dreammusiclife

[dreammusiclife]

How to Make Scales Interesting?

What? Scales can be made interesting? How can this be? There are a few things that unite all musicians - a dislike of conductors, metronomes and scales. There’s not much we can do about conductors, and I’ve already talked about metronomes, so now it’s time to tackle the issue of scales.

It’s one of those tricky subjects - we know we need to do scales, because they have such a great effect on our playing, but they can also be so boring at times. So, in an effort to make them the slightest bit more interesting, I present three different ways of tackling scales, so that they’re not such a burden.

Designer Scales

An Idea I grabbed from Practiceopedia. Basically, the general idea is that you make your scales relate to your music. Studying a piece in D major? Then you should probably be looking at doing D Major, A Major, G Major, D minor and B minor (if the piece modulates into those keys). Those 5 keys are the most common modulations from D major - The Tonic (D Major), the Dominant (A Major), the Sub Dominant (G Major), the Tonic Minor (D minor) and the Relative Minor (B minor). If you practice those scales, you can be pretty sure that you’ll run across those notes in the piece that it relates to.

Playful Scales

Another way to design your scales is to alter the fingerings. Got a scale in a piece? Study that scale with that fingering. Often we’ll only learn one fingering, the fingering that our teacher gave us, or the fingering given by the examination body. However, there are plenty of places to shift, or use different fingerings, so play around with your scales and use different fingerings, so no matter what you run into in your piece, you’ll have already practiced it with your scales.

You can also play around with rhythms, what beat of the bar you start on, “phrase” lengths, anything. Do whatever you can think of to play these scales.

Random Scales

This is one that I like. Say you've set down a number of scales to do each week. One way to get you through them is to place them randomly throughout your practice times. Write down all your pieces of technical work, one item per line. I like to use Notepad2 from Flo’s Freeware, an open-source notepad replacement with many features. One thing I like is that you can enable a line numbers margin, allowing you to see how many lines you’ve written. If you don’t want to do this, then just use the Numbered list in your favourite word processor. So you might have the following list given to you:

G major, 3 octaves

C Harmonic minor, 2 octaves

A melodic minor, 3 octaves

Bb dominant 7th arpeggio, 3 octaves

D diminished 7th arpeggio, 2 octaves

Eb major arpeggio, 3 octaves

G chromatic scale, 3 octaves

Ok, so 7 different items. You might decide that you want to have completed these 3 times a week. So we’re looking at practicing 3 items per day. If you’re using my 7-minute system of practicing, you would practice each item for 7 minutes. In your practice plan, schedule in 3 spots for scales. Don’t write in what scales you’ll be doing yet, you’re going to create a list that randomises what you do. Head over to any Random Number Generator, and insert your details. For the example above, we would want to generate 7 pseudo-random integers between 1 and 7 with no repeats. We would then generate, copy the numbers generated, then repeat 2 more times. The results I got were:

4 5 6 7 2 3 1 5 7 4 1 6 3 2 7 1 5 2 4 6 3

That is the sequence of the scales that I will practice during the week. I would now go through and create my list, and write it out completely, so that each day I just have to copy and paste the next scales.

To make it clearer, I would start on day one with Bb dominant 7th arpeggio, 3 octaves, D diminished 7th arpeggio, 2 octaves, Eb major arpeggio, 3 octaves

Then Day two would be G chromatic scale, 3 octaves, C Harmonic minor, 2 octaves, A melodic minor, 3 octaves

And so on throughout the week.

This way, you practice each item the number of times you want to practice, but you never know what’s going to be next. As you can see, this probably doesn’t work so well for the smaller numbers (With my results, I ended up with 4, 5, 6, 7, which is what I wanted to avoid), however when I put my own list together, I counted up 75 different items, which I could complete within a week practicing each one once. For me, the randomisation helps keep the mind interested, and really focussed on wanting to make sure I get it right, especially seeing as it will be the only time I practice it this week.

I hope some of those ideas help you with how you can make your scales a bit more interesting. I’d love to hear any ideas you have on how you make your scales interesting.