Tag Archives: playing piano

How Do You Play the Piano with Your Mind?

While this might sound silly, learning to play music mentally is one of the best practice methods. All practice is mental practice. While the action of playing an instrument has a physiological component, learning and practicing is much more of a mental experience than anything else. In fact, recent brain scan tests have found that there is no difference in brain activity between someone playing an instrument or just thinking about playing an instrument!

In college I had come down with mononucleosis when I was scheduled to play a solo recital. I had become very weak but was determined to play the program. An hour and half a day is about all the practice I could handle – and that was about how long the program was. Needless to say, this was not enough time to practice. Determined to succeed despite my physical ailment, I tried something new. I ended up taking all my scores into bed with me and I practiced mentally. To my surprise, the performance ended up being the best I had ever had by far! But how can this be?

Don’t hop into bed with your musical scores just yet! You have to develop technique and playing your instrument is essential. However, you should continue practicing even when you are away from your instrument. Imagine the performance in great detail, every sound and action. By doing this you will be able to hear the music exactly how you want it to sound so you can develop your performance. Learning your music mentally away from your instrument will help you identify problem spots you didn’t know existed before. You may be depending upon tactile memory on some passages and you may realize that you don’t actually know the music as well as you thought.

Here is a great exercise for you: Take a piece you are very familiar with, remove the score, and try and play it mentally. Play as far as you can go without stopping and when you have to stop, refer back to the score and start again until you can play the entire piece from memory away from your instrument. If you do this, you will have mastered that piece of music better than any other piece you’ve played before. Whenever I play a recital I play my music in my head constantly before the performance. I make sure I can get through difficult sections again and again until things are totally clear. There is great reassurance in performance when you know your scores on this level.

Thanks again for joining me, Robert@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729

What is meant by playing piano with a “Quiet Hand”?

You may or may not have heard this term before. In studying with my father, Morton Estrin, he stressed the concept of playing with a quiet hand years before I left for conservatory and it’s something I’ve incorporated into my playing ever since. This is a great technique for creating expressive playing on the piano and today we are going to learn about what it is and how you can incorporate it into your playing.

When playing the piano there are many different parts of the body that are utilized. For strength you will need to use your arms, for power and speed you’ll need to utilize your wrists but for melodies you will need to utilize your fingers to create a smooth line.

The concept of a quiet hand is about avoiding unnecessary motion in order to achieve control in smooth melodic playing. The most important aspect to playing with a quiet hand is to have as little extraneous motion as possible and to utilize the weight of the arms transferring smoothly from key to key. So how do you achieve this?

You’ll want to practice getting your hands over the correct keys and transferring the weight between your fingers creating an almost seamless musical line. For more information on this topic check out my past video on finger techniques for the piano.

Thanks again for joining me here at Living Pianos. If you have any questions about this topic or any topic at all please contact us directly: Info@LivingPianos.com (949) 244-3729

Learning Hanon Part 2 – Scales and Arpeggios

This video deals with the correct fingering in scales and arpeggios on the piano as found in Charles Louis Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist. Last week we covered the basics and a good routine for the first lessons of his text: Learning Hanon Part 1 – The First Lessons.

When it comes to playing other instruments, fingering for scales can differ greatly. For the violin or the French horn (which I also play) or other woodwind instruments, there are a number of different fingerings for scales and everyone’s approach can be quite different. Fortunately for the piano there is a resource that everyone pretty much adheres to – which is Hanon.

Hanon is a great resource for fingerings for scales and arpeggios. The problem of fingering on the pianos is that we have 10 fingers and two hands yet there are 88 keys that will require you to jump up and down the keyboard. Finger crossings are inevitable and can be effortless with the right fingering!

For each scale there are a total of eight fingerings which you must memorize. You can see examples in the accompanying video.

This might sound formidable. After all, how can you memorize eight finger patterns for each of your major and minor scales and arpeggios? While it might seem impossible it’s really not as difficult as you may think. A lot of the scales and arpeggios have the same basic patterns so you will be repeating what you already know. There are some unique scales but it’s not an insurmountable task.

There is one other method of fingering beyond Hanon that I thought I would mention. It’s called mirror fingering. I personally don’t know anybody who uses this technique – The idea of mirror fingering is to have the thumbs play on the same notes in both hands on all scales and arpeggios. If anyone out there uses this techniquewood I would love to hear more about it.

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

Learning Hanon’s Virtuoso Pianist Part 3 – How to Practice

The third part in my series on Hanon’s Virtuoso Pianist comes from a viewer question about how much to practice these lessons. In case you missed them here are the first two parts in my series on:

Part 1 – The First Lessons

Part 2 – How to Practice Scales and Arpeggios

Believe it or not, there is such a thing as over-practicing exercises. One of the great things about the piano is that there is a wealth of music – so much so that it would be impossible to learn it all in a lifetime. So why practice strictly exercises when there is so much other music you could be learning and playing?

There are some instances in which you will need to correct technical problems with your playing and develop fluid a technique. Scales and arpeggios are a great resource for this. But how much is too much practice when it comes to exercises?

Generally, you should think of these as a warm-up to your practice session. If you dedicate 10 minutes to the beginning of your daily practice to focus on scales, arpeggios, or other exercises, it will benefit you immensely. What’s most important for your progress is the consistency of practice.

There may be times in your musical development when exercises can be critical in expanding your technique and developing strength. However, you should not ignore repertoire. You can continue to develop your strength and technical prowess while learning music as well – after all, we learn our instruments to play music!

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

How to Play Hymns on the Piano

When it comes to Hymns there is a general rule of thumb: once you can one you can pretty much play any of them! However, before you reading level has progressed it could be difficult to play any of them. The key to playing hymns is understanding the structure.

The first thing you must do is figure out what key you are in. Make sure you take note of the key signature and figure out what the tonalities are. It’s a lot like detective work trying to figure out the correct chords – and don’t worry, I will provide some helpful tips to allow you to avoid the music theory part of this.

Generally, these pieces are choral writing – soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. Typically with your hands, you will play two voices with the left hand and two voices with the right hand. One secret is that it will be easier to play three voices with the right hand and just the bass with the left hand. This can be a little tricky because with choral writing the soprano and alto parts are always in the treble clef and the tenor and bass are always in the bass clef. However, choral writing always has a bigger distance between the bass and the tenor – from the bottom note to the other three notes than any other voices; it is often times more than an octave. Redistributing the hands is one way to make hymns a little easier.

Another valuable tip for approaching music above your reading level is to simplify the music. If you just want to get through something or gain some benefit from music above your reading or skill level this can be a helpful tool. You must remember that the melody and bass are fundamental – the bass is the structure and the melody is the song. To simplify the music, simply play only the top and bottom lines. In the video embedded above I provide an example of this. Say you are in a church setting and someone hands you some music, you won’t have time to learn it. However, if you just play the top and bottom lines and have a choir singing along with you, it will sound fine.

The good news is that by simplifying the music you will start to gain a better understanding of how the music is structured. This enables you to flesh out the inner voices much easier than you think. Maybe just add the alto voice eventually and leave out the tenor line. Experiment and see what works for you; expand and embellish your playing at a comfortable level.

Just remember that the most important thing is to get the melody and bass. If you can play those you will be in good shape. Once you feel a bit more comfortable start adding the other parts in gradually.

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