Improve Your Piano Scale Technique | The Piano Prof with Kate Boyd

Today's video is all about scale playing at the piano. I'm gonna share with you three principles for playing scales that I teach my students so that you can apply these principles to your own playing and play scales with more ease and proficiency. Welcome to The Piano Prof. I'm Dr. Kate Boyd, and I'm so glad you're here. This video is gonna be in three parts. First, I'm gonna talk about what I call the scale controversy, which is about two schools of thought when it comes to practicing scales and arpeggios. Then I'm gonna share the three principles that I teach to my students that I think are most important to keep in mind when practicing scales. And I'll finish with just a few bonus tips for you to apply to your own scale practice. By the way, I created a playlist about the five technical things that I most frequently teach my students, as well as a rather substantial practice companion PDF to go with those videos. The PDF is completely free. You can download it by clicking on the link in the description of this video. Before I go over the three principles of scale playing that I teach, I'd like to address what I call the scale controversy. Basically, there are two schools of thought. Some people believe that you should only practice scales and arpeggios as technical exercises within the repertoire that you are learning. Proponents of the other school of thoughts say you should learn all your scales and arpeggios as standalone exercises and practice them separately from your repertoire. Early in my professional training, in many lessons and masterclasses, I was told over and over by various very eminent master teachers who subscribe to the first school of thought that practicing scales would make your playing unmusical and that therefore you shouldn't do it. I heard many times that you really shouldn't start your day by playing scales because that's when your ear is the freshest and you shouldn't waste that time and energy by just doing mechanical exercises. You should start right off with the music to engage your ear and your imagination and then work on technique only as it's presented in the repertoire. The idea is as you play different pieces, your technique will inevitably improve because you'll encounter and solve many different technical challenges in different musical contexts. And I really believed that for many years. I really did. And I still see that point today. I absolutely agree that starting out your day playing boring and uninspiring technical exercises is just drudgery and it's no fun and it's unlikely to spark your imagination or enliven your ear and that it does make a lot of sense to just plunge right into working on repertoire when you sit down at the piano in the morning. But then when I was an undergraduate, I was working with a wonderful teacher of collaborative piano named Jeanne Fisher. She would give me supplemental coachings on collaborative repertoire that I was playing that were separate and in addition to the lessons I was having with my private teacher during undergraduate. We were having a coaching one day and she pointed out all the scales that I was playing poorly and suggested that maybe I needed to practice my scales to just become more proficient. And I told her with great authority that practicing scales makes you play unmusically so I only practice technical things within the music. And she responded in a kind of surprised and slightly skeptical tone. Well, I used to practice my scales every day when I was an undergraduate student. Sometimes people say the most insignificant things that stick with us for years. I'm sure she has no memory at all of that exchange but the thing is Jeanne Fisher is an extremely accomplished pianist. When we were having that conversation, I'd heard her play so many wonderful concerts and I really looked up to her. So I figured that she really knew what she was talking about. So right then and there, I realized that I probably really should know my scales and arpeggios inside and out. In that moment, I realized, hang on, my technique is really not that great. Maybe it would actually help to practice technical exercises. And from that point on, I made it a point to work on scales and arpeggios every day. Quite often as a university professor of piano, I meet students in high school and college and even graduate school who tell me they already know their scales and so they don't play them anymore. Like many other fundamental skills, learning scales is only the beginning. It's something that you don't do once and graduate from. It's something that you learn and then you continue to work on and you deepen your knowledge of it throughout the course of your life as a pianist. Now, I personally find scale playing quite meditative and grounding and I really, really believe that if you approach it with the mindset of curiosity, practicing scales and other technical exercises doesn't have to be a chore. It can be a time of technical and musical discovery. Here's the thing. Scales and arpeggios are important to practice because piano repertoire is filled with scales and arpeggios. These are the basic building blocks of the classical repertoire. The way that I think about scales and arpeggios is that you're pre-learning music that's gonna appear in the pieces that you'll be playing and so when you get to that spot in something you're learning, you'll be able to incorporate it right away and not puzzle over the notes and fingerings. Also, it's important to learn the standard fingering for scales. This is standard for a reason and many contexts composers will assume that this is the default fingering that you're gonna use. Later on, you might decide to vary it but I really think it's important to have a basis that's solid and that you can draw from later. You can easily find standard scale fingering on the internet but if you're looking for actual scale books I recommend these two. This is the Brown Scale Book and this is the Alfred Book of Scales. Either of these would be great and I'll put links to them in the description of this video. Learning your scales is also helpful for gaining an understanding of music theory. Understanding how the keys relate to one another by the circle of fifths and relative majors and minors will help you with analyzing and memorizing the music you're playing. There are so many ways to play and practice scales. You can find dozens and dozens of videos right here on YouTube that show you how to play scales. So there's no definitive right answer. There are just many schools of thought. I'm gonna share with you the way I teach scales to my students. At the beginning of my series on the Five Foundations of Piano Technique I created a letter board that summarized my three main principles. I think it's time for a new letter board. I'll put down my three main principles that apply to playing scales and arpeggios. So here are the three principles. The first principle is always be musical. Practicing scales and arpeggios is like taking a piece of your technique to the lab and experimenting on it before releasing it into the wild. It's important to remember that scales and arpeggios are music and that you must always, always think of them expressively. Having this mindset toward technical studies will then negate about 90% of the objections people have to doing scales and arpeggios as a warmup. In fact, you can use scales to practice musical things like dynamics, articulation, rubato, and so forth. The second principle is open and close your hand. When playing scales, there's the perennial issue of passing the thumb under. Basically the principle of opening and closing the hand means that you don't want to twist but you also don't want to hop. The thumb needs to be flexible and it needs to play from the third joint like I showed you in my video about the thumb. So what to do? This is where I teach that we need to open and close the hand. Part of what we're going for here is to keep the fingers aligned as we play. When you twist, you bring the fingers way out of alignment and while it's easy to play slowly, it's nearly impossible to play quickly when you're twisting. The third principle is keep your wrist flat. When I work with my students, the number one thing I see in developing pianists is the habit of dropping the wrist into the thumb when you play. This is what that looks like. When I say keep your wrist flat, you want to play with your wrist level like this. You don't want to drop into the thumb like this. And it's very difficult to play quickly if I do that, right? So you have to keep it level. Now, you also want to avoid playing it super low and you want to avoid playing super high. You want level. Now, I want to address the fact that in my video on weight transfer, I talk about dropping the wrist. I talk about hoisting and dropping into the keys like this and you can practice scales where you are practicing hoist, drop, hoist, drop, hoist, drop and there your wrist will not be level the whole time but that's different than if you're playing scales and then just every time you cross under with the thumb, your wrist drops or if you play your scales with a permanently low wrist or permanently high wrist, your default wrist position should be flat. So there we have it. We have three new principles of playing scales and arpeggios. So here they are. Always be musical, open and close your hand and keep your wrist flat. I'm gonna revisit these in future videos as I talk more about technical exercises. And now I have just a couple bonus tips for you about playing scales. First, do a lot of hand separate practice on scales because the thumbs cross under at different times. For years, I practiced the left hand scales alone in addition to practicing hands together in order to really work out my left hand thumb crossings because they were giving me problems. Two, use the metronome to make benchmarks for yourself. Work up to a specific tempo for all the scales and then when you can play all of them clean, musically and fluidly, increase the tempo to a new benchmark. For example, you could work up all your scales to 60 to the quarter note and play the scales as 16th notes per beat, so four notes per click. And then after you can play all the scales comfortably at 60, which might take a while, then work up to 72 and then once you can play everything at 72 really comfortably and musically, then increase it to 80 and so forth. My third bonus tip is don't press when you get to the bottom of the keys. Be self-aware and if you're putting too much downward pressure on the piano, ease up. Think about this idea of letting go of the piano as soon as you hit the bottom of the key because by that point, it's not possible to affect the sound anyway. Now don't forget, you can get that free PDF that I made that goes with the five foundations of piano technique that I teach to my students and as I said in the beginning of this video, there are so many ways to practice and teach scales. I would love to hear your thoughts on scales. Do you practice scales and technical exercises every day? What are some of your tips for scale playing? Let me know in the comments. If you found this video helpful, please share it with someone you know who you think would also benefit from it. Also, please give the video the thumbs up and subscribe to my channel. It really helps other people find these videos and I totally do appreciate it. If you're still watching by this point in the video, I bet you're gonna like some of my other videos. Here are a couple of other ones you can check out while you're waiting for next week's video. Have a great week. Good luck with your scales and happy practicing.