Music Video Lesson: 2 Essential Tools for Musicians

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin with 2 Essential Tools for the Musician.

You know, you practice hard, you try to improve your playing, you wonder, is there any device that can help you with your practicing? Well, I've got good news for you. There are two you're going to learn about today, and I'm sure you're already familiar with them, but I'm going to tell you how you can make the best use out of these two essential tools for the musician.

One of them, of course, is the mighty metronome. You might have guessed it. Love it or hate it, it really is essential in your practice. Now, why is the metronome so important? You might think that since you have a good sense of rhythm, you don't need the metronome anymore. Maybe you even practice with tapping your foot, and you think... You think, you got it covered, you don't need no stinking metronome, you can play perfectly. Well, first of all, as you well know on the piano, I guess you could tap your left foot, but it's not only in your way for the pedals, but it's distracting to the audience. Now, there are certain styles of music where tapping your foot is accepted and maybe even beneficial. In hard -driving jazz, you'll see great players tapping their foot because it's such highly energetic, rhythmically oriented music, but in classical music, this is really... It takes away from the experience, and you want to have an internal clock, and there are nuances of tempo and there's roboto and there's retards. There's a host of things. Now, the metronome also is a savior because you work on a piece, and let's say you have a really particularly difficult passage, you want to get it up to speed. Well, obviously, working with the metronome, doing progressively faster metronome speeds is one technique, or even to check your work to make sure you're playing everything at the same speed, but maybe you work really hard, you get this one passage that you never could get fast enough, and you don't even realize you've overcompensated. Now, you're playing that section faster than you think.

None of us has a perfect clock in our heads. This is why the metronome is absolutely essential. Now, this is an old school... Well, not that old school, it's not one of these wind -up type, but it's old school in that it's a physical metronome rather than an app. Now, apps are great in some respects, although there's some apps that default to the accented beat. Now, I have a pet peeve against these accented beats. Why? Well, first of all, they're completely unnecessary. If you don't know where the first beat of the measure is, you better check your score.

But worse than that, let's say you're playing that same Beethoven. Now, first I'm going to get to what I love about some of the apps, like this is natural metronome, and many apps have this. So, you're playing it, and you wonder, what speed is this? So, you just tap the metronome, and there we go.

So now, you got it.

Now, what's wrong with accented beats? Well, those are eighth notes sticking. In 4 -4, that would be 1 and 2. So, you have 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1. So, that's a long time to wait for the 1 to come around. Every time you want to play, you've got to wait all those ticks for the ding or the accented sound. It wastes your practice time. It's completely unnecessary. So, find an app that doesn't have an accented beat, or you can turn it off, and a little hack you can use if yours doesn't have that feature. It's just set your time signature with the top number being 1. If you're in 1 -4, or 1 -3, or whatever it is, they're all going to be the same because only one beat in each measure. Boom, you've got all the same sound. So, what else is wrong with these metronomes? Well, you notice they do go slower and faster than old school metronomes, but you know, honestly, when are you going to want to go slower than 42? I mean, that is pretty ungodly slow.

Any slower than that is really hard to stay with the metronome. And faster than 208? I mean, you've got to just do it at half the speed and then achieve the same thing. So, it goes... It's the fact, though, that metronomes, digital metronomes, always seem to have all the numbers. So, if you're at 60, the next one is 61, 62, 63. Now, I'm a big believer in practicing metronome speeds, but on a physical metronome, you go from 60 to 63, 66, 69, and most importantly, if you're at 120, it doesn't go to 123, it goes to 126, which is twice 63. So, it's progressive in a logical fashion instead of having too many numbers compressed in the faster speeds. So, 40 to 42, then when you get to 60, it's groups of three, 60 to 63, and finally, you go from 69 to 72, 76, and it keeps going that way. If any of you knows of any kind of metronome app that has the real honest to goodness speeds of a physical metronome, you must let us know here at livingpianos.com and YouTube. We'd love to know. Now, what's the other tool? I bet you're dying to know. Well, once again, with modern technology, you can do it right here, which is an audio or video recording.

If you haven't recorded yourself, you owe it to yourself. You will learn so much. Think about the first time you ever recorded yourself talking, how weird you sounded to yourself. Well, guess what? When you play yourself playing the piano, playback the recording, you will learn so much about the way you sound that you can't imagine. You know, I was just talking to one of my students the other day who lives in Pakistan, and he was playing for his girlfriend, and the previous lesson, I had told him to exaggerate dynamics, exaggerate phrasing, and so he played for his girlfriend, and he exaggerated like crazy, and to him, I explained, you're right two feet from the piano. You don't hear it the same way a listener in the room is going to hear it, and sure enough, he exaggerated dynamics to the point that he thought it was just way too much, and she said it sounded absolutely beautiful. You could put your recording device across the room and listen to what it sounds like to somebody listening to you. Also, as I've talked about, use your recording device, whether it's audio or video, as a way to practice performing, because the first time you play for people, you might get nervous. At least you can have a little tryout for an inanimate device so that you don't have to the first time play for people, and you can listen back, and with a pencil and a score, mark the places that you need work on. So those are the two indispensable devices for the musician, the recorder and the metronome. Let us know how this works for you, and once again, anybody, if you find a metronome app that has the real speeds of physical metronomes, let us all know. Again, I'm Robert Estrin, this is LivingPianos .com, your online piano resource. You can ring the bell with a thumbs up, and spread this on social media if you like these videos. Look forward to seeing you all next time.

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