Scales are like vegetables...

...you might not like them, but they're good for you.

Anyone who has ever been a student of mine will have heard me utter this every time I sense a complaint about scales is about to occur. Younger students often don't understand why we do scales, but have often had the vegetable rule drilled into them from a young age!

Scales (and other technical work) are necessary for development and progression. Teachers don't just make students do them because they are mean and because they had to do them when they were that age. We do scales because:

• Lots of music contains fragments of scales and other technical passages
• Scales help cement certain finger and/or embouchure changes (i.e. you don't have to wait until a hard fingering passage turns up in a piece of music and THEN have to worry about how to do it, because you've already worked it out!)
• Scales are good for warming up fingers, mouth, air and brain before we play music
• Scales are a good way of learning and using new notes as soon as we learn them

Most students will take this with a grain of salt. Even if the idea of scales 'makes sense', there is still the perception that 'scales are boring'.

If you have to eat vegetables, you want them to be in the tastiest form with the most variety possible, right?

If you are stuck in the 'scales are boring' mindset, try these tricks:

• Write all the scales you know (or need to know) on small pieces of paper. Do the same with the rhythms/speeds/articulations you are playing, but keep them separate. Draw one from each pile - this will match up a random scale with a random style and keep each scale fresh and interesting.
• Still on rhythm - find an interesting rhythm in one of your pieces (or invent one) and play all your scales in this rhythm. Not only does it become a new challenge all by itself, it is MUCH more exciting than straight quavers.
• If you ever have chance to warm up with others (in group lessons, mass warm-up sessions, etc), play scales in rounds. Leave a two-note gap between players. The harmonies it creates are glorious!
• Play all of your scales from the top downwards, then back up. This is surprisingly harder than it sounds, and is more often than not the cure for those who can play scales brilliantly on the way up but fumble on the way down (believe it or not, this is extremely common).
• Speed challenge - think of this like a scale version of the beep test. There are so many ways of doing this - you could focus on one scale in one session and use your metronome to see how fast you can get, or perhaps take a set of scales at a set speed and advance by 5bpm or so each day.
• Create melodic patterns with your scales. A common one, using C major as an example, is [C D E F, D E F G, E F G A, etc]. Another is [C D E C, D E F D, E F G E, etc]. Not only is this more interesting than simply running up and down aimlessly, but some of these patterns often turn up in pieces, particularly Baroque and Classical music. You can even use the order of the notes in the scale to create random patterns, trying to stay in order at all times.
• Learn a couple of 'cool' scales such as modes and blues scales to scatter amongst your 'everyday' scales (if these are not already your everyday scales).

We still need to know our scales in their original form for assessments, exams and general knowledge. But these techniques, interspersed with standard scales, not only relieve the boredom that scales can induce, but may also help in the long run.

Happy technique-building!