Piano Video Lesson: Setting Goals in Your Piano Practice

Welcome to Living Pianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin. There are actually three identifiable different ways to practice the piano, depending on what you're doing. I have an extended video about this on my Patreon channel, which you're all welcome to join. But I thought I'd give you a little taste about it because it's so important because knowing what you're trying to achieve is a prerequisite of getting anything accomplished when you sit down to practice. Whether you're learning a piece of music to memorize it, whether you're trying to develop your sight reading or your work on improvisation and other styles of music, these are all valuable techniques. So here's some free samples for you from Patreon.

Now notice when playing scales slowly, you avoid using the arm, you never want to do this. The reason for that is twofold. First of all, you'll never develop strength in your fingers if you're using your whole arm. You want to actually stretch the fingers with raised fingers, so you get the feeling of which keys are down and which keys are up because some of the hardest parts of scales are not just being able to play the notes precisely down, but the release of notes.

By coming up, you can see if you're looking on the side here, that all my fingers are up and out of the way. This is the proper way to practice scales slowly, so you develop independence of your fingers and stretching. Just like when warming up for exercise, you do stretching and that's exactly what slow practice in scales in this manner accomplishes.

Another essential element of technique that the wrist are responsible for is octave technique. I remember growing up, hearing my father at Carnegie Hall play the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor Piano Concerto, which I just mentioned and there's massive octave sections in that. I was always enamored and I had small hands when I finally could reach a solid octave, I really worked hard to get good octave technique. The secret to it is, once again, using your wrists. I'm going to show you trying to play octaves without using the wrists is a losing battle. Now, there are some times when octaves are slower and legato and you use your fingers like this.

I hope this has been enlightening for you, giving you a taste of what's available on Patreon and some subject that is so important, the different methods of practice, depending on what you want to accomplish. Boy, there's a really important thing that I wish all teachers would show their students. So I hope you enjoyed it. Again, I'm Robert Estrin here at Living Pianos.com, your online piano resource, and you're welcome to subscribe and ring the bell. For those of you who are subscribers, thank you. That's how I keep bringing these to you. See you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/setting-goals-in-your-piano-practice/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

Thank you for your comment, question or request!

Comment/Question deleted successfully.

Post a comment, question or special request:

Comments or questions must be between 3 and 10,000 characters long.

You may: Login  or  

Otherwise, fill out the form below to post your comment:

Add your name below:


Add your email below: (to receive replies, will not be displayed or shared)


For verification purposes, please enter the word MUSIC in the field below

---