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I played piano for many years as a child and stopped for about 8 years in between. But recently I've started to play again and I find myself lacking in many of the technical skills I used to have.

I did the RCM levels when I was young and if my memory serves me correctly, there are books with scales (major, harmonic, melodic) as well as triad/quadrad arpeggio/block chord practice in every key major and minor as well as some variations of the scales I think?

I'm looking for a book that has all the major/minor/chromatic/broken and blocked chord practice so I can get back to some of those exercises. Any suggestions?

Scales Bootcamp is a pretty good book.

edit: that's odd, I don't recall it costing $49.99, I could have sworn I paid less for it.

Cooke Mastering the scales and arpeggios is free and very thorough

Thanks! I'll check out Cooke's free one first!

beechcraft409, can you tell me the difference between Scales bootcamp and something like this book of scales? I just wonder why the price difference is so significant.

Scales, Chords, Arpeggios and Cadences

This is the book I have and has everything you listed.

It has "Achievements" in it, with tick-boxes for LH, RH, and T. Each scale has 19 "Core Challenges", nine "Twists", and 15 Tempo Milestones. Those added up with all the checkboxes for L,R, and T makes for 128 separate tasks for each scale.

The idea being the more checkboxes you are able to check off (must make no mitsakes [edit: I will leave my typo of the word 'mistake' so that everyone can have a good laugh at me] in order to check it off), the better you know the scale. Some of the challenges include First Playthrough, first from memory, 4 octave tour, grand tour, 3 minute quota, 10 in a row, some require you to play in front of other people, some don't involve playing it but verbally describing which note and finger.

Then the Twists have very non-standard rhythms, articulations, there are twists that involve playing with certain dynamics. There are ratio twists, where RH will play one octave while LH plays two octaves at 2x speed as other hand.

It is more than just a book with scales in it, hence the term "Bootcamp" in the title. It is more like a training program. Here is a sample of one of the twists:




edit to add: it would probably still be good to get a book like the one the poster above me linked to, to have as a reference. While both books are similar they don't have quite the same purpose. Hope this helps answer your question.

Thank you very much for the detailed explanation. I think the bootcamp book will be useful for me as well, perhaps I will buy both. I just wish the Bootcamp book is less expensive!

Try checking around more than just Amazon. I feel like I paid $20 for it.

I paid $23.98 for Scales Bootcamp on Amazon last week. Although there were options to pay more from different vendors.

Just checked, and I paid $19.99 for my Scales Bootcamp book. Might be worth emailing the author directly as that price on Amazon seems very wrong. http://insidemusicteaching.com/scales-bootcamp/

I have both those books and both are excellent, but Scales Bootcamp is the one that's permanently camped on my piano. It only covers Major, Harmonic Minor and Chromatic Scales but it does it well. The author has a knack for teaching and makes the presentation easy to understand and addictive. Worth it to also get his other more expensive book "Practiceopedia". I payed approx. US$20 for the bootcamp and US$40 for Practiceopedia through Amazon.

The Scales, Arpeggios, Chords and Cadences book fills in the rest of the information and is good as a refernce boook. It starts with a short, to the point intro in theory then lists out all the information in musical notation.

But I do wish there was a practice aid like Scales Bootcamp for Arpeggios, Chords and Cadences.

This one is in public domain and seens to be an excellent method:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Master_School_of_Piano_Playing_and_Virtuosity_%28Jon%C3%A1s,_Alberto%29

Thanks everyone for letting me know about the price discrepancy. I will try to email the author and the Amazon seller (if possible) to see what's going on. I hope it's not going out of print or something like that.

Can someone tell me if the scales bootcamp book has arpeggio/chord exercises as well or only scale exercises?

It only covers Major, Harmonic Minor and Chromatic Scales, nothing else.

Wow, that's a hefty collection. 7 volumes of 200-300 pages each. It was written by some very well respected pianists too.

Thanks for the link Skylover, this will be of great use to me.

Thanks, Skylover. I see it supports the natural fingering in F, D, G and A majors (4th finger on black key).

I don't recommend scale manuals generally and find them unnecessary but it's good to see one that's more thorough.

Only had a quick skim through, is that what he refers to as English or French style fingering? The exercise I read offered two alternative fingerings.

Not English vs French. As far as I'm aware English (now defunct) fingering on a score is marked as + 1 2 3 4 (+ for thumb) instead of the 'continental' 1 2 3 4 5.

His page 5 (11 in the PDF) calls the standard scales (a la Hanon) 'badly fingered'. Fourth finger on F# in G, D and A majors and Bb in F major is better. This is a natural way of fingering and comes easier by learning B major first than starting on C major.

I thought my teacher was the only one who taught scales this way until I saw the alternatives in an ABRSM manual, then recommended by Kendall Taylor and more recently by Bernhard from Pianostreet.

For chords, I've been practicing with iRealPro. I play the chords as blocks, inversions and arpeggios. I will also play the chords using exercises from my improvisation book, so I get a pretty good chord/arpeggio/improvisation workout all in one shot.