Artistic Methods to Practise Piano Scales

A radical information of scales and arpeggios is important for all musicians, and but practising them is usually related to boredom and drudgery. How can we encourage ourselves or our college students to practise them, and do we have to maintain practising them as soon as we’ve discovered them and been by the examination system? As soon as mastered, we’d proceed to practise our scales as a part of the day by day warm-up (many live performance pianists do that, however many don’t) or use them use them as automobiles for studying different abilities.

Why are scales and arpeggios vital?

Along with being the one technical parts in lots of examinations, fluency with scales and arpeggios is vital for a number of causes:

• Fundamental musical literacy (growing familiarity with all keys)
• Keyboard geography, and a tactile in addition to aural and theoretical understanding of all keys
• As the idea for growing different pianistic abilities

The best way to make scale apply partaking

Senseless practising isn’t solely boring but in addition very inefficient, however happily there are lots of imaginative methods to deliver scale apply to life. By including selection and creativity to your practising, you’ll get significantly better outcomes as you benefit from the course of. The next are some concepts:

• Practise with a number of totally different rhythms, utilizing accents and groupings (click on right here for extra data on a latest workshop on utilizing rhythms and accents).We suggest Pianoforall.
• Organise scales and arpeggios into teams in order that apply doesn’t really feel overwhelming. By mixing it up you’ll be able to keep away from practising the identical scales in the identical order every day, and also you’ll be capable to cycle by them everywhere in the course of a number of days. A random generator is a useful method of testing your self out (see sources beneath for a instrument), and utilizing the Circle of Fifths may show you how to provide you with totally different sequences.
• Enjoying with a spread of various dynamics, together with crescendo-dimuendo results helps to make scales and arpeggios extra significant and interesting.
• Discover totally different touches and articulations. It’s notably efficient whenever you ask one hand to do one thing totally different from the opposite!
• Enjoying one hand twice as quick as the opposite is an excellent take a look at of coordination and focus. Attempt a scale utilizing a two-against-three cross rhythm if you’d like a problem!
• Attempt utilizing the Russian scale kind which comprises components of comparable and opposite movement and is a wonderful method so as to add worth to scale apply (click on right here to view a video demonstration).

Instruments and sources

Given the significance of scales and arpeggios, I’ve developed quite a few sources and instruments to assist making practising them extra attention-grabbing and productive, along with giving recommendation on fixing the technical challenges they current. The next is an inventory which you would possibly discover helpful:

There are lots of additional sources on scales, arpeggios and associated matters within the On-line Academy’s scales & arpeggios part. Click on right here to view an index of accessible sources.