The Secret to Smooth Octaves on the Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin and today with a secret to legato octaves.

Legato octaves can be such a beautiful thing on the piano and I'm going to use to demonstrate the middle section of Chopin's B -flat minor nocturne.

And I was working with a student on this recently and this really was a breakthrough for him and I thought I'd share it with all of you. This is the section just so you know what music I'm talking about.

I could go on, such beautiful music. I've got to make a recording of that B -flat minor nocturne sometime. How many of you would like it? Put it here in the comments here at LivingPianos .com and YouTube and I'll make a recording just for you. So how to get that beautiful fluidity in the octaves and of course all of you are thinking right away, I've made videos on this before and any of you have done legato octaves, you know that you want to use the fourth and fifth fingers and if your hands are big enough even the third finger to get legato on the top but the secret I'm going to tell you today is the secret of abandoning your thumb. Don't even try to connect your thumb because when you do this is what happens.

You ultimately can't connect anything when you try to connect the thumbs. Why is that? Because it's physically impossible to connect the thumbs because the thumb is playing all the notes. The top line, yes you can connect by changing from five to four particularly on black keys using the fourth finger and the fifth finger on white keys works really well but when you try to connect the thumbs and the top note of the octaves you end up connecting nothing so you must abandon your thumb. Don't try to connect it. As a matter of fact more than that purposely disconnect the thumb. That enables you to focus your attention on the true legato you can create on the top note of the octaves. More than that it creates a beautiful sound when you have a little bit more weight in the pinky than in your thumb.

Listen to the difference and you see what I'm talking about. Here's with the even weight of the thumb and the pinky especially when it gets to the quiet section.

Top note how beautiful that is.

So practicing without the pedal so you can hear what you're doing and I recommend at first really detaching the thumb so you purposely disconnect it because you might think you're not connecting the thumb but until you really remove it completely from the equation you're going to have trouble connecting the octave. So practicing like this without the pedal you can hear what I'm doing.

Now just so you really know what I'm doing I'm going to get rid of the left hand and I'm going to show you this practice technique and then I'm going to enhance it a bit for you but this is what's going on.

So that's an exaggeration naturally you don't have to play the thumb so short once you get used to connecting the top note but at first you must do that make yourself do that initially so you can maximize the legato of the top note of the octave and get that gorgeous sound where you're getting more weight and you're pinky than the thumb. Not an easy task when you consider how heavy your thumb is. That is the secret to this. So once again now here's playing it without the pedal both hands together and you'll hear again and I'm not going to play the thumb so short but you'll see if you watch carefully you'll see how the thumb is lifting up before it's not trying to connect.

Now you put the pedal in you get this sound.

you hear the control that's possible when you don't try to do the impossible. What's impossible? Connecting the thumbs. It's not possible to connect the thumbs so don't try purposely disconnect the thumbs so you can maximize the legato on the top note of your octaves and you'll get a gorgeous sound and put more weight in that pinky and you're going to get smooth legato octaves in your playing. I hope this is helpful for you once again I'm Robert Estrin this is LivingPianos.com your online piano resource thanks so much for joining me.

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