Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about the five benefits of scales and arpeggios. Maybe you work on scales and arpeggios on a regular basis. Maybe you know you should, but you don’t. You might wonder if it’s really that important. I’m going to give you five reasons why working on scales and arpeggios is worth your while!
One of the most obvious reasons is that it improves the evenness of your playing.
When you’re playing scales, you are focusing on the evenness. You’re focusing on your hands being precisely together, the evenness of the sound, and the evenness of the release of the notes. It gives you that benefit in your playing because scales are an abstraction. It’s not music. But if you practice your scales diligently with a metronome slowly and then increase the speed until you can play scales rapidly with evenness, think what that does for your playing!
Playing scales can help you develop strength.
There are two reasons for this. First of all, you will play more notes in a short amount of time when you’re working on scales and arpeggios than working on your music. A lot of your practice of music is a mental exercise. If you’re learning a score, you’re focusing on all the details, like the harmonies and the fingering. It’s a mental effort. When you’re working on scales and arpeggios, it’s all physical. Slow practice of scales is unbelievably important. In fact, in some ways, it’s even more important than fast-practicing of scales. You really develop strength when you’re hammering each note with your fingers, not just using your arms. Of course, you get a lot of power with your arms, but try to play fast that way. It can’t be done! But if you use each finger, raising the fingers and coming down, it stretches your hands and fingers so that you can get a nice, clean attack on each note. Most importantly, you get precise releases of previously played notes in scales and arpeggios. So the spaces between the notes are equal. This is a tremendous way to develop strength in your playing.
Another benefit of working on scales is developing speed in your playing.
How do scales help you develop speed? Once again, the metronome to the rescue! You work slowly. Now you may be able to go from one note to the beat to two notes to the beat. But going from two notes to four notes could be too great a leap. So you might want to just do one or two notches faster at a time on the metronome. As you’re getting faster, you’re getting lighter so that you can develop speed. It’s a terrific way to develop speed because you don’t have all the complexity of shifting harmonies, inner voices, fingering patterns, phrasing, and expression. It’s just an abstraction of piano technique. So it’s a terrific way to develop speed in your playing.
Knowing all major and minor scales and arpeggios is a tremendous benefit to your fingering.
After all, the vast majority of music you play is built on scales and broken chords. If you know all your scales and arpeggios, when you have them in your music, it’s not something you have to practice. You already have the technique there! Now you might think, how can you learn all scales and arpeggios? Well, there’s a very simple way, and that is to just focus on one each week. Spend 5 or 10 minutes a day on scales in your practice. When your mind is tired and you’re ready to quit, that’s the perfect time for scales or arpeggios! It uses a different kind of concentration. Even though you might be mentally tired from memorizing or working out thorny passages in your music, you can still work on scales.
If you do one a week, after a year, you’ll know all major and minor scales and arpeggios!
But that’s not the end. That’s the beginning! Next year, you can start increasing the speed of all of them. Some of them might become more fluent than others. I suggest keeping track of them with a chart so that you know which ones need work. Eventually, you’ll get all your major and minor scales and arpeggios at a certain speed. Then you can notch that up and notch it up again. It’s a never-ending process! There are many other ways you can practice scales and arpeggios, but the first order of business is just to learn all of them. If you consistently spend 5 or 10 minutes a day on scales and arpeggios, it will really help your playing.
Lastly, it improves your reading of music.
When you’re reading a score, if there are scale passages and arpeggios, you don’t have to figure them out. You will already know how to play them! So the fingering becomes obvious. These passages become fluid for you. So these are five reasons it’s worth spending 5 or 10 minutes a day on scales and arpeggios. Once again, it improves your evenness, develops your strength, increases your speed, helps you with fingering, and improves your reading. So if you haven’t been doing scales and arpeggios on a regular basis, what are you waiting for? You don’t have to spend hours a day doing it; just a little bit of time each day when you’re tired of working on other things. Add this to your regimen! I promise you will get benefits. What has it done for your playing? Share your thoughts on scales and arpeggios in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
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