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

It it just happened once in a while, it would be different, but nearly every potentially interesting thread gets knocked off topic by people chewing into each other.

Take the case of Betty's "octave that always has five black notes and seven white ones". Or whatever she said.

If you want to tear that apart, just for the pure fun of it, sure, you can.

An octave is two notes. We all know that.

But we also all know that a one octave scale, meaning starting from the tonic and ascending or descending to the "next tonic note" is the basis for the most elementary explanations in most books about scales.

Now, we can then have a new flaming discussion about whether "an octave" really means "an octave span" or "an octave range". Spilt a hair, then split the splits. Ad nauseum.

Is there anyone so stupid as not to get the point? A C scale, starting on C and ending on C, counting the notes played and all notes "skipped" will either equal 12 or 13, depending on whether or not the duplicated C is counted, or not.

But it still amounts to key counting, somehow, whether by tetrachords or some other method (whole and half steps), there is a pattern of whole and half steps that is the same for all major scales (and so on), and is anyone really having problems with this? Is anyone who does not know most of this already going to have trouble understanding how it works?

The problem is the logic behind how fingerings are chosen, when they should be stricty adhered to (the conventional fingers) and when alternate fingerings are going to work better.

The rest of what is going on is simply assinine.

I agree, but it is just rude to pointedly ignore a question that is asked. It is even more rude to continue to tell people that they are being ignored. I have had more than a couple questions go unanswered.



But yet, it is entertaining at the same time

Yeah, I hate scales too...

But really they are very useful when it comes to knowing music. When you look at a piece of music, you'll automatically know what scale the notes in melody are derived from.

I have a list of scales that I have been learning each in all 12 keys for the last 2 weeks. I practice these every day. They turn out to be real useful and as boring as they are, (you) should learn them too:

Superlocrian
Locrian
Lydian
Lydian Augmented
Lydian Dominant
Mixolydian b6
Harmonic Minor #5
Phrygian Major 3
Phrygian
Locrian natural 2nd )
Melodic Minor
Augmented Scale
Whole Half Diminished
Half Whole Diminished
Ukrainian Minor
Dorian
Dorian b2
Harmonic minor(I had to relearn it)

I already knew the aeolian mode, ionian and mixolydian modes in all 12 keys. I had to relearn melodic minor and harmonic minor because I forgot them. Lydian was familiar to me except that I didn't know it as well as I should have.

Does anybody know whats the difference between Harmonic Major and Harmonic Major #5? Is there any difference between Phrygian Major and Phrygian Major 3?

A sharped 5th?

Guys? Perhaps only two gals should be allowed in the teacher's lounge at the same time?

Isn't the key the word 'beginning' though? It may not be the end, but it certainly IS the beginning. I do not teach the standard fingering for F sharp minor, because I find it vastly illogical. Aside from that, I teach all of the standard fingerings, because they exist for good reason. That doesn't mean I insist that students stick to those in every musical composition. However, if they do not know them, they are generally relying on insufficiently honed instincts.

I once had a beginner student, who played me a C major scale as three groups of five fingers. Should I have left him to his own devices? Or did it make more sense to say how impressed I was that he could do it, but then demonstrate a conventional fingering? What purpose does a teacher serve- if not to convey the basics of conventional wisdom to a student? If a student can play a standard 343 pattern scale consistently and without any problems, they can do their own thinking and use whatever alternative they wish. If they have never understood the fundamental principle behind how to play a scale, they ought to learn it, before experimenting. The whole point of a teacher is to give students something beyond what can emerge from nothing but unguided experiments.

Teaching fingerings is not about closing doors to a student. It's about ensuring that they don't end up doing random stuff that might hold them back, simply because they don't know any better. At the very least they ought to be able to make up their own mind, whether they want to follow the principles. Something so important should never be witheld from a student.

This is the insane part of what happens in these discussion. You appear to be disagreeing with me, but I do exactly the same thing.

I would have praised the five-finger solution but would have also demonstrated the conventional fingering.

I have yet to understand what a "343" pattern scale is…

Again, I agree. This is what is making me shake my head. You appear to be assuming that I disagree with your points here. I don't.

Again, I agree. Either extreme is wrong. One extreme is to guide students by giving them advanced and non-conventional fingerings before they have understood basic fingering. In general (with some unusual exceptions) I am against this. The other extreme is to teach ONLY the conventional fingerings then leave students to work out all others, on their own, at best relying on editors without understanding the logic the editors are using.

It is getting increasingly difficult to keep reading but there are still some gems for those of us who are here to learn.

It takes longer and they are harder to find as the noise levels from the nonsense continues to rise but they are still there if you look for them. I for one am still able to learn a lot of things I didn't know.

I have a follow-up question:


Which hand? Which minor scale? (Natural, harmonic, melodic?)

There are two types of benefit offered by scale study.

The first is technical - regular, mindful scale work which has a purpose (not just mindless 'typing') will improve your technical skills.

The other is theoretical (as in music theory) - learning and understanding scales will assist in your conceptual understanding and is an excellent basis for music theory study, as well as "experience" in playing in all the different keys - even if what you are playing is 'just' a scale.

In other issues...while it is true that most beginning theory classes probably involve some sort of piano/keyboard lab so that there is a visual reference for the concepts being discussed, I am not particularly comfortable with a totally "piano-centric" approach to theory. I knew enough other instrument and voice majors in college to understand that conceptualizations of theory that were totally piano-centric were limiting and...really...irritated non-pianist musicians

AAGH YES YES YES I feel like an idiot for only just getting a grip on the idea of the Pythagorean comma. It's got to be the coolest thing EVER, and studying on a piano puts it so far under the radar that I remained ignorant of it for ages.

Anyone who doesn't know that the circle of fifths doesn't actually close shouldn't be teaching.

I'm not sure what you are talking about with "close". Are you talking about the reason behind tempered 5ths?

Yup -- how, if you go up by twelve perfect fifths (where perfect is the 3:2 ratio), you overshoot seven perfect 2:1 octaves. The numbers are easy as pie, but I finally sat down and read up on it, and it hit me like a hammer. Wait a minute ... the circle of fifths lands you seven octaves above where you were!

Except it doesn't.

It's just amazingly cool. This is what I meant when I said YES YES YES to the whole statement that a piano-centric approach to music theory isn't the only or even best way to approach it, and I can see why it would annoy other instrument players.

Hence the reason why you should always get a professional to tune your Piano, and never have a go yourself with an ETD and a calculator!!

I'm just glad I don't have to get a G by opening the thing up, pressing down on the C strings 2/3rd of the way up, and hitting the C again!

You have no idea what a can of worms you are opening up.

I'm assuming you have never listened carefully to 5ths on a piano, after just being very well tuned, to hear the slow beat that indicates it has been tuned just a wee bit flat, to cancel out the problem you have mentioned.

You don't have to end up 7 octaves high. Multiply by 3/2 for the first fifth, then 3/4 to get an octave down from the next. Continue in the same manner, but use 3/4 for the last two. You will end up almost at your starting point, but at 446 and change.

446.0030365/440=1.0136432648

And there you go.

I wholeheartedly agree about non-piano-centric music theory, and I think it can be introduced from very early on. Many students play in band or sing in choir, and, at least to me, the differences in what pitches can be produced by what instrument can be a lead-in to it. Music is, to me, about sound and rhythm. I knew for *years* that barbershop quartets and gospel groups sang harmony that I couldn't reproduce on my piano, at least not if it was tuned in any way I'd ever heard it tuned. But I didn't know what that difference was until much later.

Similarly, the day I figured out that a major scale was *not* a series of individual pitches which can be played on keys on a piano or particular fingerings on some other instrument was a good day for me. It opened up a whole new understanding of music building blocks - including the circle of fifths and, eventually, the Pythagorean comma. The circle of fifths isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, a consequence of 5-finger positions on a piano, and I pity some poor kid who tries to convince a guitar player that has any knowledge that it is, much less try to explain to a guitar player who is tuning to what he hears of fifths why his last string is sharp. Can 5-finger positions be a part of the education towards understanding theory? Yes, but they aren't the theory. And the theory long-pre-dates the piano.

The whole concept of major and minor scales as a series of intervals lead to a much wider appreciation of scales - in the folk music based in Western Europe, in music of Eastern Europe (which I dance to often), in music of Asian countries, in jazz.

This is a piano forum. But teaching students *music* is a wider subject, and I think teachers here want to teach music, and not just pressing keys in response to what the eye sees on the staff paper. And, at least to me, piano is embedded in the much much broader subject of music, and is *not* the be-all and end-all of either music or music theory. Certainly not the only way to teach theory, and many times not the best way to do so.

I do think there's a lot of math, science, and physics involved in music theory. It's why I don't think the piano is the ultimate way to teach it. It's why, when I'm discussing music with other people I don't discuss it from a piano-centric viewpoint. Including when I'm talking to young students who are learning piano. After all, some of their parents are playing banjo in the same band with me They are not too young to understand that what they are learning is a subset of what there is to learn.

Someone asked in another thread what most teachers would think if they got a student whose teacher had taught them that curled fingers were the only way to play piano, and the implication was that we'd mostly be dismayed. I feel exactly the same way when someone says that natural notes are the white keys on the piano. Sorry. That's just the way I feel. I'm dismayed.

So perhaps we're a little closer to being back on topic here

Cathy

WARNING:

Tuning is the 3rd RAIL of internet forums. I have never, EVER, seen a discussion about tuning remain friendly. When people start talking ratios and Hertz, I am GONE.

Run! Run for your lives while you still can!

Don't misunderstand me. Tuning is really cool, and the science of acoustics is a fascinating field of study. But on piano forums, it's EVIL. EVIL I SAY!

LOL.

Cathy