 Hi guys, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, I'm going to teach you all about staccato playing on the piano and how it applies to both melody playing and chordal playing. So we get started with the general posture while playing staccato, the importance of the wrist. Staccato is very important while playing staccato and staccato for those of you who may not know, just means that the duration or the length of whatever you play be it a note or a chord is as short as possible, as short as I would say as short as humanly possible or an easier way to look at it is almost drum like in nature. So if you look at the time it takes for let's say a clap to end, it almost ends at the time of me starting to clap, it's over right. So we try to get the same technique on the piano and there are a few myths while playing staccato which students or maybe people in general musicians in general think but I'll try and break that down for you and throughout the lesson we are going to incorporate both melody and chords. We are not going to just do melodic techniques which most of the YouTube videos are about we are going to do end to end melody and chords and we'll also look at how you can avoid pain in your hand especially while playing fast music, fast stuff because staccato can be a bit more tricky on the entire body than the legato style of playing which is more smoother. And we'll also look at applying staccato to real world practice environment. We look at combining it with a lot of other techniques in music in general. So before we get started it'll be awesome if you could hit that subscribe button turn on the bell icon for regular notifications and do leave us a comment with what you thought about this lesson and also suggestions for something you'd like to learn in the future. And all of my notes are waiting for you on Patreon not just for this lesson but pretty much for everything we've done in the past and what we will continue to do in the future. So we've now upgraded the offerings wherein you're not just going to get my handwritten notes you'll also get notation wherever it's applicable you'll be getting midi files you'll be getting backing tracks exercises and lots more so do head over to Patreon check out the tires and see what works best for you. So let's get started. First of all let me give you the general posture tips while playing the piano in general and more specifically for staccato. So what you don't want to do and you'll never be able to play staccato this way is drop your wrist. So if your wrist drops down like that you you just cannot play staccato so most of us while playing the piano as we get faster and faster we drop our wrist down but that technique will not work. So just keep in mind that your wrist should ideally be parallel to the piano and your palm should always be in a cupped position almost like you're holding a ball or an orange whatever is bigger depending on the size of your palm. So if you hold a ball like this it won't fall off that's generally the strategy but if this is your palm you play the piano it's going to fall down. So that's generally the idea do not play with a flat palm and this is in general you're not going to be able to play legato or staccato. So a ball may be helpful in your living room or wherever you practice piano or a fruit if folks at home actually allow you to have a fruit to practice the piano but it's also healthy so keep a fruit next to you. Fine the other thing is about our wrist and our overall upper body when we sit we need to align our body such that our back and our shoulders are always engaged while we play the piano. What I mean by that is it's okay to move forward and it's okay to move back you know and it's okay to stand it's okay to sit but you don't want to droop or drop your shoulders downward. You don't want to collapse the shoulders or droop your shoulders this way as it's going to give you back pain or back problems in the very near future you'll realize piano is almost like drumming it's almost the same thing a drummer would tell you you know so keep your shoulders engaged always and you can help that happen through your back being engaged as well your back and if possible your core. So once your shoulder is engaged what will happen is you don't necessarily use the shoulder to play the keys so I'm never going to be doing that on the piano I never use my shoulder ability sort of like playing a sport we don't use the shoulder to play rather we just use a little part of the hand which needs to be very very stable and grounded with the help of the shoulder of course providing that support with the rest of the upper body. So what happens here is I'm not playing the piano through the shoulder now here's an example of if the shoulder is used there we go you see so that's not a good that's not efficient your hand will pain and after a point it'll sound poor as well it'll be lacking dynamics you may run your timing here and there slower or faster so not recommended so my shoulder is engaged you'll find that now when you play the piano there'll be a little bit of your tricep muscle which is used but your shoulder is where it is okay and even when we play louder stuff you see my shoulder stable it's not moving anywhere if I play melodic stuff or faster arpeggios as you can see keeping that shoulder stable is very important so then you let your tricep take over you let your forearms take over you'll find a strain in the forearm and you're working your wrist and obviously your fingers so this is some general posture while playing the piano and the wrist now coming to the wrist when you play let's take a simple exercise in legato let's just take just five notes going up and down what I want you to try to do is never is don't stick your wrist in one position try to keep it either floating up and down or even inside outside sometimes or even circular or semicircular if you think about it so either of these strategies be a bit careful you don't want to move your elbow while doing any of that as you can see here my elbow is left my stomach area so you don't want to take it away from your stomach keep it very close by and then play the drill so if you play this don't keep your wrist very stiff focus on circling the wrist light circles or focus on going inside and outside something like this would help this will also give you speed you give you dynamics and you won't get any pain because your wrist is kind of dissipating the stress or the strain between the entire arm so the entire arms energy is being used to play the piano if you keep your wrist stiff again I'm no a biologist or medical expert but what I can feel is what I'm telling you the wrist is really helpful to kind of send the sort of shock waves or the energy all the way to the tricep shoulder area and send it back towards the fingers and keep it going to the forearm and if you keep it stiff it may hit your forearm and the forearm pain is a lot so I found two muscles on the piano which really really make you want to stop playing you can't go any further that's your forearm yes the forearm can get stronger over time but there's another little muscle or muscle area here that's around under the thumb this is a very forgotten part of the piano this is a muscle we strain a lot and if you drop your wrist and if you play with a fixed wrist you could hurt this muscle and once it hurts you're gonna then need to take a long break before you recover and I would advise you to take a break if any part of your body is paining take a break take a short break long break have a meal go out have a walk whatever or just don't play because you don't want to get injured while playing an instrument like the piano so these things need to be kept in mind I'm primarily telling you this to avoid pain and to be able to play for long and fast and with dynamics long fast dynamics all of the stuff which piano players need to do anyone rather needs to do so let's get to the staccato technique only in this video we leave legato for another video we'll try and combine all the three later but for now we are only dealing with staccato so if I take let's say a single note for melody the way I like to play staccato is this now one way where students may get this technique a bit inefficiently is they play or we play when I used to be like that we played such that oh man we are getting a shock from the piano and that is staccato you shouldn't act like you're getting a shock you should just play it it's an articulation so a good way to get staccato with not your thumb but these four fingers the index the middle the ring and the pinky would be to flick them towards the palm so you're playing it like this and this will give you a decent amount of staccato with more practice it'll be better and better there we go so this is a single note a b also let's say you want to play some black notes now coming to the thumb the the thumb just has these has less one less joint right than the other taller fingers so you'll have to you'll have to flick it this way you're still flicking it but you're not flicking it towards the palm you're flicking it away from the palm there we go that's your thumb okay so you may want to just take one note and make them make the note sound the same with all fingers you know rather boring exercise but get used to that you're just trying to make sure each of your fingers can generate staccato similarly with the left hand so I'm doing a thumb staccato very important the left hand for your ghost notes you'll be playing the pinky legato and then the thumb would always be staccato if you're ghosting or maybe the index finger staccato middle finger ring finger maybe a bit rare and pinky finger okay so maybe play a couple of simple melodies with staccato only okay now we get into chord so the melody what I told you was the flicking the finger towards your body or your palm technique except for the the thumb which goes outward and that's going to take a little toll on this muscle so be a bit careful and but don't don't shake your wrist don't jerk your wrist you don't want any kind of wrist injury while or any part of your hands injury while doing staccato because you're you need to give it a flick okay now coming to chords let me look at a simple triad and let's see how we can staccato the triad again there are many ways to play staccato this is how I have been doing it and it works very well for me if you saw the intro video which we did that's actually a composition of mine it's called the absence of laughter we'll put the link in the description I chose that piece at the beginning of the video just to show you how I've combined staccato with all the other techniques so I'm using it in a real world song scenario now if you take a chord let's say a G major I'm playing G major now in the root position now you need three fingers so one way to get staccato is the same strategy I told you okay now I've taught I've taught quite a few students with different age groups kids tend to find this very difficult to do and I mean people in general some some people just find it a very tricky prospect to flick all your three fingers away even though this gets you the result so when you're playing staccato for chords I would advise you to do something like this check this out it's the wrist which is sort of jumping on the piano as though the piano is a trampoline where you just jumps and you take off in the air so so play the chord now you a good way is practice the trampoline effect even without the staccato so play a chord and push push push and you're pushing the hand up through the weight of the wrist I'm moving my wrist down just to make it a bit more obvious but you don't have to move it so low now if you're playing that that action let's say now you want a staccato now you whack it and immediately the wrist goes into the air this could be a very easy way of playing staccato and you could move it in the air and also flick it towards your palm so the wrist makes it easier on the overall muscles while the flicking technique just ensures it's staccato no matter what at least that's what I do so you can do this with a variety of chords with different fingers there we go this is a bit tricky so here you may want to get that flick there we go so that's your staccato and yes it it'll be a little bit physically daunting at first if you've never done this before but this is pretty much what you could work towards and like I said earlier it's important to take breaks when you play the piano especially if you feel any kind of strain in any part of the hand whatsoever take a break another nice rule of thumb would be when you're practicing if you practice for about 10 minutes on the piano you could just take a five minute breather after that don't play for five so 10 minutes you play five minutes you take a break something like that would work really well now a few myths about staccato some youtube videos out there and some books out there explain staccato by just drawing that little that dot under the note and then they say it's similar to a note with a rest now that is what I would completely disagree with a note with a rest for example if I play four quavers at beat one two three four let me first show you four crotchets or quarter notes one two I'm showing on F so this is how a quarter note sounds two three it's legato quarter notes so it's lasting for one count now if you do eighth notes one two I'm giving that and as a gap there one two and three so my thumb or my fingers are lifting four and one and I'm lifting it at that specific subdivision which is the end and thus the note which I am playing is a quaver or an eighth note because I am giving a gap I'm giving a rest and two and three now this is not staccato staccato is complete off it's like a clap so this is a rest so practicing rest is also a very important part of music so please understand staccato is not rest it's different from rest now so far in the video we've not really seen any creative uses of staccato how you would use it in actual music so that's what I'm going to focus on now the environments to practice staccato so the first thing you would want to do is try the technique with legato so if you take a scale let's say F major I'm going ascending and legato which is smooth and descending in staccato okay so combine that you can also combine legato and staccato with chord movement so if you take maybe another chord let's say F major again I'm using my wrist trampoline technique I'm not overdoing it because I have to come back and hit the chord again so four staccatos or why not we do three staccatos and the last one should be legato so that's a good exercise to practice and when you're legatoing you're kind of pushing the next one like a trampoline you could also do it with different hit points maybe the third hit of that groove is legato or you could flip that around three legatos and one staccato you get the idea so let's also now take some real world stuff if you take this melody for instance I'm playing it legato now you tell yourself which note should you staccato and which note should you legato maybe the first half let's keep it legato legato everything's staccato one bar legato second bar staccato mix it up okay so combine it with music which is melodic or harmonic in nature along with legato another thing you'd want to work on with respect to staccato is do it with turns or what we call as appoggiaturas in music so if you do that so you can add a few staccatos or at least make the last note a staccato there we go a little faster so the last one could be staccato and that emphasizes that note you know so so try to do it in and around turns maybe maybe this idea let's take that lick again with some staccato okay you can do it with turns you can also do it with flams so a flam is more like the way a guitarist would play chords so instead of playing D minor like that a guitarist may go it's quite obvious you're playing it from top down on the guitar string so you can make that into maybe staccato movement so legato flamenco staccato flamenco is a nice way to play chords sometimes makes it very orchestral and theatric even in the left hand I'm trying some staccato out there we go it can go really well with this technique another thing you can do is with grace notes so if you take a grace note you just take a g what's the note before g at least the tone would be f so this is how we do grace notes and there we go okay if you're a bit unfamiliar about these concepts grace notes flams apogiaturas turns I've done an entire lesson on this we'll leave you this video in the description on to learn the ornaments of music or all the possible accentuations and ornaments okay so with grace notes you slide to the note and then staccato the note legato practice with legato staccato legato staccato legato staccato okay another use case for this staccato technique would be in the bass which I'll leaving for the end of this discussion so if you take maybe the good old g and if you're building a line let's start with pulse pulse can be legato okay now look at the thumb of the left hand it's playing staccato with the flicking technique but very very short or maybe one shot one long immediately you got a disco vibe in the left hand even without playing the right hand usually the subdivisions the off beats you tend to want to play staccato so these are some guidelines to playing staccato on the piano hope you found the lesson useful moving forward there will be a lot more videos a lot more tutorials on our channel as you know I also do daily riffs where I compose some music for you to listen and learn on a daily basis so it may make sense to hit that subscribe button and turn on the bell icon for regular notifications whenever a video is premiered or uploaded to our channel you will get a notification and you could watch along and do consider being a patron on our Patreon page to support us with various tires starting from five dollars and above for five dollars itself you're going to get all my handwritten notes backing tracks wherever applicable midi and a lot more right guys thanks a ton for watching the video see you in the next one cheers