Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum I hate scales!

I'm wondering if some of you teachers can help me over this hurdle?

I am just not seeing any benefit to practicing scales. Because I hate them, I find myself not practicing them everyday, trying to cram one weeks worth or practice into the morning of my lesson. Of course, as expected, its a disaster during the lesson. I think if I understood the "why," it would help with the motivation and practice. My teacher's explanation of the benefits have left unconvinced and I feel like I'm wasting my time. I know everybody (or at least, most people) practices them, but I just dislike doing them. Yes, I know like I sound like seven year old boy, complaining about eating his vegetables.

Any insights you may have to offer is appreciated.

If you don't practice scales, then your scale passages will sound horrible. Many sonatas have scale passages. Chopin, too, has fast scale passages. So if you don't practice your scales, your fingering will be messed up, and you'll hit wrong notes, and your pieces will sound absolutely terrible.

Convinced???

It's a lot more fun to practice blues scales and pentatonic scales over chords, than 2 handed scales.

Also, once I got a digital piano, scales got to be a whole lot more fun, because you can use different voices, and put in an accompaniment or drum beat...

You have to make it fun. Even if your piano teacher isn't interested in hearing blues scales, why don't you try putting some different chords in the left hand, and changing up the rhythm of the right hand...like classical improvisation.

Well, cramming pays off, unfortunately, in other areas. Students are rewarded for cramming for tests, for instance.

But it does not work for playing a musical instrument. You are probably actually damaging yourself by cramming scale practice. This guarantees that you will learn scales wrong. Why would you do that?

Scales are in everything. You have to master them, in some way, to play well. As I teacher I stress scales more in pieces than as separate practice, and many teachers will immediately disagree with that, but if you do not master the basic principles behind scales, a great deal of music, perhaps most of it, will be forever out of bounds for you.

What level are you on? What pieces are you playing now?

Scales are a way to practice coordination, tone, articulation, and gain a familiarity with keyboard topography and the feel of different keys, which will be of great use in sight-reading and learning new repertoire.

Here is a link to a great scale game. It may seem childish but my older kids love it! You never know what scale you will have to play until you roll the dice. Check it out and see what you think.
http://www.practicespot.com/article.phtml?id=26&t=36

If you approach it from this viewpoint, scales make sense. The OP appears to want things to make sense and be relevant, so perhaps this helps. From a practical standpoint, just use scales as a warmup. If they are the first thing you play, you never skip them. I would suggest a kitchen timer. I wouldn't set it for very long - maybe five minutes. You might want to use a metronome. That adds one more skill to what Mr. Kreisler mentioned - playing with a metronome. And it has the advantage of being easily able to measure and track progress. If you can play sixteenths at 60 BPM one year, and at 120 next year, you know you are making progress at that isolated skill.

The extent to which practicing isolated skills transfers to performing them in context is a philosophical problem that is not solved and hotly debated. On almost any other instrument, practicing scales leads directly and immediately to facility. But on these other instruments, most of the music is scalewise and monophonic, and in any given key the same fingering will be used. Piano is very different and the transfer is not direct at all.

Bottom line though, every teacher makes you do scales so whether they make sense or not, might as well learn them. They do show up on auditions and those points are free for the taking.

When it became obvious to my teacher that I am not really practicing scales or doing so very reluctantly, I suddenly started getting etude assignments that are ripe with tricky rythms, keys and.. scales.. mixing up sixteenth, 32nds and eighths fairly haphazardly (to me). The trouble is I am supposed to make these etudes sound pretty musical, which is no small feat. Makes me miss plain old scales..But as Tim said, just about all piano teachers will want them done, one way or another..So just do it..

I hear you. I don't like practicing scales, either. But, as I tell my students, it's not always about motivation. It's almost always about self-discipline.

And sometimes it's just about being a slave to tradition.

I'm willing to bet that what you hate about scales is mindless repetition right?

So........

The key is to have some kind of focus whenever you practise scales. What exactly are you working on or what skills/knowledge are you trying to improve and develop?

Is it theoretical understanding and knowledge of keys? You could practise in the order of circle of fifths and/or majors and relative minors.

For co-ordination there are numerous things you can do. Slow practice with the metronome, contrary as well as similar motion, scales in 3rds/6ths, experimentation with various rhythms, accents and articulations.

For fluency you might do some separate hand work and try to increase your tempo. Listen carefully for even tone and flow.

Try variation in dynamics to make your scales sound more musical.

Perhaps link your scale practice with pieces you are learning in the same keys.

I don't know if any of this helps. I seem to have no luck getting the benefits of scales through to my own sudents. They just do them because I say so and start rolling their eyes when I go into why they need to do them. At the end of the day they do work and all my students who are good at their scales play better in general.

No. All of us will do mindless repetition if we see a point to it.

The explanations for what that point is, in reference to scales, are somewhat lacking. Why is this? Can't anyone really answer it, beyond "trust me, it works?"

Clearly the student needs to absorb the concept of tonicity and key center, and scales help. As does solfege. Once WWHWWWH and key signatures are covered, and that's about once through Sound of Music! how much more do scales help?

Two of the biggest beginner hurdles are keyboard geometry and fingering. Scales do help with keyboard geometry at least at first. Scales don't help a beginner with fingering at all, they serve to confuse an already confusing subject further.

We've had the Hanon battles here many times, right? The one side praises them for developing technique in isolation that can later be applied to music, the other side decries them as a waste of time because technique is better learned in context. Both sides clearly produce students who play very well.

The anti-Hanon crowd tends to be pro-scales, despite the fact that every argument against Hanon applies equally well to scales. But sometimes I get the feeling their heart isn't really into the scale defense. Hee, hee.

1) Warmup.

2) Everything Kreisler said. The different keys on a piano are like different landscapes. If you know your way around a landscape, you barely even need to watch where you're going. Turn off the light in a familiar room and you can get around without thinking about it. Turn off the light in an unfamiliar room, and you're denting shins. You don't want to grope for the next key, you want to know where it is without thinking so your brain can be freed up to think about things like interpretation and beauty.

It's like learning a language. You don't want to grope for a verb ending while you're trying to propose to someone. You want that knowledge to be so graven into your head that it becomes invisible, so you can think about the message.

Tim, I think you missed my point entirely.

Mindless repetition is what most students do when practising their scales. But that's not good. You should have focus and you should understand the point in scales in order to get the best from them.

I don't think it's fair to say that the explanations are lacking. Plenty have been given in this thread so far.

I didn't really miss your point, I expanded it without explaining well.

You listed a number of benefits you could obtain if you practiced scales in a different manner, and that would have the side effect of making them less mindless and boring. (and I agree with both points)

All those benefits have to be added to scales - they don't exist as an inherent part of scale practice. So to me they aren't a good argument for doing much scale practice.

Practicing scales helps you get good at scales, there is no doubt. How much that helps you play other music is the question, I think. Most Western repertoire is based on the major scale. Almost none of what beginners will play will contain more than a scale fragment, and that fragment will almost never be fingered with standard scale fingering. So the benefit, once you have do-re-mi in your brain, has to be as a practice method for isolating individual techniques such as hands together coordination, articulation, volume control, touch control, rhythmic accuracy, etc. Certainly all those can be done very well through scale practice. And Hanon. And repertoire.

As you pointed out well, those isolated benefits won't happen automatically simply by playing scales. (It's not even a given that isolated benefits will transfer to performance in context. But that's a separate argument.) Yet beginners are told constantly to play their scales because it's good for them.

Where do you think the diminishing returns principle applies to scales? One hour per day, one minute per day? I'm on record at guessing five minutes. Could be wrong though.

Yes. That's one of the benefits of scales that is most convincing to me. That's what I refer to as keyboard geometry.

Do you think playing scales will automatically grant this?
Do you think playing scales is the best method? And how many minutes a day would you devote to this?

Wow, quite a discussion. I had a feeling everybody could relate to scales.

I'll take some time to answer a few questions posted to me in this thread to provide a better background and framework for the context of my question.

I've been studying for about a year and a half, currently finishing up the Level 5 Hal Leonard method book (last of the series). I've done Hanon for about a year (ex. 1-20), along with FingerPower exercises (currently on Level 5). For each level of the method books I've done, I also played supplemental material commensurate with that level (about 2 or 3 books per level). Some Pop. Some Jazz. Some Classical.

I want to be a "decent" (whatever that means) non professional player, but have no aspirations of performing. I have yet to memorize anything, but rather focus on further developing my sight reading skills (which I still am not very good at). I play for my own enjoyment.

Q: If you don't practice scales, then your scale passages will sound horrible. Many sonatas have scale passages. Chopin, too, has fast scale passages. So if you don't practice your scales, your fingering will be messed up, and you'll hit wrong notes, and your pieces will sound absolutely terrible. Convinced???
A: I think my "mental block" is that there is a disconnect between scales and the music I am currently playing. I have no desire to play classical music and favor pop music instead. Looking through my current material, I'll see mini-scales (five note) sprinkled sparingly throughout the book. I realize this is just a first baby step, but it seems like I could hit five notes up and down by practicing the music, rather than scales. I'm wondering how many teachers do not teach scales and can produce students who play equally as well as those who do.

Q: You are probably actually damaging yourself by cramming scale practice. This guarantees that you will learn scales wrong. Why would you do that?
A: Yes, I came to the quick realization that cramming does not work. My teacher is pretty good about "not" letting me move on until he is satisfied I've "passed" the lesson (i.e. the particular (scale) key we're working on that week). In trying to convince myself (with this thread) that I must do it everyday and be justified (in my own mind) that I'm not taking a leap of faith (just because teachers say "you must do it").

Q: Scales are a way to practice coordination, tone, articulation, and gain a familiarity with keyboard topography and the feel of different keys, which will be of great use in sight-reading and learning new repertoire.
A: This seems plausible and essentially what my teacher has said. Can these skills (above) be developed without the use of scales or do scales just make the process easier? "Scales are a way.." Are they the only way?

Q: Bottom line though, every teacher makes you do scales so whether they make sense or not, might as well learn them. And sometimes it's just about being a slave to tradition.
A: That's the leap of faith I'm hesitant to take. I need to understand the "why." Its a big investment of my time.

Q: I'm willing to bet that what you hate about scales is mindless repetition right?
A: Actually, I don't mind the repetition (mindless or otherwise). Many refer to Hanon as mindless. However, I could see the logic of the exercises. They were all different in their own way and I could feel myself gaining better control of my fingers. Even though it was not my favorite thing to do, I did it because I could see the "why." Scales seem much more like the same exercise (in a different key) over and over again.

Q: What exactly are you working on or what skills/knowledge are you trying to improve and develop?
A: I'd like to improve my technique, sight reading abilities, better my keyboard geography skills, minimize the time required to learn a piece. As I mentioned before, I have no desire to tackle complicated classical music that will take months or years to master. I imagine, when I become proficient, the hardest thing I'll play is more advanced Pop music. Of course, the goal I have today may change over time.

Q: No. All of us will do mindless repetition if we see a point to it.
A: That's exactly my point.

Thanks for your feedback. Its provided me for some food for thought. Other opinions are appreciated and encouraged.



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Beats me. It'll help, I'm sure. Helped me. There's probably other things to be done, but this one thing will definitely bring improvement.

I'm becoming more and more surprised at how automatically my brain seems to recall the "shape" of various keys even after having been away from it for so long. I've been having fun downloading sheet music lately and am stunned at how automatically my hands seem to want to make an AM "shape" or anticipate the landscape of that scale when I see those three little sharps staring back at me, as an example. And my lessons always started with arpeggios and scales as warmup.

For want of a better way of putting it ... who cares? They'll get you to where you're going. There may be some other minimally more effective way to do it, but so what? As long as you end up where you intend to go, there's no reason for angsting over not finding THE perfect way to get there.

I'm sure the piano won't turn into a pumpkin if you take three months to see improvement versus two months and twenty-one days. Don't get analysis-paralysis. Just move forward in a direction that you know will result in improvement and don't worry about it.

If you were trying to improve within a certain time-frame or pass an admission test or an audition or something, then you start worrying about optimization. For now, don't sweat it so much. As long as scales will get you where you want to be, then strap in and hit the gas.

I've been trying to teach myself and added scales in April because that's just something that I assumed needed to be done even though it would be "boring". I wasn't sure what the benefit was going to be for sure but figured there must be one if everyone is made to do it and I felt like I wasn't progressing very well. I was playing a few lines each of a few songs I liked but I didn't really feel like I was getting anywhere.

I started my way around the circle of fifths, one scale per month and memorizing the I, IV and V chords for each because that's what one of the books or websites I was on suggested and I didn't know any better way to start so I just started doing it. Aside from the improved coordination I'm beginning to recognize key signatures and remember what the sharps are in a piece without having to circle all of them to remind me. I'm remembering my major chords without having to think about how to build one every time I need a chord.

I actually don't mind them much. The fact that there's nobody telling me to do it probably makes a big difference in me enjoying it a bit instead of hating it. Of course a year from now when I'm practicing more than the 5 I've worked on so far, it might start getting old...