Piano Video Lesson: How to Recharge Your Piano Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin. Today I'm going to show you how to recharge your piano playing.

Did you ever have the experience where you have a piece and you get it on a really high level and you play it on a regular basis and somehow it just kind of goes stale or limp. It just doesn't have the spark. It's just it's not quite there and you could play it and it's not like there's oh trouble spots you can practice. It's the whole thing is just kind of flabby and it just doesn't have the spark that it had. You wonder how can you get this back into shape? I'm going to show you today and there's some very basic techniques that are going to do the job for you. So I'm going to pick a piece that actually I haven't played in quite some time and I'm going to show you what I would do with it and this can help you in your practice if you have any pieces that are going stale or you have a piece that you played and you can get through it but it's just not on a high level and you don't know what to do with it because it's not like you have to practice it all over again you already know it. You can play it. It's just not where you want it to be. How can you bring it that level or two or three up? In a nutshell one of the most important aspects of piano playing and I have had the opportunity to study with some absolutely stupendous piano teachers including my father Morton Estrin, Ruth Slenczynska, Constance Keene, and John Ogden. And all of them including every fine pianist I have ever met practices slowly.

Even when you can play something up to tempo going back and practicing slowly is absolutely essential on the piano and more than that take your foot off the pedal.

Listen to what is there what your fingers are doing. The pedal covers so much.

I can tell you that these two tips I just gave you are so fundamental that every great pianist, classical pianist does them. Practice it slowly without the pedal.

What else? Get the score out but you haven't memorized. Not good enough. No you've got to reinforce the score. Do you think you remember every single detail? Where a slur ends, where a crescendo begins, the exact voicing of every chord? You must reinforce your memory constantly and lastly utilize the metronome. Keep yourself honest. So I've got the Pathetique Sonata, you know the famous Pathetique Sonata Beethoven.

But I'm going to start with the Allegro.

You know it's not totally clean so put the metronome on a nice slow speed, no pedal and with eyes on the score.

The amazing thing is that just going through slowly like that a few times will already clean up your playing enormously playing it up to tempo.

But if you really want to develop a stupendous stellar technique clean and faithful you do all the speeds between where necessary. You might not have to do all the speeds between everywhere but any place that doesn't either come out consistently or doesn't feel quite right, doesn't feel comfortable do progressively faster metronome speeds on those sections, zero on in.

I remember when my father was recording his Brahms album and watching him practice. I used to watch my father practice all the time. I used to love it. It was really enriching.

And I remember he got to a point where he was playing through everything just slightly under tempo without the pedal and it was just like totally relaxed and totally clean.

And that's what you want to get to the point where you get it up to tempo and it's all just comfortable and it's like falling off a log. The notes just are there. You don't even have to work to make it come out.

And because you've studied the score again and again slowly seeing every detail you really really perfect your performance.

And this is a great way to get any piece back into shape or a piece that's gone stale or a piece you're performing and you just had it in good shape and you want to make sure it's still in good shape.

Slow practice with a score no pedal with a metronome.

Try it in your practice and you'll be amazed at what this can do for your playing.

Thanks again for joining me. I'm Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com your online piano resource.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-to-recharge-your-piano-playing/

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