Piano Video Lesson: 3 Ways to Bring out the Melody in Your Piano Playing

Welcome to livingpianos.com. Robert Estrin here with the question of how to bring out the melody in your piano playing. One of the great things about the piano is that you have control over all the individual sounds and lines in your playing. But how can you do that? I've talked about some techniques before, today, I'm going to give you three techniques for bringing out the melody in your piano playing.

Now, typically you can think of the melody as being the top line but that certainly isn't always the case. And what I'm going to show you can work no matter where the melody is, although, the melody in what I'm going to use as an example is on the top where the melodies are typically found. I'm going to use the second movement of Beethoven Sonata, Opus 10, Number One, the C Minor Sonata. And the second movement is an A flat major. And I'll just so you to know which piece I'm playing, let me pay you a little bit of the beginning of it and it'll refresh your memory if you've heard this before.

(music)

Okay, a gorgeous movement. Beethoven could write a slow movement like no one else. So what are some techniques you can do to bring out that melody? Because if I were to just play it without regard for the top-line being louder than the rest of it, of course, I talked about your big heavy thumbs right in the middle. You'd get a sound like this. This is without trying to balance any particular way just letting the hands flop on those keys the way they naturally would want to.

(music)

It's interesting. Some of those inner lines come to your attention, so it's not all bad. And indeed, balance isn't just melody and everything else, you want to be able to craft all of the lines and the balance, both horizontally as the melody is going across, as well as vertically the balance in each and every chord. A great challenge so how do you approach such a thing? Well, I'm going to start with something that I've talked about many times before and then give you two new techniques as well. One of them is just to use different articulations and whatever you want to bring out, you play legato and the ones you want to underplay you play with kind of a gentle fingers staccato. So if you just wanted to practice bringing up the melody, you could do this.

You might actually choose to bring out more than just the melody. You might want to bring out the bass and the melody and you could do something like this.

(music)

Could you bring out inner lines if you wanted to?

(music)

There's no end to the possibilities. Whatever you want to draw the listener's attention to, play those notes legato and then gently release with a gentle finger staccato other notes. And it trains your hand which notes are down, which notes are up, which ones then you can give more emphasis to. Well, what else can you do? Are there easier techniques than that? Because that's really a very difficult thing to achieve by the way. Yes fortunately, there are something as simple as reaching for the melody notes you want to bring out. And notice how this works, reaching with the fingers.

(music)

If you get that sense that your fingers are reaching for the notes you want to hear, they are going to come out more. So that's two techniques, different articulations and reaching for the notes you want to bring out. One more technique that could be extremely valuable in certain applications which is leaning on one side of the hand more than the other to balance the weight of the hand, not on the left-hand side, but the right hand side of your right hand, so that you have more weight on that side of the hand then you have on the left side of your hand to get this kind of a balance. And of course the left hand, just underplaying completely.

(music)

Enrich core technique, that could be a wonderful way to bring a melody without having to resort to such difficult practice techniques. Simply leaning different sides of the hand, depending on what you want to bring out. If you want to bring out the top in your right hand, you lean towards the pinky. And if you want to bring out an inner line, you've leaned the other way towards your thumb and your other fingers. So those are three techniques you can try out. If you've ever had difficulty coming up with a balance you want in something you play, it could be any music at all, try all three of these techniques, and you may find that one or two of them will be particularly useful for a certain texture or certain type of writing.

And you could always try them all and see what helps you to bring out what you want in your music because that is what is so great about the piano is the control you have over all the lines and it's such a pleasure to get the sound you're after. Try this out, let me know how it works for you. Again, I'm Robert Estrin, this is livingpianos.com, your online piano resource. Lots more videos to come, thanks to all my supporters. And if you ring that bell and subscribe more people get to see these videos. Thanks a lot for joining me, we'll see you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/3-ways-to-bring-out-the-melody-in-your-piano-playing/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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