🎹 Piano Technique: How to Improve YOUR Piano Chromatic Scales!

Hello and welcome to my channel. I'm Dr. Kate Boyd. I'm a pianist and a professor of piano and today we're going to talk about chromatic scales. I'm going to go over three different chromatic scale fingerings with you and I'll also give you three technical tips and three tips for practicing chromatic scales at the end. Tucker are you ready to learn about chromatic scales? Let's get started. We do a lot of practice of regular major and minor scales on the piano. There are entire books just dedicated to scale fingering and technique. In contrast to major and minor scales and arpeggios, chromatic scales are often relegated to just one or two pages in one of these scale books and I've noticed looking at different scale books that the fingering in one book isn't necessarily the same as the chromatic scale fingering in another book and that's not because one book is right and another is wrong. It's just that there are multiple correct ways to play chromatic scales and sometimes it'll depend on the context or the effect you're going for. It's no accident that the word chromatic has as its root the word chroma which refers to highly saturated colors. A chromatic scale is a scale where all notes on the piano are played one after another and this leads to a bright and highly colorful sound. A chromatic scale goes like this. On the piano a chromatic scale can sometimes serve as a special effect. It can have the effect of glissando like on a string instrument or a slide on a trombone. Depending on the context sometimes a chromatic scale needs to be super legato and other times it needs to be articulate and bright and as a result you're going to match your fingering to the context you're playing the chromatic scale in. Even at the advanced level many students are surprised to learn that there are at least three different fingerings you can use for a chromatic scale and actually there are many more. I'm going to go over three of them in this video. If you practice all three of these scale fingerings that'll give you flexibility to choose the one that works the best for the spot you're working on. Okay so I'm going to start right out of the gate and tell you something that might blow your mind a little bit. When I show you these chromatic scale fingerings we aren't going to start on C. That's kind of the default key that people tend to start scales on and even scale sequences on. We're not going to start on C though. We're going to start on D. The reason we're going to start on D is because the black and white key patterns on the piano are symmetrical going out from D. So you have white, black, white, white, black, white, black, white, black, white, white, black, white, as opposed to C where it is not symmetrical. So we're going to start on D and that's going to make it easier to remember and retain these scale fingerings for today. By the way I made a free downloadable PDF with all of this info on it. You can get it by clicking on the link in the description below. The first chromatic scale fingering I'm going to show you today is the one that you might be most likely to know. This is kind of the standard scale fingering that's usually taught to students and that is partly because it's the easiest to remember and it's also easy to start just about anywhere in the scale and it's easy to put into pretty much any context. And that looks like this again starting on D. So what I'm doing is one, three, one, two, three, one, three, one, three, one, two, three, one. So threes are always on all of the black keys. That's how you remember the scale fingering. So in the left hand it's one, three, two, one, three, one, three, one. Every time there are two white keys next to each other then that's where you use your second finger otherwise it's all threes. And so hands together it looks like this. And here's what it looks like fast. Now the thing about this scale fingering is that it has many, many hand position changes in it because it's one, three, one, two. So every time you have a thumb it's a new hand position change. And so what that does is it makes it kind of harder to play it as quickly as the other ones I'm about to show you because while I can play it quickly my thumb is working really hard by shifting all the time. And the other thing about this though is that it's a good skill to use if you want your chromatic scale to be quite light and articulate. So I can play this on the surface of the keys or play it really slow. So it's a very versatile chromatic scale fingering. The second scale fingering I'm going to show you has fewer hand position changes and so it's a little bit easier to play faster and yet it repeats the same fingering every octave so it's a little bit easier to remember. And here's how that goes. It starts on D. It goes one, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one. So I'll do that one more time. You can see I have fewer hand position changes. One, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one. And then the left hand starts on one on D. And the reason it starts on one and not four, I guess you could start on four, but the idea is that you start and end on the same note, I mean the same finger. And the reason you want to start and end on the same finger is because what if you want to go an extra octave and then you're in the wrong place. So it helps teach you that you're going to be very, very consistent on your scale fingering. And so starting on one is a really good idea. So anyway, one, three, two, one, four, three, two, one, three, two, one, three, one. So you can see it combines one, three, one, three, one with longer groups of notes of one, two, three, one, two, three, four over the black keys. I'll do that one more time. One, three, two, one, four, three, two, one, three, two, one, three, one. And hands together. The reason that that is a good alternative to the first one I showed you is because it has fewer hand position changes, as I mentioned, and it also is easier to play fast. Also, I can play it more legato. It's a good choice for if I want to play something super legato. This is what one, three, one, three, one all looks like and sounds like. I can play that more on the surface of the keys. And if I want to be legato, I'll use that fingering. The third chromatic scale finger I'm going to show you is considered to be more advanced because it doesn't repeat the fingering in one octave. It repeats it over two octaves. So you really have to practice it with two octaves. So I'm going to start on D, and the right hand, the fingering is one, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, and then four or one. And then coming down one or four, three, two, four, three, two, one, three, two, one, four, three, two, one, coast. Left hand, 4 3 2 1, 4 3 2 1, 3 2 1, 4 3 2 1, 3 2 1, 4 3 2 1, 3 2 1, 1 2 3, 1 2 3 4, 2 3, 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3. So here it is faster. Left hand. This scale fingering is ideal if you have a very long chromatic passage that's very virtuosic that has to go really, really, really fast. Like if you're playing a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody or playing a Chopin piece that requires a long chromatic scale that you want to be very legato and very fast and smooth. The other thing about it is you can adapt it depending on what note you start on. So you can start on C also with 1. That's the thing about chromatic scale fingering that is not uniform. I mean it just depends on the context. And you can see I have my notes in front of me. The reason I have my notes in front of me isn't because I don't know how to play a chromatic scale. The reason I have my notes in front of me is because I'm used to playing chromatic scale fingering depending on the context. And once you learn those three chromatic scale fingerings, then you should be able to adapt and apply them to whatever context you're playing the scales in. Now for chromatic scale fingering, it requires a slightly different technique. I have three technical tips to share with you that I think will be helpful. The first is to keep your wrist on the high side so that your thumb can stay level with the keys and not drop below the keys. And so I'll show you what that looks like. See how I'm moving my thumb. I'm playing higher as opposed to here. So play with a slightly higher wrist as opposed to a flat wrist. This is what it looks like with a flat wrist. The second technical tip I have for you for practicing chromatic scales is to stay on the outside, the edges of the keys. That will give you more control both of the actual depression of the key and release of the key, but also it will give you control of the tone and sound quality. Playing on the edge of the key looks like this. See how I'm playing all the way out here, all the way up. But it's a lot harder to make the key go down effectively when you're playing all the way up in the keys. So playing on the edge of the keys will help you play light and bright and fast chromatic scales. The third technical tip I have for you is to keep your fingers close to the keys. The reason for that is because if we want to play chromatic scales, and let's face it, usually chromatic scales are pretty fast. You kind of want to speed along. And if your fingers are really high in the air the whole time, then that means you're going to be moving less efficiently because your fingers have to drop so far into the keys. This is what it looks like with high fingers. So it's really hard. I can do it, but it's a lot less efficient than if I just keep my fingers close to the keys. So practice keeping your fingers. Notice my thumb is not curled out. It's pretty loose and straight, and I'm keeping my fingers close to the keys. Now I have three practice tips to help you out when you practice your chromatic scales. The first one is the most important one in my opinion, and that is because now you're learning chromatic scale fingerings where your hand is going to change position in different ways depending on which finger you're using. So practice it in blocked groups. What I mean by that is every time you have a thumb, it's a new hand position. So now I'm doing the 1-3, the first scale fingering that I showed you. So I'm doing 1-3, 1-2-3, 1-3, 1-3, 1-2-3-1. So you can practice it that way. And then break it up a little bit. And that teaches your hand exactly where to go. And then coming down. Same thing in the left hand. Then it becomes much easier for your hand to just move from one hand position to the next. If you're learning one of the other scale fingerings that I showed you with fewer hand position changes, that's also very helpful because you can go like this. 1-2-3-4. Practicing it that way makes it easier to practice it as a whole series of hand position changes rather than a whole bunch of individual notes that you have to then individually remember. My second practice tip is relatively conventional but very, very effective, and that is to use your metronome to work your scales up to tempo. Set your metronome on a click. And I'm going to simulate a metronome because I don't have one handy here. So this is my metronome. And practicing. Etc. I'm doing one click per four notes to help me with the tempo. If that's too fast for you, then obviously you can use fewer clicks per note. You could do like one click per two notes or one click per individual note to help remember the fingering. Or you can focus on one click per four notes and then gradually increase the tempo of the metronome to increase the tempo of your chromatic scale. My third practice tip for chromatic scales brings us all the way back to the reason that we started all of these scales on D, which is that once you learn your chromatic scale fingering from D, it's quite easy to practice in opposite motion and contrary motion hands together. So that's my practice tip for you. Practice it hands together in contrary motion starting with your thumbs on D like this. 1, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1. And then you can do the different fingerings. 1, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 1. You can do the two octave fingering. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. So that is my third practice tip for you. It's really good to practice all your scale fingerings and learn them cold so that when you're actually practicing pieces on the piano, then you don't have to puzzle it out and decide what fingering to use from moment to moment because you'll already know it. We practice fingering in order to free ourselves up when we're faced with these patterns in the context of repertoire we're playing. Now in this video I've been talking about chromatic fingering and I made a whole series of videos about how to approach technique when it comes to conventional major minor scales. You can check that out by clicking on the link right up there. Don't forget to share this video, like and subscribe, and I'll see you in my next video. Happy practicing!