Piano Video Lesson: How to Play Smoothly on the Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin, and today is really something that might be of great value to you, how to play smoothly on the piano. Avoid the impossible. I've already answered the question. That's the end of the video. No, not quite.

What am I talking about? Avoid the impossible. Well, first of all, playing smoothly on the piano is something you hear great artists do, and everything is just so pristinely smooth, and you wish you could achieve that same smoothest in your playing. And yet, your, playing sometimes can feel choppy and you don't know how to get that sound that you hear other people doing. You want it so badly, and you wonder, what can you do about it?

Well, of course, one of the most important aspects of learning how to play smoothly on the piano is to practice incessantly without the pedal, because then you must learn to connect with your fingers. That's the secret, in a nutshell, of how to play smoothly, but there's a bit more to it than that, because oftentimes there are just things that are not possible to play smoothly.

So, what do you do about that? Do you just smear it all with pedal? No, and that sounds awful when you do that. To demonstrate, I'm going to show with the second movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Sonata, and I'll play a little bit of it first, and then I'm going to show you all the pitfalls and, more importantly, the solutions for you.

Now, it's really hard to connect those chords. How do you do it, then? Well, if you just try to connect everything, you can end up with a mess like this.

There's no way to bring out any lines. It's kind of blocked and choppy, isn't it? So, the secret is don't try to connect everything. Sacrifice things are not as important to connect, for the things that are vitally important to connect. Which is what? The melody.

So, in your right hand... You sacrifice those lower notes, so that you can connect the melody, add the pedal, and you can grab a certain amount of those chords on the pedal, so it doesn't sound quite as austere as that.

You see how I purposely let go of the bottom notes, so I could be sure I'm connecting the top notes? That's what I mean by avoid the impossible. If you try to connect all of them, you can't do it.

You can't do it. It's impossible, so don't even try. If you connect the melody really well it just sounds gorgeous. So once again, with the pedal, connecting the top line, sacrificing the bottom notes somewhat, taking what you can with a pedal, without smearing it all up, and this is what you end up with.

Try that in your music, whatever it is you're playing. When you want to really play smoothly, sacrifice what you can't connect for what you must connect. That is the lesson for today. Let me know how it works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com, and on YouTube. Thanks all you subscribers ringing the bell, and the notifications so you'll know about more videos coming your way. See you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-to-play-smoothly-on-the-piano/

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