Hi everyone, hope your all ok!

I was diagnosed with epilepsy last year and after being put on many different cocktails of meds the side effects have been..... hard!

I find it so difficult to remember things - a classic side effect of meds and prolonged seizures leading to brain damage.

So when it comes to my scales!
Im find with everything else , sight reading obvisbly you dont have to remember that! aurals im good at, peices are good, but when the scales come..!! ahhhh

And its so frustrating, when i play then with my teacher im ok, as soon as i get home i have no idea how to play them!!

Any advice i would really appreciate!

Thanks Guys and Girls!

XLu

You may be able to get permission to at least refer to the scale book in the exam.
Get in touch with the person resposible for special needs at the board.
You'll probably need something from your doctor to support you application but I've heard that they are very helpful with tihs sort of thing.

You should be able to refer to the scales manual but not read from it.... you have to have express permission from the board but it wasn't hard to get when I contacted them about my son.
Good luck

Hi, don't know if it will help, but I like to do it by learning the pattern that they all follow and then working it out from that. Then I only have to remember the one thing and I can work out all the scales.

First visualize a piano keyboard. ( or look at a real one!)
Look at how many tones or semitones are inbetween each note for a major scale.
For a C major scale the second note is two semitones up, the third is two up from that, but the fourth is the note next door to the third. Then it goes up in gaps of two semitones until the seventh, which is just one semitone away from the end note.
In other words, all the notes are a whole tone away from each other apart from the 3rd and 4th, and the 7th and 8th.

If you take any other note to start on, the major scale follows the same pattern. Just look at a keyboard to see it. To remember the basic pattern, visualize the keyboard with the C scale and see where the black notes go and where the whites are next to each other.

You can work out minor scales from their relative majors.

Maybe this sounds more complicated than usefull! But it helps me because I hate learning by rote, I was pleased when I found out I didn't have to learn all the scales one by one. Knowing that there was a pattern made it make sense. I found that looking at/ working out / playing all the scales helped me get a handle on it all. The circle of fiths is also good for seeing patterns.

I suspect I haven't explained this very well....
I guess it would work best for people who are already familiar with piano keyboards....and it is probably quicker just to know the scales by heart.....and knowing what notes to play is not the same as playing them...and I haven't taken any exams using this method....but I hope you get the idea

Sorry to hear about your problems


This is good advice, get in contact with the AB and see what they can do for you, I get the impression that they're very helpful on such issues . Would having the scale book help you out?

One way that really helped me to understand scales was a phrase I heard on the radio

Think in ink

So I got a note book - wrote T T S T T T S T on the top of columns; then wrote each scale ( in letters) in the rows, starting in C and working through the circle of fifiths, putting in sharps and flats as required. That really helped me to understand the use of sharps and flats in key signatures.

This may help - or it may not - one of the good thing about this forum is that there are lots of ideas and plenty of things to try.

Good luck - hope the epilepsy settles, it does sometimes.