Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about the most important element of music: rhythm. Is rhythm really the most important aspect of music? What about the notes? Well, think of it this way: Let’s say there’s a party and you know where the party is. You know it’s a birthday party for your friend. You know whether you’re supposed to bring presents or not, and what the activities are going to be. But if you don’t know when the party is, guess what? No party!
You need to know the when!
Imagine hearing a piece of music with no rhythm, all the notes played equally. Would you even be able to identify the piece? it would sound drastically different without the rhythmic component. But hearing the same exact notes with a rhythmic context sounds completely different. Rhythm is so intrinsically important! Of course there are many elements that are important, but without rhythm, what do you have? You really have nothing unless you put it in some context of time. It’s human nature because our entire experience is based upon the element of time. We go through life in a linear fashion, after all. It’s the way we relate to everything! You could play all the notes of a piece, but it’s meaningless if you don’t have a rhythmic context. That’s why it’s so vitally important in your practice to count out your rhythm.
Composers weren’t haphazard about rhythmic notation.
Things were written precisely for a reason. Because without the rhythm, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony doesn’t sound like much of anything. This is true of all music. I encourage all of you to count in your practice, to measure your rhythm with a metronome, and double and triple check note values as well as rests. That’s what brings music alive and gives it meaning. This is such an important topic. I’m curious how all of you feel about this! Let me know in the comments. Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to bring out the melody in your piano playing. One of the great things about the piano is that you have control over all the individual sounds and lines in your playing. But how can you do that? Today I’m going to give you 3 techniques for bringing out the melody in your piano playing!
Typically, you think of the melody as being the top line, but that certainly isn’t always the case. The techniques I’m going to show you will work no matter where the melody is. But the melody in the piece I’m going to use as an example is on the top where melodies are typically found. I’m going to use the second movement of Beethoven’s Sonata no. 5 in C minor, Opus 10, no. 1. The second movement is in A flat major. Beethoven could write a slow movement like no one else!
So, what are some techniques you can use to bring out the melody?
If you were to just play without regard for the top-line being louder than the rest, without trying to balance any particular way and just letting the hands flop on the keys naturally, you won’t fully hear and appreciate the melody. Some inner lines may come to your attention which isn’t all bad. And indeed, balance isn’t just melody being loud and everything else quiet. You want to be able to craft all of the lines and balance them both horizontally as the melody is going across, as well as vertically – the balance in each and every chord. It’s a great challenge! So how do you approach such a thing?
One technique is to use different articulations.
Whatever line you want to bring out, you play legato, and the notes you want to underplay you play with gentle finger staccato. So if you just want to practice bringing out the melody, you can use this technique. You might actually choose to bring out more than just the melody. You might want to bring out the bass and the melody, which you can do with this technique as well. You can bring out inner lines if you want to. There’s no end to the possibilities! Whatever you want to draw the listener’s attention to, play those notes legato and then gently release with a finger staccato the other notes. This trains your hand which notes are down, which notes are up, and which notes you can give more emphasis to. This technique can be quite challenging the first time you try it.
Are there easier techniques than that?
Yes, fortunately, there is something as simple as reaching for the melody notes you want to bring out! If you get the sense that your fingers are reaching for the notes you want to hear, they are going to come out more. So those are two techniques for bringing out melodies in your playing: different articulations, and reaching for the notes you want to bring out.
One more technique that can be extremely valuable in certain applications is leaning on one side of the hand more than the other to balance the weight of the hand. To bring out the top melody, you lean on the right side of your right hand so that you have more weight on that side of the hand than you have on the left side of your hand. And of course the left hand underplays completely. This can be a wonderful way to bring out a melody without having to resort to difficult practice techniques. Simply lean on different sides of the hand, depending upon what you want to bring out. If you want to bring out the top notes in your right hand, you lean towards your pinky. And if you want to bring out an inner line, you lean the other way towards your thumb and your other fingers.
Those are 3 techniques you can try out! If you’ve ever had difficulty coming up with a balance you want in any music you play, try these techniques and you may find that one or two of them will be particularly useful for a certain textures or types of writing. And you can always try them all and see what helps you to bring out what you want to hear in your music. What is so great about the piano is the control you have over all the lines. It’s such a pleasure to get the sound you’re after! Try this out, let me know how it works 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
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.
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
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about anti-practicing. What is anti-practicing? Are you doing it? You may be. I’m going to give you 3 telltale signs today that you might be anti-practicing. What do I mean by anti-practicing? What I’m talking about are routines in your daily work that are destructive. Routines that actually build negative habits in your playing. There are many ways that you can be productive in your practice and an equal number of ways that you can be unproductive. One of the most telling signs that you may be damaging your work is playing too fast.
Playing too fast has so many negative repercussions in your playing.
One negative repercussion of playing too fast is changing your tempo. Let’s say you have a piece and it’s going pretty well. It’s fun to play it because it’s an exciting piece that you love, but there are just a few problem spots. So you accommodate by slowing down for those spots so you can enjoy playing through the music. Why is this such a bad thing to do? Occasionally you might want to try playing up to tempo to see how far you get and to see where the problem parts are so you can zero in and solve them. But if you’re in the habit of doing this on a regular basis, you get so used to playing it that way, making those accommodations, that it’s all but impossible to stop!
Obviously the metronome is an incredibly valuable tool. Find a speed at whcih you can play everything at that tempo and that will serve you really well. There are other techniques you can use as well, because you might not want to play all of it slowly all the time. Instead, play until you can’t keep up with the metronome and concentrate on those sections. You can simply do metronome speeds. Find the speed at which you can play the trouble passage, and increase by one or two notches at a time on your metronome until you get it up to speed. Or you can use other practice techniques, whatever solves the problems. Maybe you need to play hands separately. You can try stopping on a note that you always miss so you land on it a bunch of times accurately. Whatever it takes to feel secure in the parts that are giving you problems is worthwhile. Playing too fast is obviously going to be destructive if you do it on a regular basis without solving the underlying problems in the sections you can’t play up to speed.
The second telltale sign is going back just a little bit every time you make a mistake.
You’re playing through a piece and when you make a mistake you just go back and fix it. You think you fixed it, but of course you haven’t fixed it. All you’re doing is getting into the routine of going back slightly when you make a mistake. So during your performance you will do the same thing, because that’s what you’re used to doing. Solving this issue really takes multiple steps. You might think you solved it, but you haven’t. Because the next time, it’s likely to happen again. Those weaknesses are still there.
So how do you get rid of those insecurities?
First of all, when you have a little problem, you need to stop and get out the music to find exactly where the problem is. By the way, that’s the hardest part of all! You might think you’re the only one who has trouble finding where you are in the music. No. It’s hard even for me sometimes! But I take the time to do it each and every time because it’s the only way to know what the problem is and to clarify the solution in your mind. That way it’s not just a motor memory thing that you may or may not get, but intellectually, you understand the correction.
Once you can play the correction faithfully repeatedly, you get it up to tempo, it’s smooth, and you can play it at least three times in a row perfectly, are you done? No. You’re not done yet because you still have to put it into context. What I recommend is to go back a little bit first, maybe two measures before the part that you already got perfect three times in a row. Go back two measures before that and play that perfectly three times in a row. Finally, go back to the beginning of the piece or section and make sure you can think it all through playing accurately. Because strangely enough, even after cementing a correction, and even after being able to go back a couple of measures and get through it beautifully over and over again, you’re still going to find that when you go back to the beginning of the piece the same mistake will creep in again because you’re not used to getting there from that point. So you have to think it all through! Once you play through two or three times from the beginning perfectly, you’ve got it solved until the next part. So go to the next problem part and do exactly the same thing until you can faithfully go through the whole piece.
The third telltale sign is playing your mistake.
The 3rd telltale sign that you may be anti-practicing is playing your mistake. As soon as you make a mistake you wonder, “What did I do wrong?” So you go back and play it incorrectly again to understand what the mistake was. I know it’s so tempting to want to see what you did wrong, but all you’re doing is concentrating on the mistake. You’re cementing the mistake! This is the very definition of anti-practicing! You don’t want to think about your mistakes. You want to focus on the corrections!
Those are the 3 things to concentrate on!
Don’t play too fast! However, you can try your music up to speed, just to see where you need to focus your attention. Don’t just stop and go back a little bit and think you’ve corrected mistakes because you haven’t. You may think you have because you went back and played it correctly, but the same thing is likely to happen again unless you go back further and further incorporating the correction. And don’t ever try to find your mistakes. Instead, focus on the corrections! That’s what will be paramount in your mind and your performance will be stronger as a result. I hope these tips are 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
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Can you hear the difference between an upright and a grand piano? Today I have another listening test for you! Last time we tested a Steinway versus a Chinese piano. People really enjoyed that little listening test. So today we will listen to an upright piano versus a grand piano! Can you really tell the difference? What are the preconceived notions about these pianos?
I dug through the archives of Living Pianos recordings and found an upright piano and a grand piano playing the same Chiarina movement of Schumann’s Carnaval. I took the second repeat in one of the recordings but not the other, but other than that they are the same. Both pianos were recorded in the same place with the same microphones, which is really great for this test. I’m going to reveal what those instruments are after you get a chance to listen.
Write down your answer!
As I said before on the Steinway versus Chinese piano video, I want you to write down your answer so that you don’t fool yourself. Because of course, we all want to be right and think we can tell the difference. So, write it down and commit to which one you think is the upright and which one you think is the grand. Here we go. Happy listening!
Eleven years ago I made a video about uprights versus grands and you can check that out at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. I discussed the differences. There are some substantial differences, primarily in the actions. But what about these two pianos? What are they? I chose a large grand. As a matter of fact, the grand piano is a seven-foot 1998 Baldwin SF-10. It’s a semi-concert grand. The upright is also a Baldwin, to make it fair. It’s a 1987 Baldwin Hamilton, which is just a 45-inch piano. 45 inches compared to seven feet, you would think there’d be an astounding difference in sound! Yet they both sound quite beautiful, don’t they? So which one was which?
The first one was the seven-foot Baldwin SF-10! The second one was the studio Baldwin Hamilton upright.
How many of you got that right? I’m really interested! My perspective is playing these instruments and making the allowances to get the best sound out of each piano, which is the job of a pianist. Because after all, almost all instrumentalists take their instruments with them. As pianists we have to play whatever instrument is available, and instantly adjust. I’ve had the good fortune of being around many pianos. I’ve learned how to make those adjustments. So the question is, how did you feel about the sound of these two pianos? Did you choose correctly? I would love to hear from all of you! Let me know your thoughts in the comments! 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
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Do you think you can hear the difference between a Steinway and a Chinese piano? Many of you probably think it would be no problem. But it may be surprising to you what you hear. There have been studies on wines. When people think a bottle of wine is expensive, they’re always going to choose that as being a better wine. There’s a subjective nature to the taste and the bouquet of wines. Well, the same is true of pianos! Now, I’m not suggesting one is better than the other. I’m going to leave it up to you to decide. I’m going to provide you with a blind listening test!
We will be comparing a Steinway to a Chinese piano in our blind listening test!
I went through the archives of Living Pianos, because we have hundreds of piano videos, and I found two grand pianos of about the same size, both in brand new condition. One is a Steinway and one is a Chinese piano. The Chinese brand shall remain nameless for right now. At the end I will reveal which is which. But don’t cheat! Don’t go forward on this because I want you to really critically listen. If you’ve got good speakers or headphones, use them so you can really hear the instruments. Then I want you to write down your answer. Write it down on a piece of paper. I’m serious about this! Because it’s easy to change your mind once you know the answer. But if you commit it to paper, then you can’t argue that you thought something different. It’s harder to tell than you might think!
I found recordings of the beginning of the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 7 in D major, Op. 10, No. 3. It’s the same exact piece of music you’re going to hear on both of these instruments. Remember, don’t cheat! I want you to really write down which one you think is the Steinway and which one is the Chinese piano so you get the most out of this. Here we go!
That was an interesting listening experience. I bet many of you have very definite ideas and some of you may be wondering which one is which. Well first of all let me tell you what these pianos are and then I’ll tell you which one was first and which one was second. The Steinway is a 2010 Model O which is right around 5′ 10″ in brand new condition. The Chinese piano is the 2017 Hailun Model 178, also 5′ 10″.
So which one was which? Have you written it down on paper? I’m serious about this because it’s easy to cheat yourself. You don’t want to be wrong here, do you? Because there’s a drastic price difference. You could buy several of those Hailuns for the price of a Steinway. So which one is which?
The first performance you heard was the Steinway and the second performance was the Hailun.
I don’t know how many of you are shocked and how many of you got it right. But there’s no right or wrong answer because every piano has something to offer. Every piano is unique. If you play several brand new Steinway model O’s in the showroom, each one will have a unique character of sound, as do the Hailuns. All pianos are made of wood and other organic materials and are highly crafted.
Now, I should tell you that there was a slight difference in these two performances. The first one was made later in my studio where I had much higher end microphones. I had a pair of Neumanns recording the Steinway and I only had a pair of Audio-Technica 4033s, which are relatively inexpensive large diaphragm condensers on the Hailun. So they were recorded in different rooms with different microphones. So this wasn’t totally scientific. The Hailun didn’t have the benefit of expensive, high-end microphones. But nevertheless you can get some idea of the different characteristics of the sound of these pianos. It was an interesting playing experience. I can hear what I went for and what came out on these performances. But I’m more interested in what you heard! Be honest in the comments. I’m very interested in how everybody responds to this! Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
