The Minor Piano Scale is More Advanced than Major Scales – Day 7
Scales are often offered as piano sheet music in the form of exercise books or even additional rare books made to take your technique to another level (including Hanon), catering for students of all grades. In these study books, you will be instructed to practise them with a number of articulations for example staccato, legato or even slurred and in many more ways. Keyboard teachers often test students’ perception of scales to view how advanced they are becoming with their musical instrument.
More Advanced Piano Scales For Intermediate Pianists
Now that you have mastered major piano scales, we can move on to the more advanced minor scales. Minor scales have more options as they can be natural, harmonic or melodic.
Natural scales have all of the ‘correct’ notes of the corresponding minor key. So if D minor has one flat (B-flat), the D natural minor scale will have only one flat – the B flat:
D E F G A B-flat C D
However, harmonic minors sound nicer as they raise the seventh note up a half-step, so play the same scale above but this time with a C-sharp.
D E F G A B-flat C-sharp D
Melodic minors go one step further by raising both the sixth and seventh degree while ascending, while lowering them during the descent:
D E F G A B C-sharp D C B-flat A G F E D.
Now, that sounds beautiful and, ahem, more ‘melodic’.
Putting a Piano Scale To Memory
Repetition is certainly the key to good learning, but even better is to prescribe a certain mood to each scale. For example, C major sounds very cheerful while D major is often used in heroic, triumphant pieces – so play the D major scale in that fashion – more majestically! E major and F major get more mellow, with perhaps A flat major being the most ‘mellow’ of all. A major sounds optimistic once again, and so forth. You should really make your own associations for each piano scale and see what mood resounds with what scale.
Scales are the guts of improv and as uninteresting as they may be they are also the foundation of all our beloved melodic elements and harmonies today. Fortunately, they are a superb way to loosen up prior to you start off practicing and can be a excellent training companion and are essential to study as they make piano compositions much easier to play over time. Some keyboard compositions like Mozart piano sonatas have many scales already incorporated into them that may be extracted and practiced on their original within a new musical context – giving you more ideas to generate adjectives and moods for each scale!
All in all, scales are employed to aid music writers in organizing musical concepts and to give music artists a structure for their compositions or perhaps one’s own improv for instance in jazz keyboard.
Return from the Minor Piano Scale page to the General Piano Scales Lesson
