Whether you’re new to piano scales or have practiced them daily for many years, there is always room for improvement! In my teaching, I often work with students on their scales and other technical exercises. In my own practicing, I also play scales, arpeggios and exercises on a regular basis. Here, I’ll share with you 5 easy ways to enhance your musicianship as you practice your piano scales.
Video Tutorial
I created a video tutorial that will take you through a few of my suggestions on how to play your piano scales more musically. Have a look!
What it Means to “Be Musical”
This is the second post in my series on playing scales at the piano. In my previous post, I outlined three principles for scale playing:
- Always be musical.
- Open and close your hand.
- Keep your wrist flat.
Today I’ll be exploring the first principle: “Always be musical.” What does that even mean? How do we know when we’re playing musically?
The short answer is: when you play musically, you are saying something with the music. You are not just playing notes for the notes’ sake. The notes are a means to some sort of expression.
When you practice scales, you can experiment with expression! Try playing slowly and sadly, for example. Then, play with energy and exuberance. You can try any emotions you want! What is important is that you think about adding an extra layer of feeling or an extra-musical idea to what you are playing.
Listen for a Good Tone
Playing piano scales with a good, healthy tone is an essential component to musicality. If you are only focusing on pressing the keys down but not listening to the sound that is coming out of the piano, you might end up playing with a thin or anemic tone quality.
If you don’t cultivate a robust, singing tone in your scale practice, when you start practicing your repertoire you will likely transfer this habit of not listening to yourself to that portion of your practice session as well.
To play with a good, healthy tone, just set the intention to listen to yourself. Play a note and then take a moment to listen to how it sounds in the room. Is it thin? Does it sound wimpy? Is it harsh and aggressive? Are all the notes of varying strength, with some strong and some weak? Take some time to experiment with how you play a scale and the resulting sound you get.
If you find yourself forgetting to listen (this can easily happen, as we get enmeshed in the physical coordination required to execute the scales), simply bring your attention back to the note you are currently playing, and let your attention rest on whatever is sounding in the room. Trust your intuition to discern and give you feedback on the quality of your tone.
Play Hands Precisely Together
Playing with your hands precisely together when practicing piano scales is another important way to enhance your musicality. This means playing with an extremely precise attack, with the left hand and the right hand hitting the bottom of the key at the same time.
When the piano key goes down, the hammer swings up to strike the string. If your fingers in each hand don’t reach the bottom of the key at the same moment, the two hammers will hit the string at slightly different times, resulting in a double-attack.
What is surprisingly common is that people get used to playing scales a certain way and then don’t notice that they are playing their piano scales with double attacks on many of the notes.
The result is that you will hear two attacks when playing scales hands together. This is how you will know that you need to work on coordinating the attacks between the hands.
You will know that you are playing with the hands precisely together when you hear a single attack for each note, even though the hands are playing together.
Use Dynamics
Practicing piano scales is an excellent opportunity to also practice dynamics. (“Dynamics” refers to the volume of what you are playing: how loud or soft each note is in relation to the others.)
When you play music, you will definitely be using dynamics, and nuanced dynamic shading is a key ingredient of an expressive performance. Therefore, practicing piano scales without dynamics is a missed opportunity to practice your musicianship.
Very often in classical repertoire, when the music ascends to higher registers, the dynamic level also increases. So, a great place to start when practicing dynamics in piano scales is to start quietly at the bottom and grow louder to the top, and then from the top get softer as you descend to the bottom.
You can also practice the reverse: start ff and diminuendo to pp as you rise to the top, and then grow back to ff as you descend. This is much harder!
I encourage you to try lots of different ways of using dynamics in your scales. You can also practice with one hand forte and the other hand piano, and reverse it.
This kind of practice not only helps you apply dynamics to scales, but it also helps you actually learn how to pace dynamic changes and spread a crescendo or diminuendo evenly across multiple octaves (as opposed to suddenly growing loud at the top of the scale, for example).
Vary Articulation
As with dynamics, articulation is an essential component of musicianship. (“Articulation” refers to the length of a note and is an umbrella term that encompasses varying touches, including legato and staccato.)
Rather than simply playing scales with the same articulation whenever you work on them, try expanding your ability to play with different articulations at the piano. Play every note of the scale very short, then experiment with playing very legato. Try playing one hand staccato and the other hand legato, and reverse it. You can see my tutorial on legato playing here.
Practicing piano scales with varying articulation will really help enhance your musicality, because then when you go to work on your repertoire you will start becoming more attuned to the detailed instructions the composer is giving you in the music in the form of staccato and tenuto markings, slurs, rests, and more.
Sweep up and down
One of the reasons pianists feel compelled to practice scales so much is that our repertoire is FULL of scales! Scales and arpeggios are a form of passagework. Passagework often appears in music in order to add drama and virtuosity to the character.
Therefore, in their musical context within the piano literature, scales often need to be played with ease, and “sweep” up and down the keyboard over multiple octaves. To learn more about playing with ease, check out this video.
To develop that “sweeping” feeling when you practice your piano scales, avoid making extra accents on notes between the bottom note and the top note of the scale. You can still organize the scale in your mind by groups of four, for example, but avoid playing a strong accent on the first note of each group.
It can also be helpful to already imagine the top note of the scale, even as you play the first note. Listening ahead in music is akin to looking down a road at what’s coming up – you can see it ahead of you, and you can even perceive it approaching, but you aren’t there yet. In this video, I share my thoughts and strategies for listening ahead.
Happy Practicing!
By incorporating these five strategies, I hope that you will not only start playing your piano scales more musically, but also that you will find the process of practicing scales more fun, more creative, and more playful than the drudgery many of us are taught to associate with the experience of practicing technical exercises.
Which of these strategies resonated with you? Let me know in the comments!
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