Hi

Im doing my Grade 4 Flute exam in November and no matter how hard I try , I just can't seem to learn my scales !!!
Does anyone have any tips?

try learning the major and relative minor scales together?? I'm not sure if it'll help as I'm not much good with learning scales either!

Have a look at this thread

I can personally recommend the splurts technique as immensely helpful for learning scales. Best to start getting them under your belt now or later grades could be a nasty shock!

hmm..interesting technique! would you recommend this for playing normal pieces?

Thanks for that! I'll have a go. the problem is I learnt them for my last exam , then once it was over didnt touch them again ! I've only been playing a year, but I with I'd of kept practicing them!

I took my grade 3 flute about 3 months ago and all I can say is that the sooner you start learning them the better. I hate my scales, so I left them till last. But then didn't have enough time to learn them, so did quite badly. Oops.

My clarinet teacher says to learn them without looking at the scale itself. Whether it works or not I don't know!

I can honsetly say that learning my scales was the best thing I ever did for my flute playing. I did a sponsered music practise thing just before I did grade 5 (26 hours of music in a week is tough) and really cracked on and got my scales learnt. I got 141/150 as a result. I've now been playing for three and a half years and I'm working on garde 8. Scales not only carry 21 marks (which is quite a lot really) but they make everything else easier too. You will do better at flute if you knuckle down and learn your scales, so get practising!

It can be useful for fast runs, yes


So true.

Don't think of scales as something to do just for exams, definitely for wind instruments, and I suspect for others as well, build some scales practice into your daily routine, even if it's just 5-10 minutes. You can use scales to practise so many things - articulation, vibrato, dynamics, consistency of tone etc, keep playing the scales you learnt for your last exam and gradually add others in until they're not something horrid you have to learn for an exam but a part of your life.

As a happy side effect you'll also regard scales as easy marks in exams, but the benefit to your playing is immense.

I don't know if this is helpful or not!

When i am learning scales i write all the scales, arpeggios etc on pieces of paper and put them in a box and pick them out one by one. This means that you eventually can play them at the drop of a hat.

Good luck!

It is useful for any section of a piece where there are too many notes to fit into your short term memory (which holds around seven chunks of information on average). I use it wherever a run of notes has a non-scale or arpeggio pattern, or where there are lots of accidentals. And I use it all the time with my students.

Hi ...I appreciate this thread is old...but I'm doing my grade 3 flute at the moment and although I know some of my scales and can do them at home when I practise- when I get to my flute lesson I make a mistake and my teacher thinks I haven't practised. He realises (I hope) that I find them tricky to learn but doesn't really 'teach' me any techniques/strategies for learning them- just says, you need to learn this one and this one...etc. am I expecting too much from my teacher, I think he should be supporting me more, not sure what to do.

Try playing them in different rhythms, dotted, double dotted, jazz rhythms and vary the articulation. Then try starting at the top and going down then up, from the middle to the bottom to the top to the middle, from the middle to the top to the bottom to the middle. Then doing it from the bottom to the top will seem easier. Get some cards and right all the scales on them. Shuffle them and then go through them, putting any scale cards that you can't do to the side and then go over them. Also make a chart of all your scales and tick them off once they are perfect - this will show you how much progress you are making and how much you have still to do. Also make sure you can say your scales (as in the letter names) in your head. This should give you the confidence to know that you can do it.

I had to learn all my scales from scratch to do a technical exam at my Junior Department and by doing all mentioned above I did extremely well. I did become slightly obsessive near to the exam, but it was worth it as now I can play every scale (there were about 100 of them) with ease.

Good luck.

Thikn of it this way- if you know what a major scale sounds like, you should be able to play any scale within a few goes of trying. Listen to what your playing instead of using your eyes.

Ears are important in music just as much as reading it is! As I'm sure you know. Minor Harmonic all sound the same too. If you can get the sounds into your head and predict the next note, playing up in semitones and tones should come naturally.

Thats the way I did it.

hope it helps

Set aside some time to study some of the excellent advice which has been given on this forum in the past. I think the best thread is this one started by Sarah-flute:

Scale! Some good practice techniques

- in it Sarah has very helpfully listed lots of links to other threads about learning scales.

View it as a project because it will take some time to study all the advice and work out what's helpful for *you*, but it will be worth it if it helps you move forward.

Agh. I hate playing scales on the flute, but that's probably mostly due to laziness..
To be honest, I've always found that the best way is to practise them, every day.
Even if you've left them a long time, it's not hard to pick them up again if you practise them regularly (as I've done with piano scales )
Don't worry about later grades either. I'm onto Grade 6, and quite a few are repeated from previous grades.

I had exactly the same problem when i did my violin grade three a few months ago. No matter how I tried I just couldnt remember them.

What I was told to do by one of my mates was what we used to do at primary school the good old look cover write check. But instead of this you play instead of write but I suppose you could do the write bit if you wanted whatever takes your fancy. Also get a friend to test you by asking you what certain scales are made of.

I would not worry because if you get into a exam room you seem to remember most of them.

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