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What Is The Point Of Scales?


Voomy

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Practicing tunes may be more enjoyable, but it gives you nothing but proficiency playing the particular tune being practiced.

 

Sorry David but I can't agree with that. Playing a variety of tunes is a way of making yourself acquainted with all sorts of situations or 'movements' if you like that will help you to to get familiar with your instrument and will also be helpful when learning new tunes.

 

We can argue about what the most efficient way to achieve an intimate understanding and familiarity with your instrument but it can just as easily be said that practicing scales and arpeggios will get you to be good at playing scales and arpeggios. But that's just words and they are cheap. I do think scales and arpeggios will just train the mechanical side of music making while playing tunes helps develop both musical and mechanical skills. And it's important to develop both. How exactly to go about learning depends on a person's goals, type of music etc. Rome, a variety of roads to get you there and all that.

Edited by Peter Laban
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I think it is a bit more than just mechanical, especially for someone completely new to music. Playing scales and arpeggios allows you to associate the muscle movements with the sounds in the context of a key. Yes, tunes do this too, but then you to divide your focus between multiple aspects of the music. Presumably, for some people this focused aspect is helpful, for others it may be unnecessary.

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The instrument you're learning also influences your appreciation of scales and arpeggios.

 

Instruments from the world of classical music (e.g. piano) are fully chromatic; typically "popular" or "people's" instruments (e.g. tin whistle) are diatonic. The latter were developed with the untutored musician in view, the idea being to eliminate all the "wrong" notes in order to make it easier - without theoretical knowledge of key signatures - to find the "right" notes for popular tunes, which are mostly diatonic in nature.

 

You don't have to learn the scales of C major and G major on an Anglo, which originated as the "popular" version of the concertina. All the notes in one diatonic row are potentially "right" notes, and all you have to do is to get a feeling for how far up or down the row the next note of the tune is. It's like walking a rell-trodden path through the forest.

 

With the chromatic EC or Duet, however, there are "wrong" notes all over the place - 5 of them in each octave. C major may be easy enough - just avoid the two outer columns, and you're OK. But when we move on to F major and G major, we have to learn to avoid the B and F - which are now "wrong" notes - and take a note from an outside column. In Bb and D we get into a pathless forest, which thickens in Eb and A. If we haven't internalised various the zig-zag paths through this chromatic forest, we're going to run into trees when we start moving (playing) quickly. When we know the path of a given key intimately, playing a tune - even a tune or counter-melody we make up on the spur of the moment - becomes, again, merely a matter of feeling how far up or down the path the next note is.

 

Having said all that, my experience is that to play the Anglo outside of its two home keys, learning and practising the often erratic paths (scales) of the remote keys is even more important than on a chromatic instrument.

 

Cheers,

John

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You don't have to learn the scales of C major and G major on an Anglo, which originated as the "popular" version of the concertina. All the notes in one diatonic row are potentially "right" notes, and all you have to do is to get a feeling for how far up or down the row the next note of the tune is. It's like walking a rell-trodden path through the forest.

 

 

Having said all that, my experience is that to play the Anglo outside of its two home keys, learning and practising the often erratic paths (scales) of the remote keys is even more important than on a chromatic instrument.

 

Cheers,

John

You don't have to practise the scales an awful lot if you only play along the rows. However if you want to get the full benefit of the Anglo layout, even on a "basic" 20 button, there are many different ways of playing each scale across the rows, each version with it's advantages, disadvantages, and ideal applications. If you have a 30 button, there are ways of playing a full scale on the push and a full scale on the pull, and it is useful to know these routes.

 

When I started out, I decided as a matter of policy I would learn to play across the rows and, for a while, I even avoided playing along the rows before I realised that this was limiting my options.

 

I play chromatic style and each time I learn a tune, I have to work out which of the various routes through the maze is the one that allows me the best accompaniment.

 

Strangely, the more I play, the more I practise my scales. Almost every practice session ends with me doing various across the rows scales in the 2 home keys in parallel octaves. It has certainly made me a better player. Not necessarily a good one, but better than I was.

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ive read this topic with great interest. I'm not a great one for practising much else than tunes but i'm persuaded that my playing would benefit from an exploration of arpeggios and scales...

 

SO could someone point me in the dircetion of ways i might explore these ideas further please

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JimmyM, what do you play? Anglo, English or duet?

 

On Anglo, I do this:

 

Straight forward scales along the row across 2 octaves, single notes, both directions.

 

Extend those scales up and down by crossing the rows, both directions.

 

Play the scales across the rows, single notes. There are several routes through the maze. Play scales in both directions.

 

Play the scales from tonic to 5th along the rows in octaves.

 

Play the scales over an octave up and down in octaves.

 

I tend to do these steadily and smoothly rather than racing.

 

Play a scale up an down from 1-5 on the right hand, filling in with the left hand on the notes 1, 3 and 5 only.

 

I must admit, I tend to practice the scales more than the arpeggios.

 

However, I do practice the chord shapes as block chords and vamping them.

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  • 1 month later...

After years of playing in the usual more common keys, eg G, D, C, A, Am, Em, Gm, I've decided to work more on the scales in other keys.

I've created diagrams of the buttons that are used in the different scales, and am working on specific exercises for the TT - much of it drawn from exercises for violinists and pianists.

I also need to improve my ear playing, and scales will go a good way to training intervals training on the different scales.

 

 

This I found interesting:

The five black keys promote a natural position of the hand, since the longer fingers play the shorter (i.e., black) keys and vice versa. Chopin always started his students with these keys and ended with C major as the most physically difficult. Unfortunately, nowadays C major is almost without exception the first piano scale learned, since the most difficult to play is also the easiest to read. However, even Vladimir Horowitz made this observation about C major: With his reputation as the greatest virtuoso of his time (his sheer variety of touch at all speeds has hardly been excelled), whenever interviewers asked him to name the most difficult piece he ever played, he would offer one of two replies, either Liszt’s startlingly difficult etude ‘Feux follets’ or the C major scale. He wasn’t being entirely facetious.

(From Piano Scales: 10 Expert Tips)

Edited by SteveS
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  • 3 months later...

Interesting discussion, which I've just come across.

 

When I started playing (Irish trad on Anglo) concertina, it seemed to me that learning scales would be a good idea. But it didn't offer a lot of help to me in learning the best way of playing an actual tune, while at the same time both managing bellows and, importantly, avoiding chopping (using the same finger for two consecutive notes). The difficulty is, as everyone knows, that with the Anglo there's an almost infinite number of (well, quite a few) combinations of buttons and pushes and pulls that can be used to play a given scale.

 

I really only started making serious headway when I concentrated on learning tunes and finding the best buttons to use for a given phrase - 'best' meaning easiest, most rhythm-friendly, most bellows-friendly, and chopping-avoiding. Admittedly some tunes call for a phrase that's just playing notes up and down part of a scale, and if that phrase is fast it means getting your fingers to learn alternating between left and right hand sides. But the great thing about learning the keyboard through tunes rather than scales is that (a) you do actually learn TUNES; (B) you quickly learn the various alternative ways of playing a given sequence; and © your fingers gain a knowledge of the keyboard that's FLEXIBLE. With regard to point ©, in the tutor I ended up writing ("The Concertina Diaries", Heather Greer), the approach is to learn to play the Anglo concertina in the same way a person learns to speak a language, realising that there are many ways of 'saying' the same thing. That works for me, anyway, and seems to work for a lot of others who are setting out to learn to play.

 

Of course, with Irish trad you're generally only interested in G and D major (and occasionally A), and G and E minor (mostly in the Dorian mode, making each of these minor keys analogous to C and D respectively). I think that, starting out to learn to play a tune you know in a different scale (say, F), it's a bit of a no-brainer to 'get' where the various notes on the key are, before starting to learn a tune. But you can go a long, long way for a session - and spend a lifetime at it - by mastering the gentle art of playing in the home keys of the tunes: G or D maj, or A or E min.

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I think there's a difference between exploring scales when you're first learning an instrument, and practising them when you're an experienced player.

 

Exploring scales is probably an essential part of learning to play. Whether you're playing by ear or from dots, in the early stage you have to work out which buttons give you which sound. However I then went on to playing tunes, and in the course of working out how to play them this led me to explore different ways of playing phrases and parts of the scale. So whether you get there through playing scales or playing tunes I don't think matters, if you end up in the same place.

 

Whether or not it then helps to continue practising scales probably depends both on your own personality and the style and complexity of the music you play.. If you find it helps then of course do so, but if you don't see a benefit then why bother?

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  • 2 weeks later...

importantly, avoiding chopping (using the same finger for two consecutive notes).

 

There is no particular need to avoid this religiously. It's a matter of where in the tune. Sometimes it is either the only solution or actually the best solution. In other cases, it can be lazy, messy and slow.

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On Sunday I shall be going to a West Gallery workshop with my single-action English bass. I shall join a variety of other bass instruments: bassoons, bass clarinets, a serpent etc. I've got an advance copy of the music, but rather than try to practise each piece I'm just going to practice scales and arpeggios in the keys they use; which range from two flats to two sharps. This is basically to remind me where all the notes are since, I regret to say, this instrument gathers dust for the other 51 weeks of the year.

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  • 1 month later...

I just came back from a 20 year hiatus, and running through some scales, which I used to do, put me quickly back into shape remembering where the keys are. I often run a scale before playing a tune in a key I haven't used recently, too. So they're good to know.

 

But that's not why I'm commenting. Back on the first page adrian said something solid gold that got blown over: what you should be practicing is the one bit that gives you trouble, over and over until you get it right, then blending it into the surrounding measures that aren't a problem until you gain the full line. Further, I learned from my professional classical musician friends, do a problem measure in different timings and speeds until you know it in your sleep. Then it's yours.

 

If you practice a whole line 15 times and make the same mistake at the same spot every time, you aren't training yourself to play the tune: you're training yourself to make the mistake.

Edited by mdarnton
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If you practice a whole line 15 times and make the same mistake at the same spot every time, you aren't training yourself to play the tune: you're training yourself to make the mistake.

 

Well put! Amen to that!

 

Jody Kruskal talks about "looping" - isolating the troublesome spot and working it over repeatedly until it's sorted. It's amazing what 5 minutes of solid attention can accomplish.

 

 

Gary

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