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I would like to know that what is the best way to learn scales as I failed that part last time. |
I expect you want to know how to memorise scales, and I'm offering some suggestions below in case you particularly want or need to do that.
In the great musical scheme of things I don't think it matters at all whether you can _memorise_ scales or not. Playing them in all keys from music and becoming fluent at them is useful though and well worth doing. It's a great way of becoming familiar with how the notes at the extremes of your range (and eventually your instrument's range) look on the page. You don't meet those extreme notes very often in pieces even at Grade 8. You will also become familiar with the less common key signatures and accidentals. All that familiarity then feeds into fluent sight-reading. I think it's particularly useful for pianists to play scales and arpeggios from music without looking at the keyboard at all.
The following ideas may help with memorising scales and arpeggios. You may also like to consider them as part of learning about the theory of music.
The way people memorise things varies enormously. See how many different ideas can feed into your memorising process.
For some people the visual memory is the most important, and once they have played their scales from the music a lot they can "see" the page in their mind's eye.
For some people the mechanical or kinaesthetic memory is very important. After a while, once they start a particular scale their fingers "know what to do next".
Learn the key signatures of all your scales (major and minor) and arpeggios, in a logical order, perhaps starting from no sharps or flats, working through the sharps from one to seven, going back to no sharps or flats and working through the flats from one to seven. Practise saying the sharps in order F C G D A E B and the flats in order B E A D G C F.
Discover how to work out the key signature from the tonic, or the tonic from the key signature.
Learn about the cycle of 5ths.
Learn the patterns of tones and semitones for the different types of scale.
Make sure you are very familiar with the chromatic and whole tone scales, so that you hardly have to think what's a tone and what's a semitone because your fingers and ears are very familiar with both. There's also an interesting type of scale called an octatonic scale which is fun to work out. It has alternate tone and semitone (or semitone and tone), so 9 notes to the octave instead of 8!
Make sure you know which degrees of the scale are used for the different types of arpeggio.
It's obviously useful to know what a particular type of scale or arpeggio should sound like, but you don't really want to have to play the wrong note before going to the right one! When you are practising scales (or anything else for that matter
), if you play a wrong note don't just follow it with the right one. If you do that, you are making two wrong moves, one from a right note to a wrong one, and another from the wrong one to the next right one, but you aren't practising the correct move at all! Always go back at least one note and then play the correct move several times before moving on.I hope this helps.
As a happy teacher, accompanist, chamber music player and orchestral player I wouldn't actually care if no-one ever played anything from memory. I think it's important for people to play scales and arpeggios fluently, in all possible forms, because they are the essential building blocks of so much Western classical music, but I feel that some people waste inordinate amounts of time trying to memorise when they could be developing their technique and improving their music-reading instead
