What is it about scales? Secrets to musical success by Sarnia de la Maré FRSA Free Lecture
hello everybody welcome to um the podcast now this is a general music uh podcast so it's for my pianists and my um cellist students but really this this applies to all musicians and whether they're just learning or whether they're intermediate or advanced musicians the importance of scales what is it about scales do you know what i'm going to tell you that scales are the secret to absolute success as a musician now you could play your instrument for 10 years you could practice every day you could practice for four hours a day but if you were not practicing scales and arpeggios you will not get past a grade three even in ten years you just wouldn't it wouldn't happen i assure you after 20 years you'd be nowhere okay you have to know your scales and arpeggios but what scales and arpeggios do is they give you a massive springboard so when you do them you can play all your pieces much much better if you're a musician you've been playing for about five years but you've been doing all your skills and arpeggios as you go up the grades you will be within five years able to join an orchestra able to perform in a band able to perform solo pieces i promise you if you've done all your skills and arpeggios every time every lesson every practice you will be that good in five years possibly less if you're joining a school orchestra or perhaps an amateur orchestra okay this is so important and i can't stress enough how much better your life will be if you just do them now the reason people don't like them is because they're difficult when you first start them but i've got some tips for you when you first sit down to look at your scales and hopefully you've got a teacher with you but if not perhaps you're doing my podcast i'm going to run you through everything we go into everything musical with a fine tooth comb over here at the music school because we work in podcasting and we have to be very um concise and very explanatory if you see what i mean we have to explain every tiny thing because you're not in the room with me and the best way to do this is to write down the fingering so i call out the fingering and you write it down with a pencil and the note names if you need to have the note names you don't necessarily um and then you can split the scale up into parts and this is really helpful so one to three notes or one to four notes the fourth the fifths and adding a note each time this is romeo by the way my studio cat talking about string crossing etcetera now once you've done that for the first time and you've written all the information in that you need and you've practiced one note and then two notes and then three and then four and then right up through the scale once you've done that once you're going to find that it improves every time you sit down to do it again now of course the grade one pieces that we're going to do today the scales and this applies to all the grades and whatever course you're doing even suzuki i'm going to be walking through um the different ways that you have to be able to play them so for piano for example you have to do left hand separately right hand separately hands together hands in opposite directions and hands in similar motion so you have to do all of that so that means you're going to practice this scale four times minimum okay so you're already four times better than you were when you started and this happens every time you sit down to do them with a cello and i speak probably for other string instruments although i don't play viola or um violins i can't promise um similarly up up bows down bows legato staccato um for the graded examinations we have to do long tonic short
separate bow movements and then slurred bone movements so again we have to do four different ways of playing the same scale so that means again we've played it four times so that means we we're improving four times...