Piano Video Lesson: 5 Benefits of Scales and Arpeggios

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin with 5 Benefits of Scales and Arpeggios.

Maybe you work on scales and arpeggios on a regular basis or maybe you know you should but you don't and you're thinking is it really that important? Well I'm going to give you five reasons why working on scales and arpeggios is worth your while.

Okay, one of the most obvious ones is it improves the evenness in your playing. When you're playing scales, after all you are focusing on the evenness, the hands being precisely together, the evenness of the sound, the evenness of the release of the notes, all of that and it gives you that benefit in your playing because obviously scales are an abstraction, it's not music after all. But if you practice your scales diligently with a metronome slowly and then increasing the speed until you can play scales rapidly with evenness, think what that does for your playing.

What's another benefit? Well obviously you can develop strength. Why? Well there's 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 because a lot of your practice of music is a mental exercise. If you're learning a score, you're focusing in on the harmonies, the fingering, you're learning things and it's a mental effort. When you're working on scales and arpeggios it's all physical, it's actually you're obviously paying attention to what you're doing but the whole time slow practice of scales by the way, unbelievably important. In fact in some ways even more important than the rapid, quick practicing of scales because that's where you really develop the strength.

When you're playing really hammering each note with the fingers, not just using the arms, you don't want to be doing this.

Of course you get a lot of power that way 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 your fingers so that you can get a nice attack on each note cleanly. Most importantly the release of previously played notes and scales and arpeggios so you get the space between the notes being even as well. This is tremendous way to develop strength for yourself.

Of course another benefit of working on scales is you develop speed in your playing. How this is done once again, the metronome to the rescue. You work slowly. Now you may be able to go from one note to the beat as I was demonstrating with that D flat major arpeggio 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 at a time in the metronome. As you're getting faster you're getting lighter so that you can develop speed and it's a terrific way to develop speed because you don't have all the complexity of shifting harmonies, inner voices, fingering patterns, phrasing, expression. It's just the abstraction of piano technique so it's a terrific way to develop speed in your playing.

Another benefit, tremendous benefit of knowing all major and minor scales and arpeggios, that's harmonic and melodic minor scales and your major and minor scales and major and minor arpeggios is for 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 like something you have to practice. You've already got the technique there. Now you might think how can you learn all scales and arpeggios? Well there's a very very simple way and that is to just focus on one each week. Spend five or ten minutes a day in your practice. When your mind is tired you've been learning music and you're exhausted, you're ready to quit, you think I don't know if I can do anything more and you're mentally tired, perfect time for scales or arpeggios. It uses a different part of your concentration so that even though you might be mentally tired from memorizing or working out thorny passages in your music you go to a scale, you start working on a new fingering, maybe you've never done the G sharp minor scale before and there you go. You work it out slowly and if you do one a week after a year you'll know all major and minor scales and arpeggios. Now that's not the end, that's the beginning because then the next year you can start increasing the speed of all of them and at first some of them might become more fluent than others. I suggest keeping track with a chart so that you can know which ones need the work and eventually get all your major minor scales and arpeggios at a certain speed and then notch that up and notch it up again and it's a never ending process and there are many other ways you can practice scales and arpeggios, country motion, in intervals but first order of business just learn all of them. It's not a big deal, five or ten minutes a day, do it consistently, it will really help your playing.

And the last benefit that I'm offering, there are actually many more benefits but these are five really definite benefits, it improves your reading of music.

How come? Because when you're reading a score, if they're scale passages and arpeggios you don't have to figure it out, you already know how to play them so the fingering becomes obvious, these passages become fluid for you. So these are five really treasures worth your five or ten minutes a day. 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? Like I said 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. Any of you who have worked on scales and arpeggios want to share your experiences, what it's done for your playing in the comments here at LivingPianos.com.

Thanks so much for joining me again, I'm Robert Estrin, LivingPianos .com, your online piano resource.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/5-benefits-of-scales-and-arpeggios/

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