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Hi all,

You may have remembered I released in this forum a while back a compilation of pieces for beginners that I avail for free. I have decided to follow this up with a visual scale book illustrating all major and minor scales. The pages for this free ebook are actually extracted from my earlier publications(the books just went live in Kindle) and the publisher do not allow me to put in the arpeggios to prevent me from cannibalising the sales of my own books. I hope you find this helpful and do support and purchase my published books at Kindle if you find them useful.

Free PDF Download of Visual Guides to Piano Scales (contains all major and minor scales)

Visual Guides to Piano Scales

The actual published books (contains scales and arpeggios requirements specific to ABRSM Grade 1-5 syllabus. If you are looking for the book that contains all the scales and arpeggios, buy the grade 5 book):

Visual Guides to Scales and Arpeggios Grade 1
Visual Guides to Scales and Arpeggios Grade 2
Visual Guides to Scales and Arpeggios Grade 3
Visual Guides to Scales and Arpeggios Grade 4
Visual Guides to Scales and Arpeggios Grade 5

Free Repertoire PDF Ebook, posted in earlier thread

Brilliant thank you, I will take advantage of your links and download them for some of my new pupils.

Thanks. Do feedback to me after you tried these scales on your students if they find it useful. Also do you find this method of presenting scales comparable to the other similar ones like the Stocken method?

CWPiano. If you haven't already, check out Scales Bootcamp.

I receive my Scale Bootcamp today, I like it a lot!

I am aware of at least three similar visual scales method, including scales boot camp. My method tries to address the issue of combining two hands together, and the prices are a fraction of the others. Give it a try

That looks good!
How do you work with tuck over and tuck under?
Thanks!

I am assuming you mean tucking the thumb under when playing the scales? I think the teachers still have to demonstrate the scales visually to the students. These books are just tools, they are not meant to replace teachers. But what you can do is to ask your students to learn the notes of the scales themselves slowly first by groups or block chords(after demonstrating to them how to read the charts) and then work on tucking under movements afterwards.

Ok :-) And do you advice teaching "tuck over" to beginners? I've read C. Chang's book and I believe he suggests teaching first TU and then sticking to TO. I tried teaching TO to a primer adult to play a fast scale and I was surprised the speed a beginner can get in a few minutes! But I'm not an expert myself that's why I was asking you.

These look nice, CWPiano!

I made graphical scales diagrams years ago and have been giving them away. Mine don't have the names of each note of the scale, though, just keyboards and finger numbers.

Here are the major scales .

Pretty plain, but lots of white space to add other information for the student.

Thanks Adrienne! These will come in handy. (I keep getting these great printing opportunities now that I've got my wireless printer set up.)

Awesome, Ann! You can get the minor keys, too. I think I had one or two copy/edit mistakes in the fingerings in the 2-octave harmonic minor scales, but the one-octave scales should be up on box.net.

I love my wireless setup, too. Out of ink at the moment, but will be making a big shopping trip for office supplies before New Year's.

Please be careful when reading C. Chang's book. You have to bear in mind that he is not a piano teacher and many of the points his discussed are highly debatable and can be very misleading (e.g. using flat fingers to play softly and that Hanon is useless). I highly suggest you go to your local music store and pick up some professional pedagogy books such as 'The art of teaching piano' or 'Professional Piano Teaching'.

Being able to play a scale fast should be the least of your worry when teaching scales to beginners. Most important should be making sure your students have good curvature of the fingers and fluid wrist movements to play the scales evenly and with good tone. Don't think so much about thumb over or under. The keyword here is that the thumb movement must be natural and free of any tension.

Thanks! Do try them with your students and feedback to me if they have easier time combining the two hands together for scales.

Thanks for the advice.

Thanks so much for another excellent contribution! I will use this Guide with my students. It should really help their learning of all the scales.