Tag Archives: piano lessons

Piano Lessons – How to Cross Hands on the piano

As you advance in your playing this will inevitably come up and it’s going to be a challenge for many people to overcome. But why would you cross your hands? Sometimes it can be the composer specifically writing something that would require it; sometimes it’s just easier to cross your hands in certain passages; either way, you will eventually encounter this technique in your repertoire.

For the video above I use the first movement of the Pathetique Sonata of Beethoven to demonstrate the technique. In the exposition section of the piece there is a part where one hand keeps playing the same group of notes and the other hand jumps around the keyboard. You simply can’t negotiate this easily without crossing your hands.

How do you handle these sections? It’s always a great idea to learn your hand positions before you start playing. Not only should you have your hands over the first note of the phrase, you should position them over as many keys as you can. By doing this you will eliminate having to move your hand more than necessary – which could lead to wrong notes – and you will have a set position you can constantly refer back to. For specific examples in this piece, refer to the video embedded in this page.

It’s always a great idea to be over the keys before you need to play them. It will help you relax and be able to concentrate on actually playing and not just where your hands are located. A great way to achieve this is by practicing your music right up until the moment where you need to move your hand. Keep practicing the same line over and over and when you get to the notes you need to play next just move your hand over them but don’t play them yet, just get your hand in position. Keep doing this until your hand effortlessly glides to the correct spot and keep doing it until it just feels natural. When you feel confident you have achieved a fluid and precise movement over the keys, play the notes. Continue to play the phrase and the proceeding notes until you feel confident enough to move on.

You can really do this for all your music – whether it requires crossing your hands or not. The best thing you can do is to stay relaxed and be ready over notes ahead of time. You should never play from a position in which you feel like you are constantly catching up.

Thanks again for joining me Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com

How to Connect Sections of Music on the Piano

You may have seen my video, Band-Aid Approach to Practicing Music. In that video I covered how to fix problem spots in your music. However, some viewers had questions on how to connect those sections once they are ironed out. I thought this would be the perfect subject to create a follow up.

To demonstrate I am using the Clementi Sonatani Opus 36 no 1. This is a good example because there is a little section in the beginning that leads into a much more complicated passage. I have had a lot of students over the years who have had trouble with this particular section.

I would suggest, as I did in the Band-Aid approach video, to play the music until you reach a problem spot. Instead of going back to the beginning each time, focus on the problem area until it is corrected and you can play it reliably. Play it slower at first, then work up a notch at a time with the metronome until you get it up to speed and feel confident in your ability to play the section.

With this particular piece you could first play the thirds in the right hand together instead of separately as written. After you feel confident put your hands together while still playing with thirds in the right hand. Once you are secure with the passage you can break up the music as written and work it up to speed striving for accuracy and effortlessness in your playing.

While you have corrected the problem area, you will discover that it’s difficult to play the passage in context accurately. Your mind and body is not used to playing it correctly when the passage comes and you’ll continue to have the same problem approaching this section. So how do you fix this?

I recommend starting right before the section you just fixed – not at the beginning of the piece. You can play a few bars before the section you corrected, then pause slightly right before you play the problem spot; just to remind yourself that you have reached the section. You can practice and mentally prepare yourself to approach it correctly. As you practice, you can shorten the pause before the corrected passage making it shorter and shorter until eventually there is no pause at all and you’re playing it as written. Eventually you will not have a pause in the music anymore but your mind will remember once you reach that section and you will be mentally prepared for it.

After you have done this try going back to the beginning. Is it smooth yet? Probably not. You might have to go back and play a little bit before the section you just practiced and work your way back to the start of the piece adding more music each time. Keep doing this until you can connect the sections of music without problems. It might take some time but once you do this you’ll be much more confident and able to play these problem sections without issues. It’s worth spending time to get this right.

I hope this helps and I encourage your comments and thoughts on this subject. Thanks again for joining me Robert Estrin, Robert@LivingPianos.com (949) 244-3729.

The Best Piano Exercises (Part 4) – Octaves

Welcome back to our continuing series of piano exercises. Today we will be focusing on developing your octave technique.

I remember growing up as a kid and watching my father Morton Estrin mortonestrin.com and being enthralled by the way he played octaves – I wanted to develop my technique to play like him and my other inspiration, Vladimir Horowitz. At the time my hands were simply too small to achieve the results I wanted but I kept practicing.

My hands even as a full grown adult never became very large. I’ve struggled my whole life developing strength in order to play octaves and large chords well. Today I’m going to share a few tips for how to improve your strength and octave technique.

If you can’t reach an octave I’m afraid this lesson wont be much help to you. You might grow into it over time. The good news is that if you can reach an octave at all, this lesson will help you develop stronger, faster octaves!

The secret to this technique, and octaves in general, is the hand position. The key is to develop an arch between your pinky and thumb equalizing the strength of your weaker pinky to your stronger thumb. Your other fingers should be up and out of the way. If you have time to watch the video included with this article it shows an excellent visual representation of this technique. The goal of this position is to generate an equal amount of force between the thumb and pinky finger – which will help greatly in developing strength to play octaves.

For octave technique you will want to rely on the arms to place the hands over the keys, not for any up-down motion. All up-down motion should come from the wrist. I have explained this technique a number of times before and it’s explained in detail in the video included with this article.

To perform the exercise, set your metronome to 60 and then play a C major scale at one note to the beat in octaves and play the notes only from your wrist using the arms to guide your hands over the correct keys. This might seem like an easy exercise but it must be done correctly in order to be effective.

As you progress through the exercise and feel more confident you can play two times on each note for each beat. As you become comfortable, add one extra note each to each beat until you reach your limit. As you play faster, be sure to keep your hands closer to the keys and lighten up to help increase your speed.

Play through this exercise every day and you will develop brilliant octaves!

Thanks again for joining me Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com (949) 244-3729

The Best Piano Exercises (Part 3) – Broken Seventh Chords

Welcome back to our ongoing series of piano exercises. These are meant to be quick techniques you can practice with just a few minutes each day to help develop your strength. The first part in the series dealt with a Broken Triad Exercise and the second was Practicing Major Scales with C Major Fingering. This week we will be covering Broken Seventh Chords.

As long as you know all your seventh chords, you can play them in all keys as arpeggios. Why would you just play major and minor triads as arpeggios? Not only is this is a wonderful way to develop your technique but when you come across broken seventh chords in your music you will already know how to approach them.

The order I play them is:

– Major seventh chord
– Dominant seventh chord
– Minor seventh chord
– Half diminished seventh chord
– Diminished seventh chord

Why this particular order? If you play them this way, there is only one note that has to change between chords. Simply keep playing the chords one by one and go through all twelve of the keys. The video included with this article will show you a great example of this.

Here is the key on how to transition from chord to chord:

– Major seventh chord: Lower the 7th a half-step
– Dominant seventh chord: Lower the 3rd a half-step
– Minor seventh chord: Lower the 5th a half-step
– Half diminished seventh chord: Lower the 7th a half-step
– Diminished seventh chord: That’s it!

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com

The Best Piano Exercises (Part 2) – Playing Major Scales with C Major Fingering

Welcome to the second part in our series on Piano Exercises. Last week we discussed The Broken Triad Exercise. This week we will cover a very unique practice exercise that might sound a little crazy but is highly effective in developing your skills as a pianist.

If you’ve ever played complex counterpoint like Bach fugues or other selections you will find yourself having to use complex fingering that’s not very intuitive. Normally you will want to find fingering that would be easy to achieve – like avoiding using your thumbs on black keys (unless on octaves and chords) – and most of the time you will have the luxury of breaking down fingering to make it as simple as possible. This is not always the case and you must prepare yourself for having to deal with more difficult passages.

One great way to practice this type of non-standard fingering is by playing all major scales using the fingering for the C major scale. In the video provided with this article I demonstrate this technique using the D-flat major scale using the fingering of the C major scale!

While this might look and feel silly it will really help you develop strength and flexibility in your hands and fingers.

Thanks again for joining me and stay tuned for the next piano exercise. Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com

The Best Piano Exercises (Part 1) – Broken Triads

Welcome to my multi-part series of piano exercises. This is a great exercise I learned in conservatory that provides a wonderful way to build strength in your technique.

Sometimes you don’t have a lot of time to practice but you want to get the maximum amount of production out of your time – this is great exercise for this exact situation. It’s something you can easily do with just a few minutes every day.

Rather than playing an entire series of scales or arpeggios and without having to learn an entire etude, you can perform this exercise – which is based on a pattern of chords – relatively easily and frequently as a great way to improve your strength.

The exercise goes from a major triad, to a minor triad, to a diminished triad, to an augmented triad. If you’re unsure of what these mean we will have a series of videos explaining them in the near future.

The best way to learn this exercise is to watch the video included with this article, if you can’t watch I’ve included a link to download the exercise right here.

When you start with the C-major triad, you simply play the top two notes in the right hand and the bottom two notes in the left hand. From here you simply go back and forth through the scale notes. You’ll want to use all five fingers – this is a crucial step for the exercise as it’s all about building strength.

After you play the major, you simply move on to the minor, the diminished, and finally the augmented. When you actually perform the exercise you will want to go in a seamless line between each form of the triads and you will do this is every single key moving up chromatically.

This whole exercise takes only a few minutes and it’s an incredible workout for your fingers. There is no phrasing or dynamics to worry about; it’s simply a way to improve your strength. Over the years I’ve found this to be an incredibly helpful exercise and something I can do when I simply don’t have the time to sit down and practice for an extended amount of time.

Thanks again for joining me, there will be a couple more exercises for you in the next coming weeks, so stay tuned! Robert@LivingPianos.com