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The Ultimate Wrist Exercise for Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to share with you the ultimate wrist exercise for your piano technique. Wrists are so important in piano playing! Everyone knows that you need to use your fingers in order to play the piano. But the fingers don’t do you much with fast chords and octaves. It’s very hard to play octaves with your fingers with the exception of legato octaves. But when something is fast, there’s no way the fingers can keep up. You have to use your wrists! If you use your arms, it’s cumbersome. You can’t go fast enough! The wrists are also incredibly important for chord technique. There are some chord techniques that are slower and bigger where you use your arms in order to get maximum power. But in most instances, the wrists must be utilized. The arms are just too big and slow.

How do you develop the wrists?

Developing the independence of the wrists so you use them separately from your arms is a major difficulty for some people. For others it comes quite naturally. Some people struggle to avoid arm motion when utilizing the wrist. Your arms have too much mass to go fast enough in many cases. But your wrists can go very fast! Here is a very simple exercise for you.

It’s how you do the exercise that makes all the difference.

It only utilizes the second and fourth fingers in both hands. Using only your wrists, you just go up on white keys starting on C and E in both hands ascending in thirds. You just go eight times on C and E, then you go up eight times on D and F. You go up as high as you want diatonically (by white keys), then come back down again eight times on each third. Do this with the metronome set at 60.

When you do this exercise, your arms should not be going up and down at all.

You want to use only the wrists. But the arms are very important! They must guide the hands over the right keys. So after the eighth time playing C and E, the arms move right over D and F. If you’ve never done this exercise before, you’re going to feel it in your forearms, because these are muscles you don’t ordinarily use. If you are a tennis player you might have very well-developed wrists. But other than that, there are not a lot of times when you use your wrists independently from your arms. The first time you do this you might not keep the wrist motion separate from your arms and have both of them working together. That doesn’t do much to strengthen your wrists when using your arms.

Keep your wrists up the entire time, except for the brief moment when they play.

Another problem you might face is letting your hands fall back down on the keys when you’re not playing. It may seem fine when practicing slowly, but this is a hyper slowed down version of what you need to be able to accomplish playing fast later. There won’t be time to go back down. You must strike from above. It has to be one motion.

There’s one more problem to watch out for. You have your wrists raised, but then your arms get lazy and start lowering. Before you know it, you’re playing in a terribly uncomfortable position with your wrists bent way up. Even when you’re playing the notes, they can still be bent. This isn’t good. It can be destructive, as a matter of fact. You don’t want to flex too far because you have nerves that can be stressed. So it’s a gentle slope of the wrist. At the moment the keys are struck, your wrists should be straight.

Go through this exercise once every day. You’ll be amazed at how the independence of your wrists helps you to develop strength, and speed!

The wrists are so important, from octaves to chord technique to delineating staccatos. Utilizing the wrists for staccatos gives you a crisp sound. When using your arms for staccatos, you would get a limp, heavy sound. The wrists play an incredibly important part in piano playing! This exercise can help you develop the independence and strength of your wrists. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

How to Identify Notes on the Piano

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. Today’s subject is about how to identify notes on the piano. You have 88 keys on the piano. What are they? I’m sure many of you already know the answer to that question. But for those of you who don’t know what the keys are on the piano, I will explain. We get a lot of pianos here at Living Pianos. Sometimes somebody has carefully put little letters on every one of the keys across the keyboard. Is that necessary? No, it’s not necessary! So, how can you figure out all these notes?

Why do pianos have black and white keys?

I have a video on that subject which you can watch here. The simple answer is, if they were all white keys, you wouldn’t be able to find any of the notes. You would have no reference. If you look at the way the piano keyboard is oriented with groups of two and three black keys, it’s a repeating pattern. Now, here’s how to find the notes on the piano. You have groups of two black keys and groups of three black keys. Any group of two, if you go to the white key just to the left, that is C. Now, what is so significant about that? Well, from there, you can go up the alphabet on the white keys. C, D, E, F G. Then it continues with the first letter of the alphabet. A, B, C. The octave higher C is also below two black keys. So now you can find all the keys on the piano. Any time you have two black keys, the note to the left is a C. The highest note on the keyboard is also a C.

What about the black keys?

The black keys are designated by either sharps or flats. But white keys can also be sharps or flats. Any two keys that are next to each other, black or white, are all called half steps. Two keys together with no keys between are a half step apart. There are white keys that are a half step apart. So what’s the significance of this?

A sharp raises a note a half step.

If you have a C sharp, it raises it a half step to the black key to the right of C. If you have D sharp, it would go up a half step as well to the black key to the right of D. You can even have an E sharp. It would be the same key as F on the piano because a sharp raises a note by a half step, and the next key on the piano is a white key.

There are also flats which lower notes by a half step.

It’s the same principle. So if you have a C flat, it’s the same key as B on the piano. But it would be indicated in your score as C flat. A B flat would be a half step lower than B, etc. So that is the way black keys are designated on the piano. You may wonder why white keys would sometimes be indicated with flats or sharps. Scales are written diatonically with all the letters in order without skipping or repeating any. On the staff they appear on consecutive lines and spaces. They are actually easier to read that way, believe it or not!

I hope this is helpful for you! Now you know all the notes on the piano. You can figure all 88 out just from that brief tutorial. Thanks again 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

Assembly Line Practicing

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. I’m here with an incredible practicing tip that will turbocharge the work you do at the piano: Assembly line practicing. What is this all about? I’m going to tell you all about it and how it relates to your piano playing. Early in the 20th century, Henry Ford revolutionized automobile manufacturing by making the assembly line.

The assembly line lets people work on all stages of development simultaneously.

Another great example of this is the post-World War II housing boom. I grew up on Long Island adjacent to Levittown, where potato fields were transformed into whole neighborhoods seemingly in an instant. How was this done? Previously, houses were built from the beginning to the end. Then when the houses were finished, the builders would move on to the next house. Well, there’s a much more efficient way. If you’ve ever been to a neighborhood being built, you see tractors digging dirt. You go a little further and see foundations being laid. Further still you see frames of houses being assembled. Then the electrical and plumbing are being put in. When you get to the very end of the neighborhood, there’s the model home. All the work is being done on all these multiple stages of development simultaneously. It’s an incredibly productive way of building neighborhoods.

How does this relate to your piano practice?

If you have watched my videos, you are probably aware of the way I practice, and the way I teach my students to practice. Rather than practicing a whole piece and eventually trying to memorize it, you flip it. Read through the piece a couple of times, then get right down to work and start memorizing a little chunk at a time. However, this type of practice is incredibly mentally challenging. Everyone thinks that it’s hard just for them, but it’s hard for everyone if you’re doing it right! Let’s say you’re learning a new piece. You learn as much as you can and it’s enough for the day. The next day you can refine what you’ve done the previous day. But you also forge forward.

Eventually you have music at many different stages of development.

The first section is at performance level, like that model home or the finished car coming off the assembly line. Later on, maybe after the double bar in the development section of a sonata movement, it needs further polishing. So you work to refine that. You’re trying to refine what you learned the day before and solidify your memory. Yet you are always memorizing new material to add to the pipeline for the next day.

Your practice becomes exponentially more productive.

You can’t just memorize for an entire practice session. There’s a point of diminishing returns of your effectiveness. There’s only so much you can absorb at one time. So you memorize what you can. Then you refine what you did the previous day and the days before that. The first sections of a piece may be at performance level, especially a multi movement work. You might have the first movement at performance level. The second movement is coming along. This is what I mean by assembly line practice. It’s so effective if you can work on different stages of development all at the same time. Instead of just working on a whole piece and trying to get it up to a high level, then go on to the next piece, you work on all different stages of development within the work. You can even be working on the second and third movements while you’re doing the final polishing on the first movement. I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again 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

Should You Look at Your Hands When You Play From Memory on the Piano?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about whether you should look at your hands when you play from memory on the piano. This is a really insightful question that someone asked me recently. There are two distinctly different ways of playing the piano. One is playing from memory and the other is reading the music.

When playing with the music, you should strive to keep your eyes on the score the entire time.

You only want to have brief glances at the keys. When you do look at the keys, it must be just your eyes moving. If you play the piano and you are looking at the music ,you can’t look away. You can’t read what you’re not looking at! When playing from the score, you absolutely must keep your eyes on the music.

What About Playing From Memory?

Oftentimes I have students memorize music. At the very first lesson I show my students how to memorize. This is something that almost nobody ever teaches. You think it’s magic that pianists could assimilate all this music. Are pianists some kind of geniuses? No. You just have to know how to memorize. You have to take little chunks of music and build the whole composition bit by bit. When you hear somebody play, it seems like a miracle. But really, if you see what’s behind the curtain, it’s just a lot of little steps that go into it.

I have my students play from memory. The first time they do it, a lot of times they’ll be looking up into space. I always tell them to look at their hands. One of the reasons to memorize music is so that you can look at your hands! When you have leaps, how are you supposed to land in the right place without looking at your hands? Having said that, there are some blind pianists who defy all reason bouncing all over the keyboard. They don’t rely upon looking. That’s great for them. But for everyone else, you have your eyes to utilize so you might as well take advantage!

Looking at your hands is another way to reinforce your memory.

By looking at your hands you see the connections of the keys. You know where to look if there are leaps. A lot of times what you want to do when you’re playing the piano is look at your thumbs rather than the extreme outside fingers. The thumbs can line up everything and they’re close together. When you have leaps, you tend to want to look at the inner part of your hand. That’s one little tip for you.

Does this mean that you should never try to play without looking?

No. The time for that is when you memorize a piece of music. That doesn’t mean you’re done with the score. Far from it. It’s exactly the opposite! The way I learn music, and the way I teach my students to learn music is to read through it a couple of times the first day, then get down to work and start memorizing. The first thing you do is memorize your music, instead of the last thing. Then what do you do? You go back to the score and reinforce the memory by reading the score and keeping your eyes on the music. That’s the time for not looking at your hands. Read from the score to see all the little details that maybe you didn’t catch the first time. Maybe you forgot where a slur ends or a crescendo begins, or the voicing of a chord. You have to constantly go back and reinforce your memory.

Interestingly, you can play the piano without any instrument or anything visual at all.

I have a video about playing the piano from your mind. You can just sit in a chair and play through your music mentally, thinking through every nuance of sound and touch. That is the ultimate practice. You can try it with a piece you know really well. You want to make sure you reinforce that memory. There is no better practice. You don’t have the benefit of finger memory. You don’t have the keyboard to look at or the sound to go by. It’s all in your head. Interestingly, there have been tests of people playing the piano while having their brains scanned. Then they get people to think about playing the piano while doing the same brain scan on the same people. There is zero difference in the brain whether you are playing the piano or thinking about playing the piano. Now, what does this reveal? It tells you that you can practice away from the piano effectively and get all the benefits. You can reinforce the score just using your mind.

How Do You Play the Piano with Your Mind?

I hope this has been enlightening for you! Thanks again 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 Much Should You Mark Up Your Score?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is about how much you should mark up your piano music. There are a lot of reasons to write on your score. Maybe you missed something in your music and you want to circle it, or you need to put fingering in. After a while your whole score could be marked up making it difficult to see the notes!

I have an interesting story about this.

Years ago, when I was at the Manhattan School of Music, I had a friend who was a piano major. She had the Henle edition of the Beethoven sonatas, which are very authoritative and expensive. I was helping her with a particular Beethoven sonata. She opened up the score of this incredibly expensive, thick volume of Beethoven. She turned to the sonata she was working on with her teacher, and it was marked up with several different colors of ink! There were so many markings, you absolutely could not see the score anymore! Things were circled, and there were big blotches of red, green, and blue ink on the score. Can you imagine the injustice of this? Her teacher destroyed her score! There’s no way you could possibly see the notes and Beethoven’s markings anymore. That’s an extreme example of what to avoid.

Only use pencil in your scores.

When I tell my students to mark something on the score I first ask, “Do you have a pencil handy?” That’s rule number one. My father used to have this really cool mechanical pencil. I haven’t seen anything like it that exists anymore. It was a pencil that had four different colored leads in it. He could mark scores with red, green, blue and black. It was such a great way for him to mark scores in a coherent fashion. Yet because it was pencil, the markings could be erased. Why is this so important? Let’s say early on you didn’t see a flat in the key signature, so you put the flat in front of the note. Then maybe later there was something else in that same measure, like a fingering or a phrase marking you missed. You can start making so many circles and marks that before you know it, it doesn’t get your attention anymore.

You want to be able to erase marks you no longer need, and only have the ones that are pertinent.

At a later stage of learning a piece of music, you might want to record it to see what kind of shape it’s in. In doing so, when listening back to the recording, you might want to gently circle the places you want to review. But maybe the mistakes were just one-offs. Maybe you just wanted to reference them after listening to the recording. Your markings are not always something you want to call to attention every single time you’re looking at the score. Fingering is a really critical example. You may work out a fingering and think it’s good. But later, when you’re playing the piece up to tempo, you realize that fingering isn’t going to work at all. As long as it’s in pencil, you can erase it and put new fingerings in. So that’s the most important thing.

Retain the clarity of your score.

Use a pencil! Don’t obliterate your score with too many markings. Erase the markings you no longer need so you have clarity of the actual score. After all, the score is what you need to see and digest. You don’t want to obscure it with too many markings. I’m interested in how you deal with markings in your scores. What do you find helpful? Let me know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again 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

Baby Grand VS Grand Pianos: What’s the Difference?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to talk about the differences between baby grands and grand pianos. You might just think one’s bigger than the other. That is an intelligent observation. But really, there are 3 fundamental differences between baby grand and grand pianos. I’m going to break it down for you today.

The 3 basic differences are: String Length, Soundboard Area, and Action Geometry.

Let’s talk about each one of these aspects and the significance of them. Then you can determine what might be the right piano for you. Baby grands are typically around five feet long. That’s measured from the edge of the key slip to the farthest part of the lid. Whereas grand pianos are more like six feet in length. These are only approximate measurements. Some baby grand pianos may be 5′ 1″ or 5′ 4″. Grand pianos can be 6’3″, 6’4″, even 6’6″. When you get to 7-feet, that’s considered a semi-concert grand, which is another class of piano.

What’s the difference between a baby grand and a grand piano in regards to string length?

The physics of sound is such that a doubling of frequencies creates an octave. When something vibrates twice as fast, it creates an octave higher in pitch. Therefore, something twice as big will produce sound an octave lower. If you think about how short the top strings of a piano are, if you went doubling each octave, you would have a piano that stretches out way farther than your room! So how do they compensate for that? Even on a 9-foot concert grand piano, the strings aren’t nearly long enough in the bass to be twice as long for every octave in the treble. It’s compensated for by making the strings fatter in the bass. You notice the copper wound strings in the bass get thicker and thicker. Even the steel wound strings have different gauges from the top going down, getting progressively thicker. This way the piano doesn’t have to be ridiculously long in order to have the range of pitch that it has. The sound created by thicker strings that aren’t as long, have many strong overtones. Overtones, or color tones, exist in all vibrating objects that create pitched sounds, whether it’s a piano, or a bell, or anything that produces a pitched sound. If you blow through a seashell and create a pitch, it has overtones in it! That’s what gives the vibrancy of tone, and the differences in sound from one instrument to another.

The shorter a piano is, the stronger the overtones are and the less fundamental frequency you have.

When you’re playing a low note, particularly on a small piano, you’re actually getting more overtones than fundamental pitch. I remember as a kid I used to love to play with tape recorders. One time I recorded the lowest note of the piano. Then I played it back three or four times as fast. It sounded almost like a chord! The overtones are so strong. This makes it very difficult to tune smaller pianos, because the overtones can conflict with fundamental frequencies of higher notes. The purity of the sound is one benefit to having longer strings. And the longer a piano is, the truer the fundamental tones are, and the overtones are less prominent. So that’s one aspect of the sound of a larger piano. That’s a benefit because of string length.

The larger the soundboard, the richer the sound.

Sound systems that have bigger speakers tend to have more bass and a richer sound. It’s very difficult to get good bass out of small speakers. There are some technologies that can come close with baffles and tubing and subwoofers. But with just one diaphragm, like a piano soundboard, a bigger one is going to have a richer sound overall. Also, the placement of the bridges on the soundboard can be more centralized when you don’t have to cram everything into such a tight space as in a baby grand. The scaling of the piano design on a larger piano can be such that you can get better vibration of the whole soundboard from any of the registers. You get a more even sound from top to bottom on a larger grand piano than on a baby grand. So those are two sonic benefits of grand pianos.

What about the action?

Earlier, I mentioned action geometry. On a small piano, in order to fit everything into a small space, and to have the strike point in the right place, that is the point of the string where the hammer hits, the keys must be shorter. Not the part of the keys you see, but the part that is behind the fallboard. So when you’re playing on a baby grand, your fingers are very close to the central pivot point. Therefore, the key travel is far shallower, particularly when playing black keys, as well as white keys close to the fallboard. Whereas on a grand piano, these parts of the keys move much more, giving you better control with your hands on the keys when you’re not playing on the edge of the keys. This makes it easier to control with soft playing in particular.

So those are some of the benefits of grand pianos compared to baby grands.

These benefits multiply as you get to semi-concert and concert grand pianos. A 9-foot concert grand is the ultimate piano in terms of scale design, with the way the strings get larger and longer from the treble to the bass, as well as the placement of the bridges on a larger soundboard, and the action geometry giving you such an even feel, even when playing close to the fallboard. It is the ultimate playing and sonic experience! However, another aspect of piano size is that generally, larger pianos produce more volume. So this is another consideration for you. I hope this has been helpful for you! Thanks again 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