Using Piano Scales To Fine-Tune Your Piano Technique – Day 7
Piano scales really make up an important portion of a pianist’s music training and therefore are a very important facet of music. They are the first step toward making music and are often seen in just about every known culture – they are the building blocks on which piano music is created. Scales can be any set number of musical notes which start out with a specific tone and stick to a particular system of half-steps and whole steps. Exotic scales even go beyond whole steps or perhaps incorporate micro-tones that are present in between the half steps of a contemporary keyboard tuned in equal temperament, but that is beyond the scope of this article.
Piano scales are necessary, because a great deal of music is based on them. Getting more technical, they are fundamentally sequences of monotones (single keys) that move either downwards or even upwards in steps and are the basis for tunes. By ascending or perhaps descending they can also affirm the key of the scale, whether it be C major, D minor, E major, F minor, etc. Generally, they are straightforward sequences of keys that either increase or perhaps decrease in pitch and are based on particular behaviors of intervals, cycling at the octave. Or even to put it more simply, they are collections of tones that divide octaves into particular intervals. Scales rarely go beyond the octave, so we’ll stick to that definition of music scales for our sake.
Scales usually consist of about seven notes and are numbered in terms of degrees. They are essentially a run of tones containing diverse numbers of sharps and flats. The only scale that doesn’t have sharps or even flats is the C major scale.
Examples of Scales
C major is the easiest to understand, but ironically the hardest to play since it’s so easy to fall in the cracks:
C D E F G A B C
B major is more natural for the hand, but requires you to play all of the black keys:
B C-sharp D-sharp E F-sharp G-sharp A-sharp B
G flat major (or F sharp major) may be the most ‘natural’ for the hand but has the least amount of natural notes. An observation made by Frederic Chopin.
F-sharp G-sharp A-sharp B C-sharp D-sharp E-sharp F-sharp
C sharp major has all sharps:
C-sharp D-sharp E-sharp F-sharp G-sharp A-sharp B-sharp C-sharp
Now back to earth! Here are a few more popular ones:
D major: D E F-sharp G A B C-sharp D G major: G A B C D E F-sharp G
Also learn about the minor piano scale which is more advanced than the major scales.
Whilst they in many cases are ignored, piano scales can make it simpler suitable for you to practise solitary if that is precisely what you pick out to do. They are often introduced to starting pianists as a form of practicing fingering techniques, however it is with valid reason because they are just like having a personal keyboard trainer close at hand.
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