Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Do you have a favorite book of scales and arpeggios?

Hi Maggie,

My experience of these teaching materials is that they are a waste of money and paper. The student will do much better to have, at first, the teacher make up or suggest exercises for these straightforward textures based on the circle of 5ths. The student usually repeats these patterns in every major and minor key. This will work very well until the student is ready for the advancing intermediate études of Czerny, for example. Doing this, the student will actually learn enough so they're not dependent on a book for the theory, and will also acquire some very useful technical skills. Students who depend on a book, in comparison, never learn much of anything.

Why don't you just make up your own?

I started with the Brown book, and then bought the Alfred book because it had cadences in it. But the Brown book has the broken arpeggios (or four note chords? I can't recall--there are certain things the Brown book has that the Alfred does not). I like the Alfred because it is clear where to put down the fourth finger, which is nice when building up a fingering scheme. It also has some helpful preliminary material for those interested in some basic theory behind concepts like key signature, chord building, scale degrees, etc. It has some suggestions for memorizing fingering schemes in groups as well.

However, after a while my teacher started giving me the look of death if I went to open a book to play any part of our scale routine. "Really? You need a book for the second inversion of the dominant seventh chord in A major?"

Now our warm-up consists of her naming a key and then my job is to play what she says in that key--contrary, parallel, chromatics, arpeggios, chords, cadences, broken chords. I grudgingly admit that it is a good thing to wean off the books so that these things are automatic.

But until that is a reasonable step to take, I do like the Alfred. Just make sure that whatever it is (that I can't remember) that the Alfred doesn't have, have the Brown at the ready.

When I start students out with scales, I have a sheet that shows them the key signature of every key and fingering for scales and arpeggios. I'd much rather that they learn them by looking at their hands rather than reading notes, so they really internalize them. However, with some of my students, they lose sheets easily (despite me suggesting a binder to hold it in), for them, I just have them buy a book. Keith Snell's Scale skills are fine, but I usually start them a bit higher up in level because I want them to do all keys right away, but not too high to where they are 2 octaves, which my students don't do right away. Anyways, I haven't found anything that's perfect yet.

It is just called The Brown Scale Book.
http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/the-brown-scale-book-sheet-music/4940035

That's the scale book my daughter uses! The Snell. But her teacher goes "off book" for quite a bit of it, so I guess she hasn't found anything perfect yet, either.

I might just write out everything in Sibelius and then print out a packet. If you wanted the perfect scale "packet" what would it have in it for each key?

I guess I'm missing something. Why would you need chromatics in different keys? Do they just spell them differently/start on different notes?

Ya, that's the thing, I don't think having everything written out is necessary, just maybe an example in C major to get things started. For example, if you are doing the formula type scales, having a written out example for the purposes of simply explaining what you do, but not to read from it as you play it would be helpful.

In fact, a book that shows examples of these different ways of playing scales and arpeggios would be great. I know Hanon has some of them, but it's not complete, and of course they write everything out in all keys for you.