Music Video Lesson: The Power of Musical Snippets in Your Practice

I'm Robert Estrin and you're watching LivingPianos.com. Today the power of musical snippets in your practice. What you're going to learn today is one of the most valuable techniques you could ever use in your piano practice.

And the amazing thing about it is that you can use this with almost all your music and to demonstrate for something fast in particular it's incredibly valuable I'm going to just play the beginning of the B minor scherzo Chopin because it's a little rusty and I can practice it in front of you and you can see how this technique works.

All right, so one could do the obvious and put the metronome on a slow speed and play and work it out.

The problem with that approach and you can do metronome speeds and work it up but you might hit a brick wall where you can't get any faster. Why is that? Because the technique of fast playing sometimes is dramatically different from the technique of slow playing.

Think of this on a wind instrument particularly because the breaths come in different places it's a whole different experience and even on the piano fast playing feels different from slow playing. You try to get faster and faster with the metronome and sometimes you just can't get any faster. I'm going to show you a completely different technique by using musical snippets. You reduce it to the smallest possible unit that makes sense to you. So for example, you know at the very beginning you could just take tiny amounts you could just take the first two and then the next two and put them together.

Now you might not do note by note you might instead consider note groups that fall under your hands. For example, that's basically a broken chord.

But then so you might go.

Notice how you get over the next note group as soon as you hit the new hand position.

Once again a chord.

Not note by note.

You'll never gain the speed. So you get over the next note group the next chord.

Notice when I hit the D I'm over the A sharp and C sharp.

And you can work through your music this way gaining the confidence and playing with the technique you're going to eventually use when it's up to tempo because you're playing up to tempo. You're just playing two notes three notes the number of notes that fit under your hand at a time is usually the right number or even less. Like for example.

Let's say you're playing this and it's not even.

You could just play two notes or three notes.

Try this in your practice particularly with fast music. It could be almost any piece of music where you just practice little snippets little groups of notes that fit under your hand at a time and get over the next position of the next notes that are under your fingers and work through pieces this way. And you can't believe the progress you can make when you hit a brick wall with the metronome speeds. Now you must go back and forth. Sometimes the metronome speeds are the way to go.

And other times doing this can give you an epiphany where you can get to that next level by trying a completely different technique. If one doesn't work try the other. You can switch them around go back and forth. Let me know how it works for you here at LivingPianos.com your online piano resource again. Robert Estrin. Thanks so much for joining me.

Thank you.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/the-power-of-musical-snippets-in-your-practice/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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