I just doubled the speed of one of my most evil scales in the space of part of one practice session.

WOOHOO!

I was using the technique that I think is called "splurts" in the Practice Revolution book, and comes up also in a Trevor Wye book, where you speed up tiny sections at a time... so for instance, with B major which I was having problems with in the top octave, I went B A# REALLY quickly, and did that all the way up and down the scale, then did it in 3s, etc etc, and eventually it clicked in my brain and now I can play it more than twice as fast as I could before I did this.

It sounds really weird - I've read about variations on it before and was never convinced, but having tried it - woah! It really helps!

It is really very useful... so I thought I'd mention it in case anyone else is fighting with scales.

I'm going to try it out on abunch more yesterday - I'll master my grade 6 scales in half the time I expected to at this rate

Good for you
Ill try it

Ben

Hope you find it helps!

I got my B major up from an appallingly bad 44 BPM (two notes per beat) up to 90 BPM in a surprisingly short space of time, not to mention speeding up a couple of other scales that were stuck well below where I need them to be. I plan to try and get all my scales up to the minimu (which is 104) confidently (some of them are better than that already but some are way below) and then try and work on them evenly so they all get up to a reasonable and reasonably consistent speed.

I thought I was never going to crack B major...

I'll have to give it a go. I've never cracked B major.

Oh that makes me feel better!!

I wouldn't say I've cracked it, but I'm a whole lot closer to that than I would've thought possible before! At 44BPM I was struggling, I just didn't want to write down a lower number because it was already TOO depressing for words, so to be playing it confidently and mostly fluently at 90 is a bit of a miracle. Kind of afraid I'll wake up tomorrow and find it was just a good dream...

If you have the Trevor Wye advanced practice book (I bought it in the 50% off sale!!) then it's in there somewhere...um... OK, page 22 and 23... I haven't (yet...hmmm!) got to the stage of being able to play whole chunks of the scale as one long set of grace notes, but it was an amazingly effective way of getting it more fluent, I could hardly believe the progress I made (I usually look at getting maybe 10 BPM faster if I work really hard at a scale in one session, not 46 BPM! and it was *relatively* easy compared to just playing the scale over and over till i got more confident) I only really did the first 2 or 3 bars of that exercise in B major and it made such an enormous difference. Only I did those two or 3 bars over the whole compass, if that makes sense (hopefully it will IF you have the book!) - so in C major for the sake of simplicity, CD, DE, EF, then CDE, DEF, EFG and so on.

Kind of similar to "splurts" on page 209 of The Practice Revolution if anyone has that.

I really don't think I've explained this very well, but if it makes any sense, then try it, it really works to my amazement!

A great tip!

I play oboe but have this nasty F# scale where it's necessary to move several fingers at once aside from the break. Having tried splurting for two days I can say it definitely works.

Sarah, do you think this would work for violin too???

Jane, I have no idea, but it might!

Franchonard: great isn't it?