Edit: Long post warning!!!! Please bear with me though as I think this thread could prove useful....

Hi,

Now I am having lessons again I am increasingly playing more scales. I know my key signatures of all major scales pretty instantly and can quickly work out those involving many sharps/flats.

I can work out minors in their various forms but they are not such a focus at the moment.

I am also working with diminished and dominant seventh forms and chromatics starting on a variety of notes.

I am playing scales, running scales, arpeggios and broken chords.


But I am not a natural memoriser. Put a scale in front of me and I'll usually play it no bother. Do the same one from memory and it doesn't work so well - especially with broken chords or running scales where I easily forget where I am in the sequence.

Now I used to say every note in my head as I played a scale - slowly (Don't think these were ever my strong point and pulled me down in exam marks ). Recently however I used this method successfully to learn a diminished 7th scale but soon became aware that I was no longer thinking the notes as I play. The same is true for chromatic scales - my fingers seem to know where to go.

In working out broken chords I do tend to say the note names or at least the starting one in each run in my head to keep track. If I don't think these out I lose track of where I am.

Then last night at my lesson I was asked out of the blue to play an F# major scale. Together we worked out it had 6 sharps. When I played it though I found that I wasn't thinking in terms of note names, rather what sounded and felt right - it worked!!

I had also started to try this strategy with diminished 7ths and to some extent it was working too.
Also, tried to apply a similar strategy to some scales I'd been learning - namely Ab and A and Eb and E majors . For these I played them quickly by reading them from my Kloze a number of times then repeating them by memory using the same rhythm e.g: Ab (quaver), Bb C Db Eb F G (semiquavers) Ab (quaver) Bb C Db Eb F G (semiquavers) Ab (quaver) and back down again. As I found this flowed really well I used the same strategy for other scales and I wasn't thinking of the notes but of the rhythm and in a way my hands were guided by unconscious rather than conscious memory. However my ear was finely tuned and so I could correct any mistakes as I went in this learning process.

So it seems to me that my scale learning process has graduated to a higher but less conscious level. I am however inclined on occasion to go back to writing down the letter names as an in between process so, for example, F G# B D might be the only thing I'd write on a piece of paper, as an aide memoire, when learning a diminished 7th on F.

So I wondered.....

How do you do it? What strategies do you employ? What goes through your conscious thoughts as you try to memorise scales or do you work on a purely sub-conscious level?

Is it different for different instruments too??

For example on a piano the keys are all laid out in front of you and you know you move your hands in one direction for ascending and the opposite for descending.

For a wind instrument you may combine the keys in different ways more than once in a scale. Sometimes familiarity with a fingering pattern helps - e.g. one off two on as you come down the F# major scale on a clarinet

OK. You get the picture. Enough waffle from me.

Please share what does and doesn't work for you and maybe we can all pick up some useful tips.

hi
When im learning scales, I think of the notes- sharps and flats. Then i play it very slowly, thinking of what note is coming next. this method works for me!
On the other hand, just attempting to play them without thinking dosent work for me

Well, I could play things by ear in a C major scale .. for example twnkle star.. and a basic hymn.. and I decided I`d work out how to play it in another key which I didnt know, Eventually its go to the stage where I can play them in all major keys .. and if you want to have a little more surprise for what I did by ear.. take a listen to this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1tQ4gVnXKU

What doesnt work.. I dont know.. if it doesnt sound right I do it again slower.. :/

this piano is out of tune and the sustain pedal is weirdly not always pressed. Enjoy..

I work scales out by a sequence of fingering, 4 3 4 etc.. but I work out looking at the keys what will allow me to do 2 octaves and more.

I think the ear is important with scales, I can instantly tell when I play a scale wrong, and I can usually figure out any major/minor scale I please from a combination of ear and theory To memorise them, I first go through as slowly as necessary to play the whole thing correctly with the right fingers. It just sinks in over the course of a few days usually, then it's a matter of speeding up

A long reply too, for which I apologise in advance!

Although I have been playing the piano for more than forty years, for most of that time my playing was not under the supervision of a teacher, nor the constraints of preparing for an exam, so I was free to get into bad habits.

That would have happened with scales, had I actually set about learning them! I have a book of scales from when I was 13 yrs old, with crosses next to some of them indicating that my teacher must have set them for me to learn at some stage, although I don't recall ever having got down to the business of getting them under my fingers.

So essentially I started learning scales from scratch last January, in order to satisfy the demands of that component of my grade 8 exam which I took, and passed, in June. That also meant going from probably only ever having played a single octave in one hand within a piece of music, to fouroctaves and also hands together, a third apart, sixth apart etc.

Under the guidance of my teacher, I got to grips with familiarising myself with the patterns of 3s and 4s preceeding passing the thumb underneath, because in some scales my natural tendency was to play thumb, 2, 3, 4, thumb, 2, 3, 4 ... where the black notes allowed. I got to remember which hand to concentrate on, to ensure that I stuck to the right pattern.

Other than that, which only very occasionally led me to refer back to my book of scales, I think that the aural aspect totally dominated prcoceedings.

Knowledge of the key-signatures was never a problem and I don't recall ever having called them to mind before launching into a practice. It wasn't long before the aural, together with the gradual familiarity with finger-patterns took control.

I was playing them on the grand at school where I work, when the Headmaster passed by the hall and waved to greet me. I waved back. He said,"I'm sure you're not meant to be able to do that and continue playing at the same time!"

So for me, years of playing allowed me to hear the correct intervals and thereby correct any errors. One hour every day, purely on scales, for five weeks and I had them all learnt, including those not on the list (G,Bb,E,A).

I started with Db/C# then D and C, Eb, B etc working outwards from C# in keys right and left, major and both minors, hands separately then together an octave apart until I had tackled all keys. Then I went back and started to learn to play each of them a third apart and a sixth apart.

At the start of the fourth week I began practising them in the cycle of fifths and after I had got to grips with them all started the cycle at a different point each time I sat down to practice, but nevertheless ran through all combinations at each sitting (156?).

What I didn'tdo was vary the rhythm though, which I could have done, had I felt boredom creep in - it didn't! Fortunately, my technique for playing staccato had developed already over the years and so, much to the delight of my teacher, that aspect didn't need a great deal of special attention.

Had I not been able to learn my scales to my own satisfaction, I would not have entered for the exam.

Learning all my scales in just over a month, at the age of 47, has now opened the door to the possibility of taking a diploma!

Nothing works for me and I've given up trying. Thankfully I no longer have to anyway.

Piano was okay - the notes are all sitting there looking at you, I know the theory and I know the keys: that is not the difficulty with memorising.

Recorder is just the most irritating problem ever - there is nothing which will help etch those fingering combinations into my head. Since I can play them from the music perfectly well, I'm not bothered though - what I do is learn the music I actually want to play, from the notes on a page, and am deft enough for this to work well for me. It's far less painful, still has a knock-on effect of improving my overall standard, and is actually pleasurable to do too .

My daughter who is very good at clarinet scales, does it all pretty much by ear I think. When she learns a new scale she'll just start with the relevant note and set off. When something sounds wrong she puts it right, and plugs away at it until it is all correct. Once she's done it enough times I suppose the finger patterns become automatic. It's often frustrating for me to listen to, because I never understand, as she makes lots of mistakes initially, why she won't consult a book or give some thought to relative majors, sharpened notes etc etc. She has to be very very desperate before she'll do that. Seems to work for her though.

I'm not sure that referring to a book helps. It might be a short cut but I think it's much more useful to work out for yourself what notes you should be playing. That should be fairly straightforward. I say should be as, although I generally don't have much of an issue sorting out what notes to play, I had an absolute blank on a certain minor scale a couple of weeks ago. It just wouldn't come out properly and eventually I had to resort to asking my teacher what I was doing wrong. I was apparently forgetting to raise the 7th How dumb can you get?

I think (!!) on the oboe that I tend to use finger memory to play scales. When asked by my teacher how I remember whereabouts in a scale I am, the honest answer is that usually I don't. She has decided that in order to make recovery from slips easier and quicker it might be an idea if I did know here I was (sounds sensible) and has suggested that I start playing my scales a little slower and talking through the notes as I play (not literally - I'm not THAT good an oboist) or visualising the score.



Yes stupid instrument. I just had to learn each note in turn cramming it into my brain and I get caught out quite regularly (I don't play much).

The oboe came as a blessed relief - 2 octaves of logic. The 3rd octave though -

I'm in the throws of learning my scales on the clarinet and I have to say that my sight reading is awful so I memorize the finger placements pretty quickly and work from memory. D minor is a pain though - lots of 'unnatural' finger movements for me

Hi,
I'm about the same, with Major scales I have no problem even Dominant 7ths I find quite easy without the music.
Put a minor scale in front of me and I can play it quite well but take the music away and I struggle on some.
I guess with me it's just keep plugging away, practice, practice, practice.

I do find helpful, when practicing Major scales I start on C and play them starting on a Major fifth higher each time right round back to C.
And with minor scales start on A and play them a Major forth higher back round to A.

The trouble is with grade 7, hopefully March 2010. every scale has to be learnt... Doh.

Regards, Peter.

I didn't even know you could play from the page when I first started flute... I'd heard about scales, read up about them on the internet, so tried C major, then F, G etc. Then my teacher told me to play a couple and I knew those ones. When she asked me for new ones, I worked them out from ear. I didn't know the key signatures well at all though (which is a bad side to it). When it got to grade 5, and it was taking a long time to work out which sharps and flats each key had and had to rely on muscle memory, I thought "hey, what about writing them out?!" so silly little me set out to write out every single scale on manuscript paper. Oh dear.

Then I was in a music shop, and saw something called a "scales book", opened it up, and was gobsmacked when I found rows of scales, all written out already for me!

I still find it better to do it by ear, especially for memory's sake. Sometimes it gets too hard and I have to use the book, like last lesson my teacher asked me to play the 3 types of diminished 7ths (I think..) without reminding me what one sounded like first, just telling me that there was a minor 3rd in between each note. It took soooo long.

On piano, I always found that the shape of the keyboard gave me a visual prompt, and generally that was all that was needed once I knew the fingering, though I never got beyond Grade 4/5 level so I might have encountered more problems had I persisted to the higher grades.

On sax, I have tended to find just lots and lots of playing is what's needed: first of all with the notes in front of me all the time; then perhaps playing it once with the music and then turning away from the music stand to try to do it again from memory; finally, ditching the music entirely and doing it slowly from memory, and speeding up once the fingering was secure. For me, it seems to be a matter of drilling the fingering patterns and sequences into my brain. Again, I haven't got very far in the grades on sax yet, so who knows what will happen once I get onto the more demanding scale requirements. However, my teacher did suggest as an exercise trying to play C maj in thirds (so C - E - D - F - E - G etc) which I understand is something required at the higher grades, and I didn't find that too difficult; again, I think this was because one of my technical exercises is based around C maj in thirds, so I had played it so much (even though not as a scale) that the patterns were familiar.

On both instruments, I think nothing beats lots and lots of practice. Unfortunately.

I have always assumed it was me just being too stupid for the instrument, rather than it being the stupid one

And me - on flute the fingerings are totally random in the higher register. Thank goodness for the Orchestral Extracts scales alternative offered by Trinity!

I'm having to learn them for guitar as there's no exam board which offers an alternative and I'm finding it fairly easy - I just remember some finger numbers and they work for all scales starting on the same string - I just start in a different place.

I never knew there was a scale book when I was learning the piano. In those days the scales built up over the grades so my teacher taught me the new ones one at a time and kept me on with the old ones. I wasn't the greatest pianist but scales aren't so bad because once you've really learnt them they stay with you, a bit like riding a bike. Now that you learn a couple of scales for a grade then drop some and learn others I don't think it works nearly as well. Although when I did grade 8 there were a tremendous number of scales I already knew many of them as I'd done all the previous grades so mostly it was just a question of a lot of practice.

It doesn't quite work the same way with wind instruments.
I'm looking after a clarinet student for a teacher who is about to go into hospital and as a first study pianist am having to think of new ways to approach scales.
The order of learning scales is different too as it depends on the range of notes a student has.

I think that would be good for me too. I've tended to learn by playing them by ear as well as I can and then cementing the finger patterns, though the trouble with this is that I can only play them well when I don't think about it. So doesn't really work in exams and can make recovery from slips almost impossible.

I've started bringing in the theory, so thinking about which notes I will play before starting the scale, and also mentally going through scales away from the instrument. thinking about the key signature, going through the notes and mentally going through the fingering too to try and engrain them in my head.

Having first learned my scales on the piano and learned the pattern of notes visually from the keyboard, I do sometimes visualise the scale on the keyboard when thinking about which notes to play.

I find with dominant 7ths and diminished 7ths I have to work out which notes I need to play almost from first principles before starting. Not doing any exams for a while though so no real pressure to learn them really. I just enjoy doing scales as part of my warm up.

I found that, for me, memorising the scales was easy.

All I did was memorise the pattern on the fingerboard and then shift up the neck to change keys. Easy on the guitar, besause as you go up the neck the pattern still remains the same.

Not so easy I should imagine on the piano, and must be a nightmare for wind instruments.

Interesting that this doesn't seem to be taken into consideration in the marking schemes.

Kind Regards,

Nigel