Bro, it's not a short. Have some patience... there's a massive amount packed into just 8 minutes here... stuff that cost me thousands of dollars and hours upon hours of private lessons to learn myself... and I've put it all out in this video FOR FREE AND IN 8 MINUTES.

@@PianistAcademy1 listen man, you spent the first minute with garbage. You could have easily deleted the first minute. Im sure there was valuable content afterward, but just think man: we are here with our time and you are wasting it

@@nachhilfehvm A whole lot of others who've seen this have said the first minute was their favorite bit ;-) and it convinced them to actually watch the rest.

@@PianistAcademy1 yeah it was great seeing you acting how you sleep on the piano, it truly gave me a lot of value

Thanks! Bethany’s digital is a Kawai yes, not sure which model. She runs Pianoteq for her sounds. This one was different than what I’ve heard her use in the past, so not sure which instrument she likes most!

Bethany's the star of this channel.

Every 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month, at 10am Mountain Time, USA. 👍🏻

I wish that were still the case for me :-). These days I find it difficult to memorize anything that's not an extreme technical challenge. If I can sight read it or close to (which I'd say I can do for the vast majority of the repertoire out there, definitely everything up to about RCM level 10 is sight readable for me), memory just doesn't come easily because while I'm practicing, I can read all of the info I need right off the page and execute it in real time. I end up having to make a very concerted effort to memorize in those cases, challenging myself to play one phrase here and there without score and figure out how to get it ingrained without the many hours of practice needed to build muscle memory. It's quite a different experience from earlier in my life when every single measure was a challenge, technically, in some way. Here's a recent example... I was practicing Chopin Op 25 No 12 to teach in a masterclass earlier this year. I had never earnestly studied the piece before, just dabbled. I gave myself a good hour each day on it for about 2 weeks prior to the event and, even now, many months later, I still have it memorized. Not saying it was "performance ready" in just 2 weeks... it wasn't THAT good lol. But absolutely ready to teach at a very high level and completely memorized. This morning I was just working on a handful of my own compositions and arrangements that I have a filming engagement for in a few months. These are pieces I've written, that I've performed in the past, that I've probably practiced for hundreds of hours over the course of the last 3 to 5 years. And *none* of them are memorized lol. I'd like to play them from memory in a few months, but working that requires a whole different kind of discipline than just practicing well, because when I read off the score, it's already concert ready. Put the score away and I can't even make it through one or two bars. Just throwing that out there! Thanks for watching and thanks for the comment!

Thanks for watching, Shaun! I don't have a video on arpeggios in particular, but the first 3 gestures from Hanon-Faber are exactly what you'd apply, although it would be a bit more minimal wrist motion. RH ascending would be a lower wrist circle for each octave up, turn around at the top would be this, "Around the Corner" gesture, and descending would be an upper wrist circle for each octave. Like the gestures in the book, LH would get the opposite wrist motion for ascending/descending.

@@PianistAcademy1 perfect, that answers exactly what I need. Thank you good sir

Hello David! Great questions! To answer your first one... I teach and I compose, arrange, and perform simply because I love it all. I'm lucky enough that all of my private students are very dedicated... I don't have anyone who isn't "serious." Serious doesn't have to mean amazing players or someone destined to do a degree or more in piano... it just needs to mean that they are dedicated to learning, hungry to be better, and put the time in practice to see results. I love teaching students like that. And I love the creative process of both interpreting the great repertoire and writing my own stuff. Its life-giving. To your second question, that's a very difficult question to answer in just a comment lol. I have another video here on the channel called "To Memorize or Not To Memorize" that would be great for you to watch. For me personally, the ease of memorization depends greatly on the difficult of the passage in question. I can memorize difficult passages and pieces with relative ease because of the simple amount of repetition necessary to learn them in the first place. Memorizing easier passages and easier rep I find challenging, because very often, it takes relatively little time playing the music for it to be "concert ready," which means I'll have built next to no muscle memory. In those cases, I try to build an additional structure using the 3 other pillars of memory (I talk about those in that video I referenced above). I rarely today have a need to play from memory, even in concert, so my habits are different than what they used to be. But when I was studying and during my degrees, I wouldn't be "allowed" to have a lesson on a piece or a segment of a piece if I needed the score. That meant memorizing early and often. Practice would regularly be huge amounts of repetition of one or two pages of a piece per day... I'm talking 2 hours for maybe 40 bars of Rachmaninoff... every day... day after day... not going on to the next segment... just repeating those and learning them better and better and better. Probably after day 1 or 2 of doing that, I'd have those bars memorized or close to it, even though they'd still be well under tempo. And if I still had time to sit and practice for 4 or 6 hours each day, I could very likely still memorize in that way!

@@PianistAcademy1 Oh my goodness, perfect response thank you so much

As long as the mics are phase-aligned, you can choose whatever balance you'd personally like! It really comes down to a matter of taste. The DG recordings you seem to favor sound like they are made predominantly of a mix of the middle distance (about 10 feet away or so)... citing the Yuja Vienna recital album, if there were even 3 sets of mics (I can see 2 sets in the trailer video), I'd guess it's about 70% the hanging mics just off stage (about 10 feet away), 20% the close mics near the rim of the piano, and 10% ambience from far mics OR faked ambience in post with reverb at about this amount. As an engineer, even in halls, I like to favor a closer perspective for the intimacy of it. In the recording I mentioned on the stream, I used about 40% of the close mics, 50% of the mid mics, and 10% of the far room mics. That sort of balance looks "on paper" like it still favors the mid mics, but the immediacy of the tone from close mics makes them very prominent very early or low in the mix. In my final recording, even with that balance I cite, it sounds like you're sitting near the lip of the stage, 3 to 5 feet from the piano. Recording in my home studio for this channel and my other, I almost don't have a choice. I can either close mic or... close mic a little further away lol. The absolute furthest I can mic is probably about 3 or 4 feet from the instrument, which by classical standards, is still quite close. And I'm forced to do that because of how small the room is. If you want some examples in my own spaces... Listen to my Schumann "Of Foreign Lands and Peoples" annotated recording. That was mic'd with a very spaced pair (about 2.5 to 3 feet apart) and about 4 feet from the lid of the piano. My recent originals (listen to "Holding Hands" for example) were mic'd with a closely spaced pair (about 1 foot apart), angled at about 90 degrees, but away from each other (so approximately an ORTF pair), and were about 6 inches outside the rim of the piano. All of my streams here use a very close pair so that my voice is as isolated as possible from the piano. So here on the stream, my mics are under the lid, about 2 to 3 inches from the strings themselves, near the bridge and pointed straight down. I've experimented with having multiple pairs up in my place, but too often its been a waste. My room is just too small (even at nearly 600 sq ft) to get the benefits of mid distance.

@@PianistAcademy1 Thanks for taking the time to give such a detailed answer even though you obviously do not dig the subject 🤣. I'll listen to your recordigs and treasure your advice for my experimenting with the bitklavier library. SFZ opcodes also allow easy micromanaging delay which adds another variable. Playing jazz the reverb effect is not always appropiate but still fun to play with.

Thanks!!

I'd say a bit of both. I feel, and most of my teachers have told me, that my sense of musicality, phrase, and artistry has usually been instinctive to me or close to it. On the contrary, I feel I've had to work hard to develop the technique to execute what my "mind's ear" hears. I was "behind" technically compared to my highest achieving contemporaries when I was 10-14 years old... I couldn't technically keep up with the kids who were winning the competitions. It really wasn't until I was far out of school and into my 30s before my technique really felt like it was where I wanted it to be, but it still takes a lot of work to maintain it. I still made my way through a few competition wins in my early 20s and studied/played some of the biggest repertoire like the Liszt Sonata, the Aurandt Sonata, many of the Rachmaninoff Etudes Tableux, and other stuff in a similar vein. But 15+ years after my first time playing that repertoire, it would feel much much more technically secure today.

But also, my 30 minutes of progress is informed by a lifetime of practice and study :-)

Tim, that's a tough question to give a relatively concise answer! I'd suggest you to get either the Faber or Alfred Adult Piano method books (Faber has 2 levels, Alfred has 3), or work through both simultaneously if you have the desire! I'd also supplement that with technique and selections from the RCM (Royal Conservatory of Music) leveling system. You can find the complete syllabus for all 12 levels of the RCM program for free online, and you can either choose to find materials to help you along that journey yourself or you can purchase books from RCM that will save you the time in finding the material elsewhere. And if you'd like to play music other than notated classical stuff, learn chord harmony and how to read a lead sheet. I don't have any resource suggestions on that front as I typically teach that on the spot and off the top of my head to my own students. I hope that helps!

Thank you very much for that response, it was extremely helpful. I will most definitely look into those suggestions. Thanks for your time, and thank you for your content. It’s a great channel.

Haha, I might fully agree with you if I hadn't personally had the mechanisms of 2 artist benches fail on me... one after about 10 years (which I think is OK, but still...) and another after only about 2 years. Neither were Jensen benches, but cost nearly that much and were directly from piano manufacturers themselves. The cushion on this one is quite comfy, and the padding isn't showing any signs of divot or wear after something like 1,500 hours on it.

Thanks! Looking forward to seeing you on this week's stream!

@PianistAcademy1 I'll email you a different piece instead called album leaf and I will give my performance of it as well I just need to relearn it

@@RhodesyYT Take your time! I already have both slots for this Wednesday filled, so you'll be looking at July 24!

@PianistAcademy1 alr that's fine can I pre book a slot it will probably take me a week to relearn this piece

@@RhodesyYT Sure, the first spot on the 24th is yours!

Thanks for listening!

Love it!

LOL. Well, to be brutally honest, I’ve never liked Pianoteq. Even if they wanted to sponsor my content and pay for product placement, I still wouldn’t use it 😂. Simply put, it sounds like a digital keyboard. Whereas I don’t think the Garritan CFX, the offerings from VI Labs, and Noire sound fake… they sound quite real to me. The Garritan product turned 10 years old this year. I think the last update it got was in 2017. Noise reduction has come a long way in that time, but it’s still really tricky to do well. VI Labs employs their own proprietary noise reduction in the libraries they create to make great sustain and pure resonance while still keeping noise at near 0 during the entirety of playback. But the exact reason I love the Garritan (the distance of the piano from the mics) is the same reason they probably can’t do any further management of the noise floor without introducing artifacts that ruin the room tone. Any time you record with a real instrument and with real equipment, you’ll get some sort of very low level noise floor. Even on some of my recent recordings with just 2 mics open, when I want to boost the super high end by 10 or 20 db, I end up “bringing up” the noise level quite significantly in order to balance the tone of the piano to what I want. Add my compression and limiting to that, and I probably “increase” the noise floor of my own recordings by something like 40 db between raw and finished master. When it starts at something like -100 or -90db, it’s still very manageable and nearly inaudible if it ends up being -60 on the final master. That’s still quieter than tape. In both of my upcoming releases, I went through and did my own series of noise reduction on all of my tracks to keep the silence very nearly true silent. I don’t layer patches from various libraries, but I do mix mic positions within libraries occasionally. Sometimes with various libraries, the instruments aren’t tuned exactly the same way, so layering would be impossible.

@@PianistAcademy1 And still, unlike other libraries, most of the big piano brands allow Pianoteq to use their names (not M&H though 🙂). Could it be only marketing? I find Pianoteq convenient as a base to experiment, at my unprofessional level, since it is Linux native and does not require a gazillion GB or HD space. Since you mention tuning, I was wondering if you had to modify the temperament of your Kawai after the upgrade. Some day, perhaps, I might buy a baby grand and, knowing myself, I'd most likely want to tune it, so I have been reading a bit on the subject. Matter of fact, I think you owe your hardcore followers a video about your Kawai transformation.

@@antoniomaccagnan7200 Pianoteq has a massive following and, like I mentioned on the stream, there are a whole bunch of professional players that love it for a variety of reasons. I do know that the major companies have gotten Pianoteq their instruments to model directly so I don’t think it’s just marketing, but there is definitely an element of truth in the “modeling” of the instruments they say. Between the small footprint, that its very reliable, and also you get a massive number of tones for a very reasonable price, it’s quite the package… I know plenty of studio and live gigging players that love it for those reasons. I still have a bunch of videos I took during the Kawai transformation!

Yup, there are pros and cons to both! And that's really the point, changing fingers alone (which is how most beginner and intermediate students are taught) isn't necessarily the best path in every individual passage.

That ability to discern at such high speeds will come with more time and ear training practice!

At least "Kinderszenen" is Scenes from Childhood... unlike Schumann's "Album for the Young" which are definitely study pieces originally intended for young students. Personally, I view all of the pieces in Kinderszenen as reflections on childhood but from an adult perspective. Because of that, I think all of the pieces, individually and as a whole set, are completely viable to present on the professional concert stage. But contrary, you'd never hear Album for the Young performed by any of the greats live lol.

Congrats and I hope the practice is going well! Keep looking for new things in the repertoire especially. Work on super fine details of phrase, dynamics, articulation etc. Listen to more and more performances of your rep by some great artists and look for all of the ways their interpretations differ and how/why they are successful. And also, you don't have to practice every piece every single day. In fact, if you have 2 hours to practice and you are truly diving into the details, you probably won't have enough time to get through more than half of your repertoire in a given day ;-). A day between can be really nice to let the subconscious do it's job and refresh the conscious mind to tackle the piece again when ready.

It’s hard to limit the list! Just about any piece of repertoire you can think of you could apply this. The shortest and most concise example might be Burgmuller’s Op 100 No 2, which follows an almost literal representation of the motion presented here. But truly, wrist circles can be applied to Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and more. Instead of thinking where can these exercises (from the book in its entirety) apply, you might instead think, which of these motions best suits the phrase in question. I’d venture to say that 99% of time, you’ll find your answer within one of the gestures in the book.

@@PianistAcademy1 Thank you!

Almost always, any lifting of the finger results in the hand and tendons controlling the fingers fighting against themselves. There are occasionally professional pianists who make that technique work, but many of them also suffer injuries because of it. A preparatory motion is always necessary, which is why the argument for “lift” happened in the first place. My philosophy is to make the preparatory motion as efficient, small, and healthy as possible (usually more with wrist than finger) to allow the actual motion we play with (down) to work as best and as predictably as possible. The faster you need to play, the more all motion needs to be minimized and made more efficient. But there’s also the question of finger engagement to consider. A teacher might ask for more lift simply to try and engage the fingers more on the downward motion. We can’t replace finger engagement with wrist movement, they both need to work in conjunction with one another, but even so, I tend to teach engagement without lift as much as possible.

Thanks for the comment! Eventually, I will venture out into repertoire like that, but right now the channel is only a little over 2 years old and I'm focused on producing content of some of the most played repertoire to continue to build viewership. I resisted starting with Op. 9 No. 2, but this particular Nocturne (27/1) is one of my favorite pieces in all of the repertoire!

@@PianistAcademy1 That's great. Actually this one (27/1) is not a problem at all. I was thinking about the other C-sharp minor nocturne, which is No. 20 posthumous.

Thanks for watching!

Congrats on the new buds! I love my AirPod pros.

@PianistAcademy1 oh yeah did you find out the beethoven swing sonata?

@@RhodesyYT I looked it up and do know/recognize that spot, yes... I've honestly never thought about it as in swing! I still don't think I would because I don't think it would lend itself to quite the right emotion, but I definitely hear the resemblance.

Thank you!

A G F# D E

C# D

Thank you, Giuseppe!

Thanks so much for watching, and I'm so glad to hear you enjoy playing my arrangements! I hope you'll share some videos of yourself performing them sometime as well!

Thanks, Antonio!

100% yes. This principle is especially true in contrapuntal work. But if I’m honest, even teachers that will typically stress this in Bach seem to miss a multi-voice approach to learning and understanding other repertoire.

You have a perfect spot to begin applying this in the piu mosso of op 27 no 1 😉 you might not need to separate out the voices more than once or twice given your current level of preparation, but you will phrase those bars differently through this lens.

@@PianistAcademy1 indeed! Now is the time to start polishing

Hand separate is most beneficial for learning chords with pedal in the left hand. This really helped me as I am not great with pedal.