Piano Video Lesson: Secrets of Balance on the Piano

But there is one very important acoustical property you must be aware of on the piano, which is balance is different playing loud compared to playing softly.

Welcome to LivingPianos .com, I'm Robert Estrin, and today I'm going to give you some secrets of balance on the piano. Now, what am I referring to about balance? Well, piano is one of the only instruments where you have all different notes at the same time, and you're able to bring out different notes within a chord or within a musical texture, and this is one of the great things about the piano. I can easily demonstrate what this is all about by playing a simple chord, a C major chord, C E G C in the left hand, and the same thing in the right hand, C E G C, and if I play them all together, you get this.

Or it could be played softer, and there's many different ways of approaching the voicing, and how is this possible? Well, listen, I'm going to bring out every single note of the chord one by one from the top to the bottom and then back up again, playing exactly the same chord, but bringing out different notes within the chord each time.

So you can see that you can create whatever musical texture you want, much like a conductor with an orchestra, getting the balance out of the orchestra to get just the sound thereafter, you can do the same thing at the piano.

But there is one very important acoustical property you must be aware of in the piano, which is balance is different playing loud compared to playing softly. I'm going to demonstrate this by showing you with Chopin C minor prelude. It starts off with some massive chords that are fortissimo, then it goes down to piano, and at the very end it goes pianissimo. I'm going to play the first fortissimo part of this prelude, and I'm just going to use all the energy equally on all the keys, and yet the melody, the top line, will come out loud and clear.

Now if I play that pianissimo section, which is almost the same chords, but I play it all equal as I just did now, the melody will be lost.

But by delineating the top note, by reaching with the top fingers and having the weight in that side of the hand heavier than the left side of your right hand, you can bring out the top notes to get this beautiful balance.

So it's interesting, when playing loudly, the top notes just come out anyway, as I demonstrated earlier.

Even if I were to play those exact same chords quietly, with the equal balance just like I did, listen how lackluster it sounds.

Now even though this isn't written piano, I'm going to play it piano again, bringing out the top notes, delineating the melody compared to accompaniment in a much more extreme manner the softer you play.

That's the secret.

So that's in a nutshell.

One secret of balancing on the piano, the softer the playing, the more extreme delineation you must have for a melody compared to accompaniment. It's just the acoustical property of the piano.

I hope this is helpful for you. And bring your questions here to robertolivingpianos .com, your online piano resource. Thanks for joining me. Thumbs up. And you know the drill. If you haven't subscribed, go for it. You'll get notification about new videos. See you next time.

Thanks for watching.

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