Piano Video Lesson: How to Create Tonal Shadings on the Piano

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. Today the subject is how to create tonal shadings on the piano.

Now what am I talking about here? Well, you know the piano is such a great instrument we all love, but it has some inherent limitations that I'm sure you're all aware and one of the things is the fact that the notes are all fading out. Almost gone already. What can you do about such a thing? Well, one of the things you can do is take advantage of that in your music. I'm going to show you how here today and I'm going to use a Chopin Ab waltz to demonstrate. Now I've talked about how to create the illusion of the breath. You have the analog, which is the weight of the arm, so you have a rise and a fall of the line.

And so for example, if I use that technique, this is how the beginning of this waltz would sound.

Perfectly acceptable, if not inspired.

So I'm going to show you a different technique.

You've got the long notes and the quicker notes. The fast notes, the long note going to a shorter note and again, long note to a short note. That long note fades out and if you catch the next note at exactly the level that that long note has diminuended to naturally, you can make it just melt into the following note and create a very interesting tonal color. So listen for all these long notes and they seem to melt into the shorter note by catching the diminuendo, the natural decrescendo of the acoustics of the piano so that the quarter note that follows that longer half note is at the exact volume the half note is reached at that point and you can create this sound.

Now this is just one example of so many.

Listen to Vladimir Horowitz. He utilizes this technique, a tremendous amount in his recordings and you can hear how he takes the characteristic of the piano that for some people is the biggest weakness and turns it into an amazing strength with these tonal colors and shadings that somehow magically work even though when you try to analyze them, they don't even seem to make sense because it's not playing this overarching rise and fall as much as it is taking advantage of the nuance of the natural tonal properties. Of the envelope of the sound of the piano.

I want you to try experimenting with your music and let us know here in the comments of living pianos .com and YouTube what pieces lend themselves to this sort of tonal shading and then we can all experiment together on these different pieces and see what's possible on the piano by taking its biggest shortcoming and turning it into the sparks of creativity in the tonal shadings in your playing.

Again I'm Robert Estrin. This is livingpianos.com your online piano resource. Thank you for joining me and subscribing. We'll see you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-to-create-tonal-shadings-on-the-piano/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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