The 3 Essential Skills of Piano Playing

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com and VirtualSheetMusic.com with three essential skills to piano playing.

Well, you know, I've had many students from other teachers and oftentimes people come in and they kind of, the first thing I ask, one of the first things after listening to them play and such, is has anyone ever showed you how to practice? And that is a great question because I think one of the most important things a teacher can ever share with a student is how to practice because no matter how brilliant a teacher may be, it's only an hour a week sometimes even less. It's the other hours, what the student is doing the other six days of the week that is going to make the difference in the progress the student makes. So the three essential skills is very important you know what it is you're trying to accomplish.

One skill that is essential for any pianist is memorization. Well, that's right, some instruments you can get away with not memorizing and be fine because you don't have to look. If you play a flute, you can look at the music the whole time. On the piano there is some music you just absolutely have to look at your hands when you have big leaps. Plus the score is very complex. It's hard to see everything you need to see.

That's why memorization is one of the essential tools that a pianist has. Fortunately, I have videos, by the way, on all three of these subjects that you can follow the links to at the end of this video. And I go into great detail how to memorize, and I learned how to memorize from my father, Morton Estrin, who has a very simple system that virtually anybody can master.

The second skill is sight reading. Now, you might think, can't you just read through a piece a lot and eventually learn it. Well, I guess just like playing a video game and starting from the beginning every time you mess up. You could do it that way, but it's not a very efficient way to learn. And, in fact, you can do what I call anti-practicing if you try to memorize simply by reading through again and again. Why?

Well, if you're reading through and you can't read it perfectly the first few times, you are reinforcing mistakes and you have to unlearn which is a very tedious process and very difficult. If you've ever learned something wrong and tried to correct it, you know how hard that is. So you want to avoid that by having memorization as one process and sight reading, a completely different methodology. And again, I have several videos on sight reading you can reference.

The third skill, and I can't believe there are some incredibly skilled pianists who have developed the first two skills to a very high level and yet have no idea at all how to improvise. Improvisation or playing by ear is not only fun, but it's absolutely essential for many styles of music from jazz, blues, rock, country, new age. If you try to play these styles just from reading, you'll never really get fluent and you won't really have the style because it's all about arranging the music yourself. Playing with other musicians, listening, fitting in, finding an intrinsic part. And yes, I believe to be a well rounded musician it's essential to have all three of these skills.

So this is a very important lesson for you today. Reference the other videos. I want to hear from you if any of you have experiences where you've developed one or two of these skills and have been very deficient at one or two and felt somehow inferior. This might be of help to you, and I'm happy to provide further insight for your particular situation. Thanks for joining me. Robert Estrin with LivingPianos.com and VirtualSheetMusic.com. I'll see you next time.

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