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How to Cement Corrections in Your Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to cement corrections in your playing. One of the most difficult things about practicing is when you work on something, you get it right, and you think you have it locked in. And then later the same mistake creeps in again and again. So what can you do if you make a correction, but then still make the same mistake? Today I’m going to show you two techniques that will help you cement corrections in your playing.

You must be able to recognize where the correction has been made!

This first technique is incredibly important. It is crucial for you to know where the correction is. I have a brief story for you:

A young boy is getting ready for school. His mother hands him his lunch and asks him to return a library book on his way home from school. The boy agrees, and his mother hands him a large book. He carries the book to school. He has the book with him all day. It’s rather cumbersome and a bit annoying as he carries the book from class to class. He can’t wait to drop off the book after school. But at the end of the day when the bell rings he excitedly runs straight home. When he comes inside his mother asks if he had returned the book, and there it is sitting under his arm. He had been thinking about it all day long as he carried the heavy book from class to class, yet somehow he still forgot to return it.

This is indicative of what happens when you make a correction in your music and yet, the mistake happens again anyway. It’s because when you’re coming to it from a certain place, you’re used to missing it, even if you corrected it. So how do you alleviate this problem? Once you make a correction, you need to cement that correction by going back and being aware of the correction when you arrive at it. To do this, try going back different amounts of time to approach the correction from different places in the music. This is a really valuable technique.

Slow things way down to fully understand every detail.

There is another completely different technique I want to introduce to you today. You probably know the feeling you get when you say a word over and over until it loses its meaning. You say it enough times, and it sounds like giberish. It almost makes you wonder if it’s even a real word! The same thing can happen in your piano playing. You’ve played something so many times up to speed that at a certain point you approach your music, and it seems completely unfamiliar. How can you eradicate this? If you go extraordinarily slowly on something that you can play up to tempo comfortably, it’s going to feel totally different to you. It’s going to feel almost as unfamiliar as saying a word over and over again. Is that even a word? Is that even a phrase? Am I playing the right chord?

It comes down to intentionality. You must have a musical intelligence, looking down upon yourself, making sure you’re going to the right place. This is absolutely essential, particularly when you’re making a correction in your music. You must know where that correction is, as I mentioned previously. And you must know what the correction is on a deep level. Do this by slowing it way down. There could be something you’ve played a million times, but when you slow it down you realize every single nuance. Maybe you never really thought about it. You just played it and it came right out. Then for some reason you start missing it again and again. To alleviate the problem, play very slowly note by note and study your fingers. You will start to understand it on a much deeper level by this intensely slow practice. Just this in itself may solve your problem.

You can use a metronome to bring corrections up to speed.

Sometimes, it takes progressive metronome speeds to put the correction into context. But just going through the piece slowly can be of tremendous value. One of the most important types of practice you can do on any music you have already learned is to slow it way down, take out the score, take your foot off of the pedal, put the metronome on really slowly, and play everything very definitely. Maybe play a little bit stronger than usual because when you play slower, the notes have to last longer. This is a great way to reinforce your memory and your performance!

These are two valuable techniques to cement corrections in your playing. I hope these are helpful for you! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Does Music Need to be Loud to be Good?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about the importance of volume in music. It’s interesting, as technology has grown, the use of volume to reach larger and larger audiences has ensued over hundreds of years. Originally, music was just singing, because the human voice is the first musical instrument. Then percussion instruments came along with people banging on things to make even more sound. With the invention of modern instruments like the saxophone, volume again increased. Then electronics took us to another level with how much volume is possible. But today, we’re talking about something a little bit different. The subject today isn’t about how the volume of musical instruments and musical expression has grown over generations and beyond, but how volume in your own music has a profound effect upon the listener and the emotions that are conveyed. The actual amount of amplitude, the energy of sound levels, has a profound effect upon how you feel when you’re listening to music. I’m going to demonstrate this for you with some original music to celebrate the new year. I hope you enjoy this!

See the accompanying video to hear the performance

Sometimes you can actually make a far louder message by holding back and playing delicately. The same thing is true with technology on a grander scale. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone into venues where the music has been so loud that you can’t really appreciate it because it’s beyond the threshold of pain! Any sound over 100 decibels is considered to be above the threshold of pain. If you go into a club, often the music is far above that level. But lower volume music actually draws listeners in! That’s the lesson for today on a personal level, as well as a global level.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this! Here at Living Pianos we wish you a great new year of music! We have plenty of great subjects for new videos in 2021, so stay tuned!
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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How to Achieve Speed & Lightness in Your Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we’re going to discuss how to achieve speed and lightness in your piano playing. These two things are related. It’s simple physics really. Moving a great deal of mass takes more work than moving a smaller amount of mass. So minimizing motion in your fast playing is really the secret. I’ve talked about this with finger work, so today the focus is going to be on the wrists. The wrists are incredibly important on the piano for so many things that the fingers just can’t do because they don’t have enough power. First I’m going to give a little refresher on how this applies to finger work. Then I’m going to show you wrist technique and how minimizing motion gives you more speed and lightness with the wrists as well.

Minimize motion of the fingers when playing fast.

A piano melody, even one that is quiet, still has to project. It takes a certain amount of arm weight supported by the fingers to achieve this. This is analogous to the breath of a wind instrument or the bow of a violin. You can get a nice warm melody that projects and creates a fluid line by utilizing the fingers and the arm weight. But you can’t use that much finger motion when you want to play at a much faster tempo. You have to stay closer to the keys. Your fingers need to be close to the keys and rounded, so there’s a minimum amount of motion necessary. It makes it much easier to play fast and light.

The wrists are necessary for articulating staccatos, phrasing, accents, and chord technique.

 

For an example, I’m choosing a piece that I’ve taught countless times, the Ballade by Burgmuller. Students often play the staccatos with their arms, which creates a ponderous sound because the arms are so big and heavy. It’s better to utilize the wrists instead of the arms. However, trying to get the speed faster with that much motion can be incredibly difficult. But by staying closer to the keys you can play faster and lighter. When you want speed, stay closer to the keys in your finger work and use less wrist motion. Certainly don’t use the arms! The arms have a real limit of speed. Playing fast staccatos with the arms is all but impossible. But the wrists can go very fast. The wrists have much less mass to move compared with the arms, so already that helps. To get even more speed, agility and lightness in quick playing that is not just finger work, stay closer to the keys and have a minimal amount of motion. Then you’ll be able to go much faster!

Try this technique on whatever music you’re playing!

 

If you’re playing rapid finger work and you find that you’ve hit a brick wall, try lightening up and staying closer to the keys. In chord technique and staccatos, use the wrists, not the arms because they are much faster and more agile. And as you get quicker, stay closer to the keys and use less motion. That’s the tip for today! I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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The 3 Worst Piano Practice Habits

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we’re going to discuss the three worst piano practice habits. These might be things that you do in your piano practice. Maybe you’re scared I’m going to bring something up that you do! Maybe you’re not aware of these destructive habits that are part of your practice routine. But it’s better to find out now than to continue on the wrong path.

1. Hesitating before a tricky passage

Hesitation is a habit that I constantly work with students to eradicate. It’s such a bad habit! You get to a difficult part and you can’t quite get it, so you hesitate just for a moment, then you get it and go on. This is a very bad habit because it ingrains stopping into your playing. The more you do it, the more you will continue to do it. It’s self regenerating. So how do you break that habit? We’re going to get to that, but first I’m just going to list the three habits so you can see how they apply to you.

2. Starting over from the beginning after making a mistake

The second bad habit is, when you make a mistake you get frustrated and you go back to the beginning. I’ve talked about this many times before. This is such a destructive habit. In a performance, if you find yourself having difficulty, what are you going to do? You can’t just go back to the beginning. The audience doesn’t want to listen to all of that again just so you can get past that point.

3. Changing speeds in your performance

Maybe there are some parts of a piece that you can play really well, so you play them at a nice fast tempo. Then you get to the parts that are a little harder and you slow down to accommodate them. Once again, you lose the whole flow of the music. You might think that to play everything slowly is tedious for the audience, so you might as well play fast where you can. But that doesn’t make for a fluid performance.

What can you do in your practice to eradicate these bad habits?

1. Hesitating before a tricky passage: You’re going along and you pause for just a moment, and then you go on. This is incredibly disturbing to the audience. Maybe they are tapping along to the beat and then suddenly it hesitates. It’s off-putting. With something that’s lyrical, anytime there’s a hesitation it just doesn’t feel right. I’m going to tell you what you can do. First of all, make sure you’re choosing the right tempo so you can play through the piece without hesitation. But suppose that just doesn’t cut it. Suppose you’d have to play the piece at half the speed just to avoid a couple of hesitations. That seems like a brutal solution. Indeed there are more effective ways of dealing with hesitations, unless you’re hesitating every bar, in which case you obviously need to choose a much slower tempo. But if it’s just a few key places where you are hesitating, and you can’t quite eradicate it, I have a solution for you.

When you are practicing, get in the habit of stopping whenever there’s a hesitation. Stop immediately and find your place in the score. Find an appropriate place in the score just before that hesitation where you can start to get past the point of hesitation. You might have to start slowly and increase the speed. Maybe even do metronome speeds if you can’t quite get through the hesitation by playing it several times. Then after you’ve played through the trouble section several times in a row perfectly at a comfortable tempo, go back to the beginning of the piece, or the beginning of the section to pass that hesitation.

Interestingly, you may find that even though you can play it many times in a row perfectly starting at the previous phrase before the hesitation, once you go back further, you may still hesitate there. So you may have to go back a little bit further to get it fluid. Then go back to the beginning of the section or the beginning of the movement to finally eradicate that hesitation. You can work all your key hesitations out that way. I sometimes refer to this as the band-aid approach of practicing. It can be very effective, because if you just have three or four places in an entire piece where you’re hesitating, to take the whole piece painfully slowly will feel quite tedious. And it’s not the most productive way to solve the problem. So hopefully this solution works for you!

2. Starting over from the beginning after making a mistake: It’s so tempting when something goes wrong to just start over and try again. Well, the problem with this is if you get in the habit of doing that in your practice, when you get out to perform you’re going to do the same thing. More than that, it doesn’t solve the underlying weakness in your playing. So what you must do is find exactly where you had the problem, and study the score to figure out the solution. Then, much like I described before in avoiding hesitation, start just before the point at which you had the problem, pass that point several times, increase the speed, and use the metronome if necessary. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It’s a very valuable technique. You may have to go back a little bit further to finally be able to start from the beginning and pass that point without starting over. So the key here is to reference the score and nail down the correction. Be very deliberate with this. Find the specific correction so that you don’t just play on automatic pilot with your tactile memory. You don’t want to rely upon that because obviously, whatever made you miss it that time, will undoubtedly happen again. So you want to really focus on the correction. A lot of people want to know what they did wrong, but that’s of no value. Find the correction! Whatever you focus on is going to be apparent in your playing. If you’re focused on the mistake, you’re going to make the mistake. Focus on the correction and forget the mistake. This is a life lesson too!

3. Changing speeds in your performance: I have a student who’s extremely talented. He likes to play everything really fast and it’s pretty dazzling. He hasn’t been playing very long, and I’m constantly impressed by him. But being able to get through an entire piece or even an entire movement at the speed at which he starts is oftentimes all but impossible. So going faster and slower really isn’t the answer.

Here again, you want to focus on the parts you can’t play up to speed. The answer here is to work with a metronome. Once you get to the part you can’t play up to speed, find a speed you can handle and set your metronome to it. Then start from the beginning and play the whole selection at that speed. If you really want to play a faster tempo, zero in on the parts you can’t play faster and work with progressive metronome speeds and other practicing techniques in order to get them up to speed. Then you will be able to play everything at the tempo you want. But starting off at a tempo faster than you can play the difficult sections won’t work.

So these are three tips for you! You’ve probably noticed there are similarities in the solutions. Focusing in on the correction, going back, speeding things up, working with a metronome, going back a little bit further, then going back to the beginning. These are tremendous practice techniques that come into play in solving these common problems in piano practice. If you can break these bad habits, I promise you, you’re going to take your playing to a higher level! You’ll really have security, and you’ll be able to play through a piece from the beginning to the end at one speed without stopping, without going back, without hesitating, and without changing speeds. I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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How Practicing Slower Will Get You There Faster

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how practicing slower will get you where you want to be faster. It seems counter-intuitive. I have seen so many students falling into a trap. Maybe you’ve had this experience. Or if you’re a teacher, you’ve seen students succumb to the false promise of solving problems by playing too quickly. They’re playing a piece and they miss something so they go back a little bit, and then they miss it again. Then they get more and more frustrated. They’ll say, “No, wait. I can get this. I know I can get this!” They just want to have the satisfaction of getting it right once. But they keep reinforcing the mistake because every time they play it again, they miss it. After many failed attempts they get it right, and they feel so good that they’ve finally gotten it. Of course, then they move on and do exactly the same thing with the next section. This is akin to someone who gets stuck in quicksand and they struggle to get out moving furiously. And what happens? They sink deeper and deeper! If they keep doing that long enough, they will end up so deep in the hole they cannot get out. And the same thing can happen in your practice if you’re not careful.

Practice the correction, not the mistake.

The more times you repeat a mistake, the harder it is to ever play it right again. And even if you manage to play it correctly after missing it again and again, you’ve still practiced the mistake far more than you’ve practiced the correction. So next time you play that section, the same thing is likely to happen again. How do you get out of this trap? I’ll answer that, but first let me tell you a story:

There are two men in the woods and they are chopping wood. They need the firewood. It’s very important they get this done before the day ends because it gets intensely cold at night. One of the men is chopping furiously. He sees his friend taking breaks, sitting there with his ax. Inside, he’s kind of peeved, but he knows they need to get this done because it’s going to get very cold and they will need the wood. He’s working as hard as he can, but he keeps seeing his friend taking breaks with his ax. He wants to say something, but he’s just too busy chopping the wood. At the end of the day he’s exhausted. He looks over, and much to his shock, his friend’s pile of wood is much larger than his own pile! He couldn’t imagine how this could have happened. So he says to his friend, “I don’t get it. All day long, I’ve been busy chopping wood while you took several breaks just sitting there with your ax, but somehow you chopped more wood than I did.” And his friend replied, “Yes, I like to sharpen my ax.”

Use a ‘sharp ax’ in your piano practice.

That’s a funny story. But the same principle applies to your piano practice. It’s not so important to keep charging forward as fast as you can. Be sure to reflect upon what you’re doing. Take that time. Slow yourself down. When you miss something, the temptation is to just charge forward and get it right. But if you do that, you’re missing a tremendous opportunity to find the correction, to find what you need to do differently, and to slow down so you can get it right the next time.

Once you miss something, it’s critical that you get it right the very next time.

Once you miss something, make the correction and play it perfectly at least three times in a row. Solidify the correction! Reinforce it using different practice techniques. Use progressive metronome speeds, or other techniques to cement the correction. Remember to slow down in your practice and you’ll end up with much more to show for your time. Just like the men in the woods. The man who sat there sharpening his ax had a better tool to be more productive. You want to take time in your practice. You don’t want to keep going back over mistakes hoping to get things right, because that’s not what practicing is about. It’s a matter of cementing corrections right from the get-go, to play accurately the very next time. And how do you do that? Study the score and slow down so you play perfectly the very next time. Then repeat it until you can play it correctly again and again consecutively.

So make the correction! You’ll find your practice will take on a productivity that you can’t even imagine if you haven’t used this technique before. Repeating mistakes in hopes of getting things right is like sinking into quicksand. It is anti-practicing. Repeating your mistake again and again, and thinking just because you got it right once, even though you missed it a bunch of times in a row is destructive work even though it may have been done with the best intentions. You know you can play it right because you played it right before. Why shouldn’t it come out right now? Well, that’s not an important question to ask yourself. Instead, focus on the correction. Get it right and get it done! You will be so much more productive in your practice and avoid frustration. Thanks again for joining me! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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How Much Should You Practice The Piano?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how much you should practice the piano. I hear this question all the time. Of course, parents always want to know that for their kids, and adults also want to know if they are practicing enough. This is a great question, but it really isn’t the right question, believe it or not. The most important aspect is not how much you are practicing, but how often you practice. Why is this so important?

Practicing on a daily basis is essential to maximize your productivity and progress at the piano.

When you practice every day, you reinforce what you’ve done the day before on a daily basis. Skipping days is like taking one step forward and two steps backwards. It’s very difficult and can become frustrating. It makes you not even want to practice because you forget what you did and you feel like you’re not getting anywhere. And maybe that’s true. So it becomes self-defeating. Practice every day and you’ll see your progress growing.

Your mind has only a certain amount of time when it can work with maximum effectiveness.

When your mind is fresh, it can be so productive! You can get so much done. So you want to take advantage of that every day. You can even practice more than once in the course of a day. Maybe you have a little bit of time before you start working when you can review what you did the day before. By keeping it present in your head, right from the moment you sit down to practice, you’re ready to go! So that is the most important thing.

Setting the clock to practice a certain amount of time every day isn’t necessarily productive.

Why? Because what is practicing? Sure, there’s a certain amount of physiology involved. You want to develop strength and independence of your fingers and wrists for technique. But that’s not the most important aspect of piano practice. Practicing is a thought process. You can’t just do it by the clock. I’ve seen kids do this when their parents make them practice and they just sit there thinking about anything other than the piano! They’re thinking about what they’re going to do later when they run out the clock. So you must maximize the productivity of your practice. And that takes a thought process that you can’t always force. If you practice for 30 minutes and you’re really focused, you can accomplish far more than practicing for hours while daydreaming or just going through the motions. You want to digest a chunk at a time and really have something to show for your work at the end of practicing. So make sure you get to the piano every day. At least refresh what you did the day before and try to learn something new. Even if it’s just one tiny phrase. And on good days when you’re fresh and you’ve got time, do as much as you can! That way you will really grow tremendously rather than trying to have an arbitrary time limit that you are going to practice.

I hope this is helpful for you and for your teachers. This is a great recommendation, particularly for parents of students, because a lot of parents don’t know how hard it is to practice if you’re doing it correctly. So give your kids a break! Just make sure they do some work at the piano every day. That’s the most important thing. Thanks again for joining me! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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