Tag Archives: piano techniques

Why Not Playing is Practicing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about repetition in your piano practice. Repetition is an essential part of piano practice, but did you know that the essential element of repetition is not the repetition itself? It’s the time between the repetitions. All too often, I’ve seen students fall into a trap. If you don’t take the essential time between each repetition, you can fall into an endless loop of missing things over and over again, essentially practicing playing badly. That’s what you want to avoid!

There are myriad ways you can practice.

I would suggest practicing slowly. You can turn the metronome on at a comfortable speed, and do progressively faster metronome speeds. You can work on note groups. You can do rhythms. You can do so many things! But that’s not what I’m showing you today. I’m showing you how to deal specifically with just repeating something until you get it right, which I’m sure all of you do on a regular basis in your practice. But you have to remember that the repetition is not where the value comes in.

The time between the repetitions is the practicing; the playing of the passage is not the practicing.

The playing is only a check of your work. The work happens in your head between each repetition. So if you play, and something isn’t clean, identifying the correction is number one. Find where the correction is. Focus your attention on the correction, and then you can come up with a strategy for cementing it. You want to find a spot to start just before it so you can repeat the correction. Once you get the correction solidified, go back and see if you can put it into context by starting at the beginning of the passage. Each time you play it, take a moment to think about what you just played. If it comes out absolutely perfectly, see if you can repeat it perfectly again. If there’s anything that isn’t quite right, identify the specific correction before you repeat it. This is essential. Each time you play it, stop and think about what you just heard.

Take the time between repetitions to mentally study what you just played.

Find the correction in the score, then implement the correction by starting strategically at the exact right spot before it at the beginning of the phrase. You don’t want to start right on the correction. However, initially, just to know what the correction is, you might play the notes you are having trouble with, but then find where you can start just before it. You have to be able to get into it in the context of the piece. You want to find the closest spot before the correction to start from. You can either land on that note or land right after that note, then cement it and go back. Initially, you may even want to stop just before the correction, then play the correction so you are sure to play it accurately from the get go. With each repetition, you must analyze your work and think about what you want to accomplish. If you fall into mindless repetition, where you are just repeating things without listening to what you did and coming up with a strategy to improve it, you are not practicing at that moment.

Remember, practicing is a thought process!

Playing is not practicing! It’s the analysis of what you’ve played that is going to improve your playing. That’s the lesson for today! If you have any questions, you can ask them in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. I hope this has been helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Can You Make a Crescendo on a Chord on the Piano?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question is: Can you make a crescendo on a chord on the piano? How many of you have seen a held chord with a crescendo on it in your score? How can you possibly do something like that? Did the composer not understand the physics of the piano, or were they just crazy?! Why would they ever write a crescendo on a held chord? Well, there are some very good compositional reasons for this, and I’m going to show you how you can achieve the effect of a crescendo on a chord on the piano!

Sometimes you will see a crescendo on a held chord in your score.

As an example of this, I’ve pulled up Grieg’s Lyric Pieces. In the third one, called Watchman’s Song, near the very end, there is a held chord with a crescendo on it. What is meant by that crescendo? Well, the composer is trying to show you that this phrase is not ending gently. It’s moving forward. There are some things you can do to achieve this effect; one way is with the use of the sustain pedal.

The sustain pedal can create the sense of a crescendo on a held chord.

When you use the pedal on a chord, you get a little bit of a sense of growth in the sound as all the other strings of the piano can resonate because the dampers are lifted. When you play it and gently move forward right at that point, you almost get the sense of a crescendo. You can play the chord a little bit louder in anticipation of the crescendo, pedaling very soon after the initial attack to get more of a booming sound. Whereas usually the way to pedal chords is to pedal just as the chord starts fading away to mitigate the dying away of the chord thereby increasing the sustain. But when you’re trying to get a downright crescendo, put the pedal down very soon after the initial attack. Your attack should be stronger than it would be without a crescendo. Keep things moving forward, almost anticipating the next chord to try to get the sense of a crescendo.

Indeed, you can get the effect of a crescendo on a chord!

Even though physically it’s not really possible, you can get the effect of a crescendo by utilizing the pedal, anticipating the crescendo a little bit early, and letting the music move along through the crescendo. That’s what the composer intended. They weren’t out of their minds. It wasn’t like they didn’t understand the physics of the sound of a piano. I’m sure Grieg understood! You can hear the effect that it creates when you follow the composer’s intentions. After all, the piano is an instrument of illusion. There’s so much we do with the piano that you wouldn’t think is possible. Just getting a singing line out of a percussion instrument, where every note is dying away, is a huge challenge. So this is what you must do. Think of what the composer intended and find a way to achieve it with the way you approach the music and how you apply the pedal. I hope this has been helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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What Does Chopin Sound Like Without the Pedal?

Welcome to www.Livingpianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about what Chopin sounds like without the pedal. When I talk about the pedal I’m talking about the sustain pedal. It’s the one on the right that holds all the notes when you put it down. It’s a glorious thing! It makes everything sound better, doesn’t it? And louder too! It helps you to connect what you can’t connect with your fingers.

What is the job of the pedal in music in general, and in Chopin specifically?

The pedal actually has two distinct functions. One is to connect notes you can’t connect with your hands. For example, you will see music where you have a whole note in the lower register and other things going on in the upper register. You can’t possibly hold that whole note because you’ve got other notes to play. Pedal to the rescue! There is no way to hold those notes with your hands. So sometimes music is written in such a way that you depend upon the pedal to play what’s written in the score. But there’s also the tone enhancement that the pedal affords you in your musical performance.

When you play a note with the pedal, you get a different sound than without the pedal.

If you listen to a note with no pedal compared to the same note played with the pedal down, you will hear that it gets more of a reverberant sound with the pedal down. When you depress the pedal the dampers lift off of all the strings so they are free to vibrate sympathetically, enhancing the tone. And indeed, when you depress the pedal it will have an effect upon the tone, the envelope of the sound. That is the shape of the decay. You can enhance the sustain by judiciously using the pedal just at the point at which the tone might be dying away. But that’s a subject for another day.

What does Chopin sound like without the pedal? Of course it depends upon what piece of Chopin. The famous E-flat Nocturne Opus 9 no. 2, for example, doesn’t really have notes you can’t hold in terms of what’s written in the score, but it’s implied to use the pedal.

When I play without the pedal I strive to connect as much as possible with my fingers.

I can’t connect everything I want to with just my fingers. But I try my best so that the pedal can enhance the sound and not be used as a crutch for things that I can connect with my fingers. You want to strive for your playing to be as legato as possible with your fingers before putting the pedal in. Because if you practice it with the pedal right from the get-go, you might not use the ideal fingering in order to connect as much as possible. So you want to connect with your fingers everything you can. Then it becomes obvious where to pedal. And of course, adding the pedal gives you a much more beautiful sound. Plus you can hold the bass notes to get a richer sound and a more linear quality to bass notes, and indeed the inner voices as well. With the pedal, you get the sense of the line instead of just the chords. The bassline has enough sustain from note to note, instead of just being sporadic.

With the Chopin G Minor Ballade indeed, you not only need the pedal to get the sense of the lines, but there are notes you just can’t possibly hold without it. This is the genius of Chopin! It’s amazing that he could conceive of, and write down music that would work so incredibly well with the pedal. Without the pedal it practically sounds like a whole different piece!

So that’s what the pedal adds to Chopin!

There’s a richness to the quality of the sound you get with the pedal. You get sustained harmonies and a linear aspect of all the lines, from the bass all the way to the treble. Not to mention the enhancement of the tone. Because you can use the pedal to get little gradations of tone in the melody to make one note kind of meld into the next by enriching it with sympathetic vibrations that the other strings allow for when you release the dampers with the sustain pedal.

I hope this has been interesting for you! Thanks so much 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

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How to Use the Pedal on the Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to use the pedal on the piano. This is such a deep subject. I have other videos on the finer points about pedaling, how it imparts changes in tone, when to use it, when not to use it, and how to use the sustain pedal in conjunction with the soft pedal. But today I will cover the fundamentals. If you’ve ever wondered how the pedal works, you’ve come to the right place!

The interesting thing about the pedal is that it does not go down rhythmically.

If you’ve just started using the pedal the hardest thing about it is that it is not used rhythmically, because you want to tap your foot on the beat. It’s the most natural thing in the world! Yet that doesn’t work on the piano. It doesn’t work because if you push the pedal down when a note plays, you will capture the harmonies of the previous notes that were down. It’s a mess. Why is that? The fact of the matter is, when you push the pedal down, whatever notes are held down are going to continue holding down. When you play a note, you’re still holding down the previous notes to some extent, particularly if something is slurred.

How do you create a slur on the piano?

A slur is a glide between notes. A singer or a French horn player does it very naturally and the notes between the slur are all there. On the piano, you can’t do that. So you tend to overlap notes, and that’s the way you create the illusion of a slur. But what happens when you pedal on the beat is the previously played notes are going to be held. If I play middle C and then a C sharp and I pedal at the same moment as I play the C sharp, you’re going to hear the C and the C sharp together. You will hear dissonance. The pedal must go down right after notes plays.

But here’s some good news for you, the pedal comes up exactly on the beat!

The pedal goes up exactly when you play a note. But the pedal goes down right after the note, arrhythmically. It’s important that you understand that, otherwise, you’re going to hear dissonance. It’s the nature of the pedal.

There’s so much more to the pedal. As a matter of fact, I will put links in the description of some other videos I have on pedaling. Decades ago, I made 50 hour-long presentations live on the internet, for a company in Irvine. My show was called Keyboard Kaleidoscope. One episode is an hour long show on the pedal that I will share with you in the notes below, in the description, and on LivingPianos.com! I hope this is helpful for you. Thanks so much 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 USE THE PEDAL ON THE PIANO – KEYBOARD KALEIDOSCOPE – ROBERT ESTRIN

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How to Keep Your Review Pieces on Performance Level

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to keep your review pieces on performance level. I talk to so many people who wonder how they can learn new pieces without forgetting old pieces. People can end up studying the piano for years and still only have one piece they can play, the piece they’re working on that week! So, how do you keep old pieces in shape? How can you possibly have time to learn new pieces when you’re reviewing all your old pieces?

Of course the answer is, you can’t keep every piece you’ve ever played in your hands and in your head all the time. It becomes impossible! Once you amass a repertoire of five or six hours of music, you can’t possibly keep everything in shape. However, it is vitally important that you keep at least the last few pieces you’ve studied in your hands and in your head. Because there’s a pleasure and an ease you gain with music you’ve played for a long time. So, how do you do that without taking up all of your practice time?

The best, easiest, and most fun way of keeping your review pieces in shape is to play them!

Play your pieces all the time! play them every day! Why not? Obviously, if you have pieces like the Hammerklavier Sonata of Beethoven or the Bach Goldberg Variations, they’re going to take a while to play through. So, there are certain limitations depending upon the level you’re on. But certainly you should keep playing the pieces that you’ve studied within the past few weeks.

Let’s say you’re working on a brand new piece, and you have the piece you did at your last lesson. Well, it’s better to have the last few pieces, at least three to five pieces. Otherwise, as I said, you could be playing the piano for years and never have anything really secure. Because there’s nothing like the security of playing a piece that you’ve known for a long time. The ease and security you gain from living with music is tremendous. If you never review those pieces, everything is kind of tentative and you never have that pleasure.

Simply playing through your pieces, is that all you have to do?

Playing through your pieces isn’t all you have to do, but most of the time that’s enough. On a daily basis or at least every other day, play through your review pieces. Play through a bunch of them. It’s fun because they’re pieces you already know. What’s the purpose of all this practicing if you’re not going to have anything you can play? You should enjoy playing the piano, not just practicing. You put in all this tedious work of learning music and working out all the technical details. The reward at the end of the line is being able to play! So of course play them, and play them for people. You’ll get better at performing simply by playing for other people.

Now, if you keep playing your pieces over and over again for weeks on end and that’s all you do, they will deteriorate over time. Because there are slight changes that happen. Which is why you must go back to the score on a periodic basis with your music if it’s something you’ve memorized. Put the score up and play with your foot off the pedal so you can hear the underlying performance without the benefit of the pedal which can obscure things. Sometimes you should use a metronome to make sure you’re playing at a constant tempo. This is a great way to reinforce your playing. Playing with the score slowly to a metronome with no pedal reinforces everything that you’ve learned before. It’s a refresher. I recommend it highly for all of your review pieces. This is particularly helpful with pieces you’ve recently learned that you’re trying to get on that ultimate level. This is a terrific way of doing that. You can actually work at different speeds. Start very slowly with the score, because it’s hard to read something you’ve memorized, particularly if it’s a piece that’s above your reading level. You undoubtedly read through it when you first got it just to see what it was about, and then you got to work and learned it. Going back trying to read it is a tough task, but it’s also vitally important if you want to keep your performance on a high level. Otherwise, it’s like a game of telephone where the message gets so garbled it ends up being a whole new message. If you play your piece over and over enough times and never refer to the score, you can end up with a whole different piece! So, it’s incredibly important to reference the score.

Choose wisely which pieces you keep in your repertoire.

Definitely keep at least the last two or three pieces you’ve learned in your repertoire so you can really solidify them and enjoy the fruits of your labor. You might also select some choice pieces that you’ve learned that you never want to forget. Play them often enough that they don’t get too far gone. If you find that they’ve deteriorated to a great extent, go back to the score. You might have to practice some sections, but don’t let them get so far gone that you have to practically start all over to learn them again. But even if you do, you’ll find if you’ve really learned a piece of music and committed it to memory, relearning it is much faster than initially learning it. So, that’s the good news for any of you out there who haven’t done this. Go ahead and relearn some of those pieces. At first it’ll seem arduous, but then you’ll quickly assimilate the score once again.

There are pieces I’ve learned and relearned multiple times. They become cemented almost as a part of my permanent repertoire. There’s a number of pieces that I just have all the time. Even if I haven’t played them in years, they’re still there. But it takes a long time to get to that point. In the meantime, play through your pieces on a regular basis and have fun with your music! Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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2 Types of Encores – for My Parents – Scriabin: Etude in D# minor Op 8 Debussy: The Little Shepherd

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about the two different kinds of encores. There are fundamentally two different types of moods you want to create in encores, and I’m going to get into that. But first I want to start with a personal reflection for you.

My father, Morton Estrin, had such a profound effect upon me.

I want to talk a little bit about my father’s experiences as a performer. As much as he performed, he got extremely nervous for performances. And when he would walk out on stage, it was a terrifying experience for him! He would get so nervous, his pedal foot would shake. I remember watching him perform and feeling so badly for him. There he was, trying to control things, and his foot was going up and down like crazy! It was once kind of funny, in retrospect. In one of his New York recitals, the reviewer commented on his beautiful performance and his “fluttering pedal technique.” Little did he know it was nothing intentional. It was something my father fought with his whole career. And the way he overcame it was very interesting. For him, the easiest thing to start a program with was something really heroic. He could go out there and play the most bombastic virtuosic music right from the get go. With that, he didn’t have any trouble. But to go out and start a program with a delicate piece, like something of Mozart, or a Schubert Impromptu, was extremely challenging for him. With that very delicate music, any little motion of any part of the body has such profound effects. He worked really hard to overcome this and was proud of himself that he could go out on stage and play something delicate as an opener for a program. Because programmatically, he wanted to be able to have architecture and not just start with the most heroic piece. Usually you want a big finish at the end of your program.

What was interesting about my father’s performances, we would always go backstage at intermission and hug him and tell him how beautiful it sounded. He couldn’t even believe it because he was so terrorized up there for the first half! But in the second half, he would relax. By the time he got to the end of the program, he was in his element. He would play encore after encore and the audience would cheer for more! He would play five, six encores, as many as the audience wanted. And at that point he could do anything. He had no nerves left whatsoever. It was a thrilling experience for everyone who heard him!

There are two different types of encores.

When a program ends and you come out for an encore, the audience has been through a whole program. You want to charge them up! So you play something like a Chopin etude, something virtuosic and energetic. But what if the program ended with something big and dynamic and it’s already a blockbuster at the end of the program? That’s when you want to flip it and come out with a poetic encore, maybe a Chopin Nocturne or Prelude. That could be just the mood you’re looking for.

My father recorded the Scriabin Etudes Opus 8.

It was the first modern recording of the complete Opus 8, and it won record of the year. You can find them on YouTube. His performances don’t sound like etudes. They are rich musical experiences. He didn’t play them as just technical exercises. He played them for the gorgeous music that this early Scriabin is. The Opus 8 was very different from later Scriabin where he explored very sophisticated harmonies that bordered on atonality. Early Scriabin is sometimes compared to Chopin. It really has a voice all its own, but it’s quite chromatic, beautiful romantic music that is extremely emotional. I got to hear my father play them in New York at Lincoln Center. It holds a very special meaning for me.

I’m going to play the D-sharp minor Etude from Opus 8 which is the last of the set. Then, just as if the program ended heroically, because that is an incredible blockbuster piece, I’m going to go right into a movement of Debussy from the Children’s Corner Suite, The Little Shepherd, which was my mother’s favorite piece. I would play it for her as an encore. So this is very special and a personal performance for you. You can listen to the accompanying video. I hope you enjoy it.

Those are two completely different types of encores. What is appropriate depends upon your programming. So remember, if you’ve already pulled out all the stops, and you’ve ended really big, then bring it down and show poetry and express intimate feelings. Show what you can do to the soul! On the other hand, if the program ends with something long and melodic like a Schubert Sonata with beautiful architecture, then you’ll want to charge people up with your encore so they leave the hall with energy. Judging your encores is very important. Sometimes you can even have two or three encores prepared. Or maybe you’re brave enough and you have an audience that’s enthusiastic enough so you can play a bunch of encores like my father used to do!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Thanks again for joining me! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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