 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. In this lesson, I'm basically going to show you the difference between legato and staccato. So legato and staccato are two very familiar terms, right? You may have heard it, even if you haven't learned music officially in a school or in a classical system, so to speak, you may find people just saying, can you make that more staccato or can you sing that a bit more legato? Now there are definitions for these, which you'd find in books, but I'm more interested in this lesson or concerned in this lesson to show you how it applies on our instrument, the piano. How do you actually know that you're playing legato and staccato and what are the mechanics behind them, what are the muscles going to do, how are the muscles going to change, how are you going to think, and also I'd like to talk about legato and staccato, which sometimes we fail to do, legato and staccato doesn't only apply to melody, it will apply to both the melody and the harmony aspects. So if this is a melody, for example, while this is a chord progression. So we need to decide whether to make the chord progression, legato, staccato, what are the tools used for that, and what are the tools used to make the melody legato and staccato, right? So lots to learn in this lesson, try to watch till pretty much the very end and if you like what we do, if you're on our channel for the first time, it'll be great if you can hit that subscribe button, turn on the bell icon for regular notifications, can consider following us on Instagram or Patreon as well for regular handwritten notes for pretty much all the lessons we would do and ever do, hopefully, right? So let's just get cracking then. So legato and staccato from a melodic perspective, if you take just a simple scale drill, let's say I'm just taking the scale of D major, now I'm just playing that ascending and descending, just rather boring, rather simple, but you get the idea. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, Now the first concern is when we do play an exercise like that, sometimes because of the tension in the fingers or rather the slipping potential of the fingers, in some cases if you play, your ring finger may just slip, you know? So those are the things which we try to take care of. So the first thing you'd like to do is whatever exercise you play, first start by default, playing it slowly, so you go, there we go, and what I like to think when it comes to slow or speed, I tend to think played at a thinking pace, like you should not let any of those notes run away from you. So at a thinking pace or at a singing pace, like I can actually sing this stuff, so that's what I mean by speed. A lot of us teachers may tell you, you know, play slower, play faster, but what do we mean by that? There are also fancy words out there, you know, Adagio, Allegro, Lento and all of that. I'm honestly not the world's best at those definitions. Maybe I have to learn some Italian, I guess. So the point of these terms, whether it's slow or fast, slow should feel slow to you and you should understand what you're playing on your respective instruments. So if it's a piano, here's what I do. If I play that exercise, I'm letting my head move always with a pulse and I'm dividing by two with respect to my right hand, see, two and three and four and one. Now at this speed, if you feel your ring finger is slipping, the ring finger tends to slip very often, you know, it may slip. So if you get that feeling, slow it down even more, there we go. To make things interesting, you can always do it on the minor. I like that. Minor third and the left hand is always there to support it, or you can do the same thing with both the hands together and you also realize when you play with both hands, you're not going to rush that hurrying factor will not because the faster you go, you're losing the hands. At least I can't go that fast, you know, so with the two hands, so it's always good to play with two hands, it's always good to play slow, it's always good to play at a thinking speed, it's always good to play at us in a singing way, you know, try to sing as you play and another way you would want to first play your exercise is to see how you can use accents to make the exercise sound a lot more understood or knowledgeable for you. So, maybe play the lowest note and the highest note louder, right, so I just wanted to talk about that before we actually talk about the actual legato and staccato motion or the muscular movements required for that. What did I say again? I'm talking about keeping a very steady tempo, I'm talking about playing at a thinking speed, you should be able to know what you're doing, you need to be able to sing what you're doing and well, then the usual stuff of course, you need to stay relaxed and all of that. What I find helps me sometimes while playing the piano is to just focus a bit on your breathing, it makes the process a lot more relaxing if you ask me and yeah, breathing will really help. Breathing also helps the dynamics, so as you breathe in, you tend to get louder, as you breathe out, you tend to get softer. So anyway, coming back to the drill at hand, guys, understanding legato and staccato, so if you do legato, here's, first of all, let me show you what you should not do and what is not legato, so okay, now if you were to actually play that in the lower register or with your left hand in comparison with something which is legato, I'm guessing you're hearing a huge difference in the clarity of the notes, right? If I played it this way without thinking much, sometimes we may overlap the notes, like that's not a great sound because that is a major second interval, it's not a very consonant interval and the problem gets even more bigger as you go lower on the piano, like if I go left, it's almost impossible to play without legato. See how usable legato is, so it may even help to play the exercises or you could do this exercise or any exercise in a lower register, then you really feel the need for legato, okay, without absolute chaos, all the notes are fighting with each other because they are overlapping, see, they're overlapping with each other, so what exactly happens or the mindset when you're playing legato, when you're playing legato, as you can see with each finger, there is a kind of a recoil which is happening, so if I play D and now I'm getting ready to play the E which is the next note, when I hit this E, I'll be lifting my previous finger off the D, so got that, it's like ridiculously simple, it looks but it's not so easy if you think about it, so go D, now when you whack the E, you lift the D, so in a sense, whenever you're playing a note on the piano, you're kind of unplaying the previous note, so it's like a recoil action, sort of like you're playing carom board or something like that on the instrument, so it's a recoil, so when I play E, I lift my pinky, when I play F sharp, I'm going to lift E, see it's exactly timed, but if I go, ouch, that doesn't sound so great, does it, so rather, there we go, start slow, you're only going to get this if you do it slowly and that's legato, so you don't want to overlap your notes, that sounds bad but at the same time, you don't want to chop your notes, what I mean by that is, that's a chopping effect, not so great, it's a good effect here and there, but it's not legato, this would make it legato, huge difference, legato, overlapping with some chopping, so with chopping, you can even do it tastefully by lifting your fingers at the off beat, see, you can actually make the choppy effect more tasteful, you can even make the overlapping effect a bit more tasteful by going, check that out, I'm only sustaining the root or the sa or the D while the rest of the stuff happens with that, sustain, that's a nice effect, this is also a department which we call as finger independence, so there's legato with the other fingers but there is a hold, there's like a semi-briever, a whole note with my the lowest finger here, so nice for finger independence, I'm demonstrating it with both hands, it's not what you have to do, you can do this with one hand as well, let's just recap what we've done so far, we've done what should not be legato, that is don't overlap your notes, don't chop off your notes even though that's a cool effect and then what is legato, it's the idea of recoiling the finger, the previous finger, so you play one and you lift one, playing this, lifting that, playing this, lifting that, playing this, lifting that, so this takes some time but over time it can get smooth and I would encourage you to play it in your bass, play it in your left hand and your right hand really low to really see the impact of legato, if you play it here, you'll know when it sounds really bad, same thing here, you can't make out the impact of legato or the problem of not doing legato in the higher register, you can figure it out more in the lower register, right guys so that's about legato for your melody, if you're doing legato for chords, now I am going to talk about the opposite of legato which is staccato very shortly but let me just spend a quick moment just talking about legato for chords and it's pretty much the same thing but I'm just going to tell you the concepts you may need to learn or should learn in order to shift smoothly between your chords legato, so you have let's say a chord D major, now you don't want to play the next chord let's say G major here because you have to lift your hand and go there and it also honestly does not sound cool so where you want to understand legato is how you can retain if there is a common note between the chord try to retain that note that's D or I can go up so this is a more easy way to go between the two chords and we call this as chord inversions so if you use chord inversions if you learn chord inversions you're automatically going to be playing your chords legato and the last point I'd like to mention with legato is what if you cannot do legato in cases like a bigger voicing in the left hand like 1, 5 and 10 I can't reach that F sharp it's impossible for my hand so that's where you need to start using the pedal so okay so with pedal comes great responsibility because you can't you can't just keep the pedal on all the time see it sounds horrendous so you then need to play a chord lift it change the chord especially in the left change lift change can even lift pretty much at the time of playing the chord but you have to listen there we go okay so that's about legato for chords now let's talk about the idea of staccato guys so first staccato if I take the same music if I want to go staccato with this stuff I now I could well staccato just means absolutely choppy so you're trying to make the sustain of the note to be as short as possible of course there are other concerns like your piano may have reverb on it may you may be playing the piano in an actual room which reverberates and there may be some kind of a resonance which a resonating frequency will be there in pretty much all rooms so you staccato may not be a perfect halt because it also determines the room it depends on the room which you're in so what you do is you try to create the staccato and this is how you could do it the general way I like to do staccato is to flick if I'm taking a chord or if I'm taking a note is to flick the finger back to the palm it's like you're trying to close it back so now why do I prefer this why do I prefer this primarily because I'm not lifting my arm the rest of my arm is not bothered it's just the finger so again it's sort of like a recoil but you're moving the finger towards the palm you're just moving it inside trying to create a fist staccato now you could also couple this idea by by bouncing off your wrist as well so you could move the finger towards the palm you could also get a even more obvious staccato by jumping your wrist so try that versus that so you don't want to just bring your hand out you you can do this with the wrist the wrist makes it a lot more easier without the wrist you're putting more strain on the forearm and other parts of the hand but with the wrist it kind of makes the process a lot more easy so okay okay so that's let's let's demonstrate the drill with staccato like that don't play like you're getting a like a shock from the piano if you're playing like that then your whole body is going to like shiver you know so so this is staccato created just with the fingers and a little bit of the wrist for for just overall support or overall control you could also try both legato and staccato by just moving your wrist a little bit you could either move your wrist up and down try that out or you could go in circles sometimes I may do both maybe while playing faster you could go circles while doing chords you could go up and down now coming to staccato it's a lot tougher to do staccato faster so when you're going fast staccato that's where you need to really use your wrist if you keep your wrist the same way it's gonna start hurting here these muscles the forearm so you can already see I think you can see my forearms shivering but if I use my wrist see this is a very important thing of both staccato and legato if I just do this with my wrist it's not easy this will take a fair amount of time but I hope I want you to see the reason why we do this because if I don't do this this even my tricep my shoulder everything is shivering and it's hurting my wrist also strangely enough even though you're not doing much with the wrist you're hurting your wrist so this should not tighten the forearm and tricep should not tighten so to prevent all that from happening check this out it's just the wrist everything's chilled out yes my forearm is used wrist but doing this with the wrist is also very musical remember so keep this going and you see how lightly I'm doing it right I'm not I'm not doing it forcefully I'm not like go up wrist or come down this no I'm not doing that I'm just going with the music almost pulse like it's almost like the wrist is move like like how I'm moving my head with the song the wrist also goes so with staccato playing you really want to consider that if your hand starts paining now in all probability if your hand is not play a paining you're probably doing it well so you may not want to over-hype these things which I'm telling you but definitely you can consider the flick the flicking of the finger can really help and with a little bit of wrist and when it comes to staccato for chords you really need to use the wrist like check that see if I do this without wrist the pain is shot up so check this out and even in the left hand like if you do bluesy stuff check this out the wrist is always working if it did not do that I start playing very hard my wrist starts dropping and whenever your wrist drops it's not the best thing in most scenarios on the piano if you're a very experienced player I guess your wrist can drop because you've already gone through the the strength you know of playing the piano for so many years for newer players I would always recommend you know keep your wrist parallel to the keyboard and well that's about it guys so this lesson was about legato and staccato for chords let's just have a quick recap legato you want to recoil play a note and unplay the other note legato for chords is all about inversions and whenever things are too difficult for legato you cheat a little with the pedal but not really cheat I don't know why I said cheating but you get the idea so learn how to use the sustain pedal as well it can be very very helpful if you don't have one try to go to Amazon or some website and try to get something which is compatible for your keyboard and watch a few of my lessons I've done one lesson on how to pedal how to use a sustain pedal check that out it'll be there in the description now legato was all about that recoiling and unplaying the previous note staccato is just flicking you're trying to bring the finger towards you you know so something like that that's sort of what's happening and staccato can hurt can hurt your hand so for some strange reason the pain happens because we don't relax our wrist the best way to relax the wrist is to actually move the wrist so move it up and down while playing staccato very important for legato you have the option of even moving it in circles moving it in circles kind of distributes your weight legato you can also move it up and down but staccato definitely up and down whether you're doing melody or chords or some bass rock and roll stuff and all that right guys I really hope that was useful this is a very important part of playing the piano it's almost like the the bare minimum fundamental things about playing piano legato or staccato you know you decide that and then you figure out muscularily mentally how it should sound sonically and you have to be able to execute these things at a very very grass root level before you play the simplest of melodies you know that was staccato and then we have staccato see the impact it's completely different it would work for a completely different visual scene in like a movie or something so very very fundamental things about piano sometimes we don't practice these things enough so I would incorporate this in a practice session if you're doing an exercise do a little bit legato think of the legato are you actually getting it in all probability or you're not you're overlapping some notes sounds absolutely horrible so you need to think pay attention and that's a very important aspect about practicing the piano you need to be in control over your instrument and you should always kind of ask yourself after a few minutes am I actually playing it right there's no harm in like taking a step back recording it listening to it and saying oh yeah that doesn't sound so good I need to maybe work on it now I'm a bit tired next morning after a good night's sleep I will try and practice it and improve it I would say legato and staccato is as essential as like a serve in a racket ball game like tennis or batminton or something where if you don't know that you know if you can't return a ball or something yes you have to place the ball you have to then hit it harder or you know lighter and aim and whatnot but the basic essential things you have to serve so if you can't do that if you can't get the basic movement going around the sport you're doomed so it's the same with the piano don't forget legato and staccato we tend to want to learn the fancier things like you know the Andalusian cadence which is a trending topic at the moment or whatever else some other fancy words out there in the fields of harmony and rhythm like poly rhythms but if you can't do this you it's gonna be tricky to do all the other fancy stuff out there if you have any questions if you like what you learnt please leave a comment tell us what you think share the video with all your piano player friends and hopefully it's useful for them as well don't forget to give the video a like a share and don't forget to subscribe that's very important if you want to get more content from our channel send to you regular notifications as well that'll be great and patreon is always there for our handwritten notes thanks again for watching the lesson guys if you'd like to explore this even more further you could consider going to a website filling up a form in the description there should be something and you can consider doing like a regular course or something with the school thanks again for watching cheers