I have an adult student who plans to take Grade 3 Violin, and would like to use a CD at home to help with learning of scales (ie a piano, for instance, playing along, for intonation). Does anyone know if such things exist?

I've heard of people making backing track CDs of their own to use...not of commercially available ones.

Does your student have a keyboard? It can be very helpful to practise scales with a drone accompaniment.
So say you're practising B flat major, you train your tame parrot to hold down the B flat note while you play carefully up and down (or down and up is also good!) the scale, listening really carefully to the interval between each degree as well as the interval from the tonic being droned.

Sounds odd but works! If you don't have a tame parrot, I suppose you could put something heavy and small on the necessary keyboard note to keep it playing although long term I guess this is not an ideal way to treat the beast...

The ABRSM have done a CD for piano exam scales, I don't know about violin.

Or buy a tuner that produces reference tones.

Any chance you could enlarge on this? I haven't heard of such animals before.

There is a series of books called Scales Under Construction. I think they are available for several instruments. I'm not sure if they have actual scales on the Cd but there are exercises with scale patterns in which might be of help.. It might be worth checking if there is one for Violin.

Yep. I recently mentioned mine for instance on another thread. It's one of these:
Intelli IMT-301 (bought 'cos I was impressed by the one my oboe teacher has).



For details see http://www.staffordguitar.com/reviewsmetronomes.asp

It's a chromatic tuner over 8 octaves and will also play reference tones over that range. It has a volume control (some don't) and a good metronome too along with a big easily readable display. It's not small but in the context of carrying an instrument plus accessories plus music, it's OK (any smaller and I'd mislay it anyway). Oh and it's cheaper than the Korg or Seiko competition.

I found in a book on keyboard harmony some chord progressions intended for accompanying singers practising scales, and produced some MIDI files using Logic. I gave up using them after a while, mainly because when my intonation goes wrong (i.e. even further wrong than usual) I tend to stop and correct it rather than just continuing with the scale; but, now you have reminded me, I might have another go. It's easy enough to transpose these files into different keys, change the tempo and so on. And they sound great because the samples are recorded from a real Steinway. I'll send you a batch of mp3 files if you like.