Learning Your Scales: Why and How for Piano Students
Chances are, if you’re a piano student, you have spent at least some of your time grumbling about learning your scales. They’re boring. And they’re hard. What an awful combination, right?
Actually, if you can look at them the right way, scales are anything but boring. Hard, yes; they can be hard, especially when you are learning a new one. But anything worth doing is hard at first. And learning your scales is definitely worth doing. Scales provide a necessary foundation for improving your skills.
Why piano students need to learn scales:
(1) Scales are a good way to practice using correct posture and form.
(2) Learning your scales helps your fingers gain speed and agility on the keyboard.
(3) Scales also help you warm up your finger and hand muscles before you start on a more challenging piece.
(4) Familiarity with a scale can also help you “warm up” your ear and your mind to the key, which will help you learn a piece written in that key.
(5) Having your scales “in your fingers” will help you with transposition, sight-reading, and improvisation as well.
How to practice scales:
- Gently stretch the muscles of your fingers and hands before you begin. These muscles are small, but they are about to get a pretty intense work-out!
- Sit up straight; don’t slouch. Always practice good posture at the keyboard.
- Adjust your seat height so that your forearms are parallel to the floor, while your fingertips are in contact with the keyboard. If necessary, sit on a telephone book!
- Curl your fingers into a gentle curve.
- Keep your fingers close to the keys. This may not seem important at first, when you are starting out slowly, but you’ll find this increasingly valuable as you gain speed with your scales.
- Relax. This can be hard, especially for beginners, who tend to tense up when confronted with a new scale. But your muscles will actually perform better if they are loose and relaxed.
- Take it slow. Don’t be in a hurry for your fingers to fly up and down the keyboard like those of professionals! They achieved that after many hours of practice, and that’s what you need to do now.
- Start with one hand at a time. Don’t try to play them together until you can run through the scale accurately with each hand separately.
- Don’t look! Once you have gained initial familiarity with a scale, try to keep from looking at your hands. Your fingers should learn to run their scales entirely by touch.
- Use a metronome. Playing your scales evenly is an important form of self-discipline, and the metronome can help. This tool can also help you speed up once you have mastered the scale at a slow tempo.
- Master one scale before moving on to another. Take at least 1 week per scale. If your piano lessons follow the local school calendar, this will take most of a school year, just to master the 24 major and minor scales! But at the end of that year, you’ll have these scales “in your fingers” for life.
- Keep your skills fresh. Revisit the scales you have mastered even while you are learning a new one.
Tags: learning scales, learning to play piano, learning to play scales, major and minor scales, major scales, minor scales, musical scales, piano, piano lessons, piano scales, piano student, practicing scales, scales
