Years ago, when someone had piano lessons, they always had to learn scales. I’m sure that if you had lessons as a child you’d remember having to learn scales. It probably wasn’t a particular fond memory having to incessantly go up and down on the piano keyboard until you got them right. Playing scales might have even been one of the reasons you might have quit when you were younger.
Scales were useless and boring and now they aren’t taught anymore. Sorry, but that statement is not true because there is a point to learning scales and they are still taught today. Okay, I’ll give you the point that they can indeed be boring.
Years ago, scales were often the first thing that was taught and from what I gather, for the first few weeks or even months, sometimes it was only scales that were taught (I was lucky, I had a teacher that waited about a year before I had to start learning scales). Its no wonder some really keen kids gave up learning to play the piano – they were bored to death with scales, instead of starting to learn really simple pieces of music that could capture and hold their interest in playing the piano.
Of course everyone who wants to play the piano wants to play beautiful pieces of music. No matter whether you are interested in playing classical, jazz, modern or the music of your youth, there is just so much wonderful music that you can play on the piano and just be caught up and swept away by the beauty and the emotion of the music – whatever that emotion is.
If you choose to have piano lessons now, you can find a good piano teacher that will not insist that you learn to play scales. They might persuade you down the track, but they won’t try and force you to play scales.
If you remember enough of what you learned from when you had lessons when you were younger and you choose not to play scales as part of your practising routine, then its not going to stop you from playing what you want and playing it well.
However, there are indeed benefits that I would wish you to consider:
Playing scales at the very beginning of any piano practice that you do is like doing stretches before you go and exercise. You would be warming up your fingers, ready to play. This could be really useful especially if your hands and fingers ever felt stiff and if you did ever have any finger or hand stiffness, then I would go so far as to say that warm up scales are essential. This is because your subsequent practice would be better than if you hadn’t done any warm up scales at all.
Learning and practising scales will help you with a better technique. It is through scales you can learn to play much more smoothly. Playing smoothly and not disjointedly is really important with the majority of piano music that is out there, regardless of which genre of music you are keen to play.
It is because scales are nothing but technical exercises, they can help you learn to play faster and more rhythmically. This is important for all pieces of music. Many pieces of music would have sections that seem to be a lot faster, simply because they are more difficult to play. Practising scales are the very thing that can help you get your music to the correct speed as well as having the correct rhythm and timing.
Another reason why scales are useful to learn is that the vast majority of music has been written in a particular ‘key’ which means that it is mostly uses certain notes, which have a defined and specific relationship to each other. By learning and practising scales you will get to know incredibly well what the various keys are and what relationship the notes have to each other.
Following on from this, if you are into jazz music and want to be able to improvise then you will need to know and practise scales. You are not going to be able to adequately improvise if you don’t practice your scales.
I know that a lot of people who learned to play the piano when they were younger, detested playing scales. Now that you can see just some of the benefits of learning and playing scales, I hope that you reconsider and incorporate some scales into your regular piano practice.