Bentz Music Studio

Sunday, October 4, 2015 by Andrea Bentz | Uncategorized

It is hard to get students to see the value in learning and practicing scales sometimes. However, learning scales serves many purposes! Here is a bulleted list of some of the reasons scales are important:

• Scales form the foundation of all music. Playing from one note to the very next is the most common movement found in music.
• Scales are a great warm-up to get blood moving to the fingers and prepare the muscles to play.
• While working on scales, a piano student learns a lot about efficient movement of the hand and fingers, creating even tone, and avoiding injury.
• Scale work is a great way to develop a beautiful fluid sound in melodic passages.  
• Learning scales is the most efficient way to learn how to play in many different key signatures.
• Proper scale practice leads to better control of dynamics and mastery of tempos.
• Jazz players agree that knowledge of all scales is essential to improvisation.

And I could go on! However, the above list covers most of the major points. In the studio, we make scale practice more interesting by adding dynamics, patterns, or perhaps working through a scale as we learn a piece in the same key. We might even have an studio incentive to see how many scales we can review or learn in a short period of time.

We don't study a scale every lesson all year round, but we do consistently learn and practice scales. We are better pianists and musicians because of it!