Scale Practice for the Amateur Pianist, Part 2/3

I began this series of essays by asking you to ask yourself three questions regarding piano scale practice:

"What will I, personally, get out of the effort that will help me play the music I want to play the way I want to play it?"

"If scales provide something I need, is there any other way to get the same skill/knowledge, perhaps in more enjoyable fashion?"

"Are all scales equally important?" meaning, "Which scales deserve the most attention?" and, "Are some scales not worth my time and effort?"

This essay deals with the first two questions, which are closely related.

Scale practice provides the following benefits to a pianist:

1. Increase manual dexterity
2. "Grooves in" to both the mind and hands which notes go together

They used to do one more thing - provide a sort of "pre-learning" for much of the material found in classical music. To clarify what I mean open any serious classical sheet music book. You will find that much of the music itself consists of "scale runs" up and down the notes in the various major and minor scales. When a pianist learned the scales, they could easily play this material when it appeared in the context of a piece.

This benefit is much less important today when so much of piano playing consists of renditions of popular songs, such as ballads, movie themes and show tunes. Of course, it still happens in much jazz music.

We have seen that scale practice DOES provide benefits, albeit fewer for the popular music player than the classical player. However, the "downside" is that many folks don't enjoy this practice and some simply won't do scales at all for any reason. For such players, the second question becomes most important and needs an answer: Can such hobbyists gain the benefits but avoid practicing scales altogether.

The answer is, "Yes!" and here's how:

Many, many activities produce manual dexterity and it really doesn't take a "rocket surgeon" to see that the particular brand of dexterity needed to play popular songs can best be produced by - playing popular songs! It's almost TOO simple. Do the thing you want to do and you will get better at doing it. All you have to be wary of is not realizing that this process means GETTING better, not just instantly BEING better. It takes some time, in other words. However, delaying full gratification is something most adults are familiar with, right? My experience tells me that some reasonable effort on your part will produce observable improvements that you will see and appreciate.

As for "knowing which notes go together, in both head and hand," the solution is the same - do what you wish to do with the scales you will encounter and you will learn those scales, in both head and hand. This means that you will learn that if there is a single sharp in the key signature of a tune that sharp is ALWAYS an F. You will very soon remember this fact and your hands will learn to include it automatically. Yeah, you can do this via scales, but you can also do this simply by playing tunes using that G Major Scale.

So the moral is to do what you want to do and you will get better at doing it. Just recognize that it will take some time.

Scale Practice for the Amateur Pianist, Part 1/3

I don't know why I was surprised when my blog "analytics" (the statistics that tell me each week what folks have been interested in reading on the blog) told me that the "big draw" this last week was practicing scales - something I only rarely assign to my piano students. This interest makes sense, however, considering that music teachers have been pushing scale practice for centuries. This is sad to me, because more time and attention is wasted on lousy and inefficient scale practice by aspiring hobbyist pianists than almost anything, other than lousy and inefficient practice routines in general. I'd like to set the record straight on this topic and hopefully save you readers time and frustration. My advice will run this week and for two further weeks.

The first step in any process of change is to question. I'd like you to ask yourself this question first, "What is the purpose of scale practice?" meaning "What will I, personally, get out of the effort that will help me play the music I want to play the way I want to play it?" It's possible that many of you who faithfully work on your scales as just doing it because you've come to believe you should - after all, doesn't everybody?

Ummm...no, they don't. I've made a career out of playing the piano professionally, as well as teaching amateur pianists, and I personally haven't studied scales in years and years. My students, even the really competent ones, usually do not regularly practice scales either, and they love piano and have taken lessons for years. Gives you the idea that perhaps scales are NOT as mandatory as they are often said to be. I'll get into this more next week, but right now let the questioning continue.

"If scales provide something I need, is there any other way to get the same skill/knowledge, perhaps in more enjoyable fashion?"

There is indeed. More later. Now a final question:

"Are all scales equally important?" meaning, "Which scales deserve the most attention?" and, "Are some scales not worth my time and effort?"

The answer depends on what you wish to accomplish, but no matter, the starting point to getting efficient with scale practice is to ask yourself those three critical questions. If you already have and know the answers, well, stay tuned. If these questions are new, then you need to know your own personal answers for my further advices to make sense and work for you.

The 2 Steps to Achieving Piano "Flow"

Older piano students seek REAL piano ability - naturally!

When I interview a prospective new student, I essentially ask them to describe two things: Where they are NOW as regards their piano ability and (most importantly) where they want to be. It's then my job as an instructor to facilitate the journey from their particular "Point A" to their desired "Point B." During 20+ years of such interviews, I've learned some things about adult piano students and their desires.

Adults primarily want to play for their OWN enjoyment, and

Adults want to play their favorite music FLUENTLY

Note the similarity of the words "flow" and "fluently." Essentially, these are the same thing, which in piano terms means to play with feeling, effortlessly, after a short amount of practice and familiarity with the tune.

As I said, I've worked at helping folks do this for more than two decades, people much like anyone else, some extremely bright, some not so much, a few VERY wealthy, most middle class - retirees, housewives, doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, businessmen, teachers, all sorts. Really, differences were rather minor, such as the kind of piano music they preferred and how fast they picked it up. However, this one similarity was striking. Almost all adults knew, almost instinctively, that fluent playing with feeling was their real goal.

Thus, it was little surprise to read from my blog "analytics" that many people were searching in search engines for guidance in achieving this piano goal. I'm writing an essay for these folks, because there are a lot of them - almost all adult piano students, in my experience.

Here is my 2-step solution, followed by some explanatory comments:

1. Learn the techniques relevant to your favorite music so well that they are second nature

2. Now allow your creativity, your passion to flow through this hard-won skill

This solution immediately tells you whether any particular course of piano study is right for you or not. If that course is ALL technique and no passion, then the cart is before the horse and the means have become the ends. If a course is all passion and no technique, then students suffer the curse of knowing what they want to express but lacking the physical means to easily express it. For details, see "Piano Methods that Work Poorly" just a few essays ago.

The proper program follows the two steps above, and with adults that is the work of only a couple years, perhaps less.

Piano Memorization - Naturally !

Many, perhaps most adult piano students worry about memorization

One thing I've heard often in my career teaching adult piano students is concern about forgetfulness. This concern almost always extends beyond the piano into forgetting things in general and the usual fear is that one is "getting older" and suffering that inevitable loss of memory. In piano, the most common complaint is forgetting the same pieces of music the pianist worked so hard to learn just a few months prior. As they say, "I have good news and bad news!" about this subject. First the good news:

Your forgetfulness is NOT due to advanced aging (unless you are quite old, late 70's, early 80's maybe)

Now the bad news:

EVERYBODY forgets their pieces - regardless of age

But wait, I've got some more GOOD news:

You can EASILY get those "forgotten" pieces of piano music back

I plan on giving readers both the WHY and the HOW of this in situation.

Memorizing pieces is inevitable. Consider the sequence of events as you work on a new piece. First, you start with almost nothing, other than perhaps some mental recording of the pretty melody and the fact you like that melody and want to play it on your piano. However, you don't yet know the key, the notes, the fingering, very little in fact. You go through it once, sloppily. At the end of this, you do know something about that piece, some of the notes, the key signature, some of the fingering tricks. You work on it a second time and now those notes really come into focus and you have some idea where the easy and hard parts are located.

And so it goes...each time you work on the tune, you learn more and more. You don't EVER start in with that total lack of information you had at the beginning. In other words, you have memories of what went on in previous practices and you start each new practice with those memories and attempt to build on them. Everybody, at every age, works this way, naturally.

Of course, no piano student of any reasonable experience would think that 100% of the memories from the previous practices will be carried over into the new attempt. Human memory, anybody's, simply isn't that good. Some people are better than others (think prodigies!) but all humans suffer from some degree of memory loss between practices. It does NOT mean "early onset senility," as adult piano students often fear. It means you are a human being, NOT a space alien.

What to do about this is the proper question.

I recommend to my students three measures to minimize the memory loss effect when learning tunes or maintaining them as a repertoire:

1. Understand the naturalness of memory loss and cease to worry

2. Use memory "cues" effectively

3. Learn how to easily remind the hands of what they used to know so well

We have covered topic #1 in this post. Next two weeks I will cover details in topics 2 and 3.