4 Keys to SKYROCKET Your Piano Progress

Four keys to skyrocket your piano progress.

You know, I've been playing the piano and teaching piano almost my whole life. Second generation pianist teacher, my sister's a pianist and a teacher. So I've got a lot to share, as you notice from the thousands of videos and articles. And I thought I would give you something concise that you can use right now. So what are these four keys to skyrocket your piano progress? Well, number one, I learned this from my father, Morten Estrin, who was my teacher up until I went away after high school to the Manhattan School of Music to major in piano and French horn incidentally. But that's a subject for another video.

Number one, always be learning new music, no matter how far you go. My father, even in his eighties, was the first time he decided to learn Mussorgsky's pictures at an exhibition. Can you imagine? And one thing he always lamented at, he'd see some of his colleagues playing New York recitals and he goes, ah, that's the same program they played in their graduate recital at Juilliard. And he was incensed by this because he was always learning new music. And that is the secret to growing as a musician. Ruth Stanchinska, another one of my teachers, phenomenal pianist, musician, human being, who just turned 100, by the way.

And she always was learning new music throughout her entire career. Even came out with an album just a couple of years ago. So that is key for growing as a musician.

Now here's one, a lot of you are gonna get to kick yourself. You're gonna do, I know I shouldn't do this, but choose music on your level. Now you may think, oh, but I really, really want to play Clare de Lune or whatever it is that maybe is a little out of reach or Brahms or Khmeranov.

Well, not that you should never attempt music that's above your level. After all, how do you grow? Right? But you owe it to yourself to be able to really get music under great control and have that satisfaction.

And then choose other music you could also absorb. The good news is, unlike other instruments where there's just a dearth of great music on earlier levels, the piano has so much great music. As a matter of fact, I have a video coming out on this very subject, seven pieces that you must learn. Because there's so much music on the piano that you don't necessarily have to resort to pieces that are above your level.

So always be learning new music and make sure that music is on a level that you can play. Now, what is another secret? Select three or four pieces to perfect. Sometimes people try to keep too many pieces in their repertoire.

And as a result, it can be too time consuming to try to keep those pieces in shape. So select three or four, not too many more or less. You'd always want to have something or pieces you can play, pieces you've lived with. So choose the ones. What's really sad, I know people, they practice and practice and they drop their pieces. They start a new piece. Their old piece is rusty. The new piece isn't learned yet. And they have virtually nothing to play even if they played for years. So always have review pieces at the ready.

And another thing is cover several essential skills each day in your practice. Learning, refining, reading, technique, scales and arpeggios, octave wrists. These are things, if you do these things every day, you are going to grow tremendously instead of just doing one thing every day. So remember, there are certain keys to what you want to do at the piano.

Always be learning new music and choose music on your level.

Keep several pieces in your repertoire that you can play on a high level and work on a variety of techniques to keep your practice engaging and productive. These are four tips that can really supercharge your piano playing. If you like these videos, check out the description if you want to supercharge your piano playing. I'm here for you. I'm Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource.

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