure, it frees you up to sound more authentic than the sheet music in many instances. What makes it even more complicated is that sheet music is usually written with the melody line contained within the piano part. Occasionally you’ll get sheet music that doesn’t have the vocal line in it. It just has the accompaniment which is appropriate when accompanying a singer. In this case, it doesn’t work at all as a piano piece. The opposite is also true. If you’re trying to accompany a singer, you don’t want to double every one of the notes the singer is singing. This is an essential point. It’s 180 degrees opposite when you’re accompanying someone compared to playing a solo on the piano.

The next reason to play by ear is to be able to improvise.

Feeling like you absolutely must read notes to be able to play anything on a piano will keep you from the fun of ever being able to improvise. Using a lead sheet is a terrific way because after all; pop, jazz, rock, and country players use lead sheets most of the time for the melody and basic chord structure rather than have all the notes written out. To give you an extreme example, I’ve seen accomplished classical musicians who can’t even play happy birthday because they have never tried to play by ear! It’s totally alien to them. Playing from a lead sheet and learning chord changes is the crawling and walking before you learn to run in the world of improvisation. Improvisation isn’t a wildly free, play anything, anytime sort of thing for people. What improvisation is most often, is creating a melody line while playing over the chord changes. You’ve got to know the chord changes to a tune or you really can’t improvise. By just doing that, it may provide the foundation you need. Learning chords and learning to play from lead sheets creates the foundation that very naturally leads into improvising. Because it’s not black ink on paper, doesn’t mean it’s not music. Written notation is nothing more than a documentation of music. Music is what we play. It’s the sound we make that’s the music. So, sheet music is nothing more than a recording of music.

It’s a tough thing sometimes to get people who have had nothing but traditional lessons to accept that what you’re playing might not be exactly what is written. Something that is missed in classical circles is that almost all the great composers were improvisers, but we only have the recordings on the paper because there was no audio recording back then. So the score is elevated to the point where people don’t realize that improvisation has always been an essential component of classical music. Many if not most of the great composers were prolific improvisers!

The last of the three benefits of playing by ear is instant gratification.

Most adults who are taking piano lessons don’t plan on doing it for a living or making a career out of it. They’re just wanting to have fun playing the piano. They want to sit down behind this piece of furniture they’ve been dusting for the last 20 years and play something! For that reason, it can be a phenomenally faster route to learn to play three chords which can take about five minutes. By doing that, they’ve got the chord changes to probably 70 or 80,000 songs! This isn’t to suggest that that’s all you ever want to do by any means. But it can be a great way to get someone to experience gratification through playing the piano. It gives an incentive to want to keep going.

There are a whole lot of reasons to play by ear and it is incredibly rewarding and fun. We’re going to explore more in future videos in this series. I hope this has been helpful as well as enjoyable! Thanks again to Scott Houston, The Piano Guy. For more on Scott, go to PianoInaFlash.com. This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. You may contact us at: info@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729

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How Playing Fast on the Piano Can Sound Slow

This sounds like a total contradiction. So, I’m going to show you something really fascinating today! You will hear an example of the famous Mozart Sonata in C major K545. Most of you probably know this sonata. I’m going to be demonstrating with the beautiful and lyrical slow movement. I’m going to first play it in a way that is pretty slow. But it won’t sound slow and I’ll explain why in just a minute.

This movement is in ¾ time and I’m playing every single sixteenth note in the left hand as its own beat. So you’re hearing a lot of motion in the music. Now I could play it at the same tempo or even slightly faster, but hearing the eighth notes as the beat. It will start to sound a little bit slower even at the same tempo or faster.

Finally, we’re going to go one step further and make the quarter note the beat. I will play a little bit faster. Yet, it will sound slower than anything you’ve heard so far. It will have a more relaxed quality. It was Rachmaninoff who said,

“The bigger the phrase, the bigger the musician.”

So in your music, try to think the long notes as the pulse of your music; particularly in slow movements. It will have the benefit of creating a relaxed quality. You will also be able to take faster tempos yet make it sound slower which can really help with slow movements that have repeats because they can get ponderously long if you take them too slowly. You can create a relaxed quality in your music at a faster tempo by hearing the longer notes as the beat.

I hope this has been helpful! This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store! 949-244-3729 info@LivingPianos.com

Should You Play Music Exactly as Written?

Do Classical performers play exactly what is written? There’s a lot to this question. Of course, naturally, Classical pianists strive for accuracy. But what is accurate? There is a real challenge with composers who lived hundreds of years ago. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to look at some of the great composers’ scores, Beethoven comes to mind, there are scrawls on the page and sections scribbled out. Trying to decipher what they meant is no easy task.

It takes a lot of scholarly work. That’s why the editions you look at is critical and there are urtext editions which strive to present exactly what the composers wrote. How do they know what the composers wrote? Sometimes there are autographed scores and early editions and there are often discrepancies. Decisions have to be made as to what the composers’ intentions really were. Particularly with composers with sloppy calligraphy, it can be a real task! Ultimately, the performer must have conviction about the notes they play regardless of what is supposedly authoritative. If something seems wrong, you shouldn’t play it even if it is supposed to be authoritative. Maybe somewhere somebody got it wrong! You must have conviction as to what you’re playing.

There’s an entire other side to this question that is perhaps even more significant which is this: the musical score only has notes, rhythm, phrasing and expression. There is a whole lot more to the music than that! Consider this analogy of a play or motion picture. The words are all written out, yet the actor or actress must take those written words and create a character out of it. The words themselves really don’t come to life until the performer creates that character.

Exactly the same thing is true with a musical performance. The notes are just the skeleton of the work and it’s your job as a performer to flesh out the living, breathing work of music. In order to do that, many decisions have to be made that are not in the score. You might wonder what else there is besides the notes, rhythm, phrasing and expression. There are the ups and downs of the expression as well as rubato (the slight speeding up and slowing down in Romantic period music) which gives flavor and emotion to the music.

All of these things and more are left up to the performer. So it’s more than just a matter of accuracy, it’s all the things a performer brings to a performance to turn it into a piece of music. There are only basic directions in the score. So that’s the job of the performer. It’s not just about being accurate and if you want to prove that to yourself, listen to a computer playing a score of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin or anyone else. You can program in everything and still it’s no music is it?

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com info@livingpianos.com

Should You Learn the Notes of a Piece First?

This is a really loaded question. A lot of people think they should learn the notes of a piece first and later add the fingering, phrasing and expression. There’s a great fallacy in thinking that you can learn just the notes first. You might think that you should at least learn the rhythm with the notes and maybe you might even think the fingering should be learned initially. But can you add the expression and phrasing later? Here’s why this just doesn’t work.

Whenever you play a piece of music, you’re reinforcing the performance. The fallacy is that you can play without phrasing or expression such as dynamics. It’s virtually impossible to play without any phrasing or expression. How can this be? Well, what is phrasing? Phrasing is basically the way in which notes are connected or detached. So, if you play a passage that is written to be played staccato and you’re playing it legato, you are learning wrong phrasing. You will become used to playing it that way. The same is true for expression.

Why can’t you just add the expression later – things like dynamics (loud and soft). It’s because you’re always playing at a dynamic level! So if something is written to be played softly (piano) and you’re playing it medium loud (mezzo forte), you’re learning the wrong dynamic. Not that you’re meaning to, but you can’t play without dynamics. So, you’re learning the wrong dynamics and here’s why it’s so important to learn correctly all of the elements of your score right from the beginning. It’s because

Unlearning is much harder than learning.

Once you reinforce mistakes, getting rid of them is incredibly difficult and it takes massive amounts of practice to unlearn what you’ve solidified wrong.

So you may think you’re going to just get the notes and that you will add other elements later. This is a great mistake that does not serve you well in your practice. Take the extra time as you’re learning your music to learn all the details of the score right from the beginning and you will be rewarded by not having to go through the tedious process of trying to unlearn what is learned wrong.

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com. info@LivingPianos.com

Do Performers Make Mistakes?

The questions today is, “Do performers make mistakes?” I am referring specifically to Classical performers. You see them on stage playing and it seems effortless and perfect, but do they make mistakes? There is a lot to this question because first of all, of course performers make mistakes and brilliant performers sometimes have train wrecks, but it’s quite rare. Usually what happens is there’ll be something that may distract the performer and they have a mishap, but unless you’re intimately familiar with the score, seasoned performers know how to hide the mistakes well enough to not disrupt the performance. It’s not just that they’re trying to make themselves look great, it’s also that they don’t want the audience to feel uncomfortable.

This is an important skill, but there is more to it than that because performers today actually do play scarily accurately. If you compare performers from a generation or two ago, some of the greatest pianists of all time like Alfred Cortot, Arthur Rubinstein to Artur Schnabel, there are countless recordings that were made years ago where you’ll hear mistakes often in pre-WWII recordings of great artists with lots of missed notes. It is important to note that these recordings were made before the advent of editing. Yet even live performances today are on a much higher level of accuracy generally than years ago. What happened and how is everybody playing so accurately today and what does this mean?

I’ve talked about this quite a bit and of course today it’s quite obvious everybody hears everyone because of the internet. Even before that we had a generation of musicians growing up hearing edited recordings that were note perfect. As a result, everyone is expected to achieve this high level and there’s a certain homogenization of interpretations and tempos as well as voicing and other aspects of performance because everybody knows how everyone else plays. There is a standard level that is accepted today whereas years ago there was much greater variety. It’s true that the accuracy of performers and the sheer technical mastery that so many pianists and other instrumentalists have achieved is awe-inspiring.

On the flip side there isn’t as much experimentation. When listening to historical recordings, made from 78 rpm records, performers often take chances and liberties that nobody would dare today. Occasionally they’d fall flat on their faces. But when they didn’t, they achieved highs rarely heard anymore. So, accuracy is important and it is important not to make an audience feel uncomfortable. But yes, performers do make mistakes even though they hide them extremely well! It’s not all about accuracy, is it? I’m interested in your comments which you post here on LivingPianos.com or on YouTube. It’s a great subject and I would like to know what some of you think about the great old performers and if the missed notes are too bothersome to where you’d rather have more perfect performances even if it sacrifices a bit of the wild expression! Thanks for joining me Robert@LivingPianos.com.

Should You Use the Piano Pedal In Bach?

Is it okay to use the pedal when playing Bach? This is a great question and there are many different ideas about this. Why should there even be issues with using the pedal or not when it comes to playing Bach? Bach lived from 1685 to 1750 and the very earliest pianos were invented just around 1700. While Bach got a chance to try some of these early instruments, he really never wrote for the piano. He never wrote for any specific keyboard instrument other than the organ. All his other works are written for clavier, which means simply “keyboard”. It is up to the performer to decide which keyboard. No keyboards had pedals anytime during Bach’s life (other than the organ, but that’s a completely different matter).

There are many purists who feel that you shouldn’t use the pedal simply because Bach did not have one. Other people feel that if Bach was alive today, he would love to use the pedal! There are different schools of thought. There is some music that absolutely calls for the pedal. Why? Music is written sometimes where there are notes to be held, yet you run out of fingers since you have to move your hands to another part of the keyboard. So the only way to hold those notes that are written to be held is to sustain them by using the pedal.

You can certainly play Bach without the pedal and get very good results. When I studied with Ruth Slenczynska, she insisted upon using no pedal in Bach and it works great! I am going to offer an example, of the beginning of Bach’s 5th French Suite. Why would you use pedal and how would you use pedal in Bach? You don’t use it to connect notes that you can’t hold with your fingers because there is nothing that is written that necessitates the use of the of the pedal for this purpose. Instead you use the pedal to add color. You’ll notice that even in this fast music, there are little touches of pedal to enhance the tone of key notes.

The important thing is that you must practice Bach using no pedal at all. In fact, I recommend practicing all of your music without any pedal until you can play as connected as possible finding the best fingering that accomplishes this first. Then it becomes obvious where the pedal can be utilized.

I am going to play the first section of the Bach 5th French Suite with the repeat as written. The first time I will play it with no pedal. Then upon the repeat, I will utilize the pedal to add color. If you listen to the video, you can determine which performance you prefer. I would love to hear from all of you in the comments on LivingPianos.com and YouTube.

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com. info@LivingPianos.com