Music Video Lesson: Tempo Must be the Lowest Common Denominator

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin, this is livingpianos.com, your online piano resource. Today's subject is tempo must be the lowest common denominator. Now, what am I talking about? Well, you sometimes hear performers and they start off and everything's going great. And then they get the parts and they don't quite know it as well as the other part. And they have to slow down in order to accommodate and maybe they'll speed up again when they get to the part they know better. Well, this is really a terrible way to perform. Now I understand the temptation. If you, for example, you know a piece and you know all of it, at a nice tempo that sounds great. And then there's one part that you can't quite play up the tempo. So you figured, okay, I'll just play everything up to there and slow down. Well, you don't want to do that. So what do you do in order to correct this?

Well, if it's just a few key sections of a piece that you can't quite play up to tempo, work on those sections, zero in on what you can't play up to tempo and work with a metronome. We're doing metronome speeds to get those sections up to the speed of the rest of the piece. Better yet, get them even faster than the rest of the piece. So your weakest parts of your performance become your strongest parts. But if you find yourself ever in a situation where you're really don't have parts of it up to speed, you must take the tempo that you can play the whole piece, including those sections. Now, if this is a piano lesson or something of that nature, that's not really necessary, a teacher will understand that. Yeah, you haven't quite gotten that coda up to speed yet in your Chopin Ballade, but you want to at least play the rest of it up to speed and even the parts of the coda, you can play up the speed.

But in performance, lock in the right tempo. And here's what I suggest for you. How do you do this? Think of a piece that you're playing, that you have a couple of trouble sections, that you really worked hard on and listen to yourself play it. And then find the speed at which you can play those sections and kind of, in your mind, think of that tempo and then make that the tempo of your piece. Because you will make a much more convincing and satisfying performance that maintains tempo throughout rather than changing tempo to accommodate parts you can't play as fast. You might think that it doesn't make you sound as impressive because hey, you can play these other parts so fast. But believe me, it will be much more enjoyable for the listener and there'll be more impressed with you as well for getting a musically, more cohesive performance. That's it for today. Once again, I'm Robert Estrin here at livingpianos.com. Thanks so much for joining me.

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