Do I really need to practice scales?

One of the most common rituals that beginner piano learners include in their practice is scales. Playing scales can start as an exciting step toward playing piano independently! But all too often, and too soon, practicing scales can become stale.

This psychological turning point is really interesting to me because it marks one of the moments when the joy of learning piano can be lost. If you have reached this point and are struggling with feelings of guilt and obligation, I’d like to share with you how I approach scales as a student-centred teacher, in the hopes that I can inspire you with some more authentic motivation that will lead you to have more joy in your piano practice.

When scales are a bad idea

Scales are a wonderful practice for learning your way around a piano, but the honest truth is that there are times when I don’t assign them in my lessons. If I sense that assigning scales is going to impart a burden of obligation onto my student or potentially threaten their self-esteem as musicians, I won’t assign them.

The reason is because my teaching philosophy is centred around my belief that musical ability is a gift of expression, not a skill to be mastered. I ground all my teaching on the joy of learning musical expression, and I use the energy of joy to power my students’ practice.

This makes a big difference in how I approach scales. A lot of people push through the obligation of scale drills and hope that succeeding in them will somehow spark joy down the road. I know from experience that if you don’t start from a place of joy, you won’t magically find it later on, so instead I prefer to use the energy of joy to power practice practice, not the other way around.

How do you recover the joy of scales if you’ve lost it?

One way I’ve found to maintain or recover the joy of piano scales is to recognize that they are not an end in themselves. You don’t learn scales for the sake of learning scales. Scales are a tool to help you do other things at your piano. My goal as a teacher is to help my students see scales as a helpful assistant or a supportive friend along their piano journey.

If your piano journey is Frodo Baggins, scales are Samwise Gamgee carrying you up that mountain!

So then, if you’re trying to recover the joy of scales, my advice to you is to stop thinking of scales as a burden or responsibility, but as a friend who wants to help you reach your goals. All you need to do is identify what your true goals are for the piano, and consider if you need this particular friend to help to get there.

To help you with this, I’d like to share the three most common reasons why you might want to practice scales, so that you can decide if any of these goals align with what you’re aiming for right now. Then you can decide if scales are a good idea for you, and if so, which ones. Sound good? Then let’s get started.

Potential goal #1: Playing more smoothly

Being able to play smoothly will, in general, improve your experience of playing the piano. Smooth playing allows you to reach notes more accurately (which means less mistakes), it allows you to impart more expression and emotion into your playing (which is more satisfying), and it improves your proficiency as having better finger control allows them to successfully perform faster and more complicated songs (which is personally gratifying!).

In order to play the piano smoothly, your fingers need practice reaching and successfully pressing individual notes. Repetition really helps with this. Now, when I was a young student trying to get out of doing scales, I told myself that I could build these reps in just by learning how to play new songs. Every time I learned a new song, I was practicing my smoothness, right? And to a point that was true. But I eventually found that that wasn’t really the case. I found that, in reality, the pace of learning new music is too slow to actually build any new skills in smoothness. I was capped at whatever pace of learning piano I had already been at when I started the piece. For another thing, I was a terrible sight reader and it only made it more cumbersome to have my new skills in precision to rely on my reading skills.

I additionally noticed that it was impossible for me to really learn more than one new skill at a time — I could either focus on learning new music or I could focus on the smoothness of my playing. I couldn’t do both at the same time with any real success. This meant I was practicing my songs twice as long — first to learn the thing, then to learn how to play it well. It got boring very quickly.

This brought me back to considering scales. I chose the easiest scales that I could play just so I could focus on my smoothness of playing, and that’s when I realized how great scales could be. Scales actually let me relax into my practicing because they were so easy to play compared to the songs I was learning. Once I knew their key signature and fingering, I didn’t have anything else to learn, I could just run through them and focus on the actual skill I wanted to focus on.

So, if this is a skill that you also want to focus on, you might consider scales.

Potential goal #2: Learning new key signatures

As you grow in your piano skills, you are inevitably going to encounter key signatures you’ve never played before. Key signatures are a shorthand way of mapping out which white and black keys are going to be used for a song. While it’s possible to learn a song without knowing the key signature, in my experience that approach will take you twice as long because you’ll need to double-check each note rather than knowing the shorthand that the composers themselves used to write the song.

Again, when I was a young piano learner, I thought I could learn new key signatures just by virtue of learning new songs but again I learn that that way of doing things just takes longer. Again I learned, you can only really learn one new thing at a time. You can either pay attention to the patterns that make up the key signature or you can learn how the piece is to be played. You cannot effectively do both.

This again brought me back to trying out scales. Learning and practicing scales gives you an opportunity to visually map an entire key signature on your piano, with handy fingering shortcuts that have emerged from centuries of piano lessons. Scales are again, a pared down opportunity to mentally section off the black and white keys that you are going to need to play your song, to prepare you for actually learning it.

If the songs you’re learning right now use a key signature with only one or two sharps or flats, then maybe this doesn’t seem so necessary because you can keep one or two black keys in your head. That’s totally fine. However, when you start getting into songs that use three, four, or five black keys, you start to need support in remembering which black keys they are! Practicing the scale of your song’s key signature is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with the piano landscape that you’ll be using.

Potential goal #3: Getting better hand co-ordination

Dual hand co-ordination is when you can get your hands to do different things at the same time. A lot of people find this to be an unnatural aspect of learning piano, but life is actually full of dual hand co-ordination activities: washing dishes, putting on clothes, giving your cat scratchies. These are all dual-hand tasks, and although we don’t really think about it, we had to learn how to get good at these activities. We got good by practicing in small steps.

The same thing happens in piano. Leaning how to play your hands independently of each other feels really unnatural at first, but a good piano teacher will help you break this task down into beginner friendly steps.

Learning how to play your hands independently of each other is one of the first hurdles a piano learner must face. Most beginner piano books introduce this skill with five note songs, where you start with a “hand position” and each finger just plays one note. This is one of the reasons why most beginner piano music consists of five note songs — it’s not just that they’re trying to teach you to learn your note names, it’s also to gently introduce you to the idea of playing different things with different hands.

If you don’t have access or interest in using a beginner book, practicing scales can be an ever lower pressure way to build these skills. What’s nice about scales is that you get to learn how to use different hands, but you don’t have the added pressure of learning to read music at the same time, which a beginner piano book does. Another thing that’s nice about scales is that you don’t need to learn a full song in order for your playing to sound like music.

So if dual hand co-ordination is something you’d like to work on, you might want to consider learning and practicing some scales.

Let me know what you think!

So these are the biggest benefits that I see scales offering to piano learners. I hope this video has helped you see scales as more than just another drill to add to your practice, that they can be more like a friend helping you along your piano journey. I encourage you to think about what you need in your piano journey right now, and discern for yourself if scales are right for you. From my perspective, if you want to build skills in smoothness of playing, key signature mapping, or dual hand co-ordination, then scales could be really good for you! Thank you so much for watching. As always, I’m here for your questions so feel free to leave me a comment on this video (opens YouTube in a new tab).

Good luck!