When diving into piano playing, a common question pops up: should you start with scales or arpeggios? Both are key to building your skills, but knowing where to begin can make your practice more effective.

What’s the Difference?

Scales: These are sequences of notes moving up or down in a set pattern of whole and half steps. Take the C major scale, for example: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and back to C. It’s like climbing a musical ladder.

Arpeggios: Think of these as broken chords. Instead of playing all the notes of a chord at once, you play them one after the other. For instance, a C major arpeggio would be C, E, G, and the higher C. It’s like spreading out the notes of a chord.

Why Start with Scales?

Kicking off with scales is a smart move for a few reasons:

Finger Coordination: Scales involve finger crossings, especially the thumb, but over shorter distances than arpeggios. This makes them a great way to get your fingers moving smoothly.

Building Blocks: Scales help you understand key signatures and finger patterns, setting you up for more complex pieces down the road.

Musical Flow: Many songs have scale-like passages. Getting comfortable with scales can make learning new tunes easier.

When to Add Arpeggios

Once you’re feeling good about scales, it’s time to mix in arpeggios. They require bigger finger movements and offer new challenges, helping you further develop your technique.

Practice Tips

Use a Metronome: Start slow, maybe at 60 beats per minute, playing one note per beat. As you get better, you can speed up.

Finger Power: Focus on using your fingers to play, not your arms. This helps with control and precision, especially as you pick up the pace.

Stay Consistent: Even just 5 to 10 minutes a day on scales and arpeggios can make a big difference over time.

In short, starting with scales gives you a solid foundation. Once you’re comfortable, adding arpeggios will round out your skills, making you a more versatile player.

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.

Arpeggios are simply broken chords. Scales and arpeggios form the foundation of technique, not just for the piano, but for virtually all musical instruments. I’ve talked about how to practice scales and arpeggios in the past. Today, I’m going to give you three ways of practicing arpeggios specifically. If you like this, I could probably give you 10 more ways of practicing them because there are many ways of practicing arpeggios.

Here are three good starters for you:

Let’s start with a basic C major chord which forms the foundation of a C major arpeggio. Since you’re going all the way up and down the keyboard with both hands, you have to deal with finger crossings. I suggest you reference Hanon – 60 Selected Studies for the Virtuoso Pianist. This is a resource for all the fingerings of all major and minor scales and arpeggios as well as exercises and additional materials. The first way to practice arpeggios is perhaps the most fundamental. I’ve talked about this before in videos and I’m going to recap this because it’s essential.

You must practice slowly first to develop independence of the fingers.

As you get faster, place the fingers closer to the keys to get speed and lightness. You want to use the metronome when practicing arpeggios and scales because the whole idea is to measure your playing because you want to achieve precision. You must strive for evenness in tone, touch and timing.

Of course you can practice arpeggios with different phrasing and dynamics. For now, I’m going to suggest you play them at a strong level always from the fingers. It won’t do any good to practice arpeggios or scales using your arms or wrists because as you go faster, they’re not going to be able to keep up. The whole idea is to develop the strength of your fingers. So, watch how you can approach arpeggios slowly. If you’re a beginner studying arpeggios, I recommend putting the metronome at 60 and going one note to the beat, then two notes to the beat, and finally playing at four notes to the beat. You can even do gradual metronome speeds raising a notch or two at a time if you run into difficulties going faster. There is a brief demonstration on the accompanying video on how to practice this way with the metronome.

Notice a couple of things. First of all, you want to avoid any up and down motion with the arms. Use only your fingers. Notice how you raise your fingers to achieve independence and strength. You get the feel of exactly where each key is. It provides an opportunity to dig into each note gaining security. Once you’re comfortable, you should do that at least four times before moving on any faster. Then you can go to two notes to the beat. Notice, as you get faster, the fingers must be closer to the keys. When transitioning to four notes to the beat, you want to have your arms almost floating in air just above the keys because they don’t have the strength to support the arms at great speed. At four notes to the beat there’s less motion of your fingers as well. They are kept very close to the keys. You must spend sufficient time at each speed. At one note to the beat, you might spend around five minutes mastering it. If you’re playing only an arpeggio at one note to the beat at 60, five minutes is a pretty long time! This helps you gain great strength and independence of the fingers.

So we’ve covered one way of practicing arpeggios which is essential. It think it’s probably one of the best ways to practice arpeggios. You may get to a stumbling block and get to a point where you know you can do one note, but getting to two notes or four notes to the beat proves to be very difficult. You’re wondering how you can get it any faster. Are there any shortcuts? I’m going to show you a couple!

One shortcut is to practice in chords. Here is how to do this: Delineate where the thumb crossings are and play two notes together, then play the thumbs. You can watch how to achieve this on the accompanying video. Once you are comfortable, you can do that at two notes to the beat. Doing four notes is probably too fast for this practice technique depending upon the tempo you choose You want to get it fluent so you get the sense of the thumb crossings which are essential for smooth transition of registers. Instead, of trying to go faster, try breaking up the inner notes quickly and land on the thumbs securely holding them longer so that you gain security of the thumb crossings in both hands. This helps you get the sense of how the thumbs anchor you versus the finger which hover over the other two notes of the chord. You must strive for evenness playing the inner notes cleanly.