Scales really don’t take that long to practice. I never really thought about that until I hopped on Facebook the other day. The following quote was the first thing that came up. It hit me like a ton of bricks.
Tip of the Day: “If you play scales in 16ths at a metronome marking of 96, you can play all the major and melodic minor scales in about two minutes. Little time to practice is no excuse for not practicing scales every day.” Patricia George, Flute Talk Magazine, April 2009.
My first thought was, “YES!!!! You tell ’em!” My opinion on scales is here.
Then I thought about my personal practice. Unless I’m using my 5-minute warm-up, I just run through a page or two from a scale book every day. I don’t usually run through all of the scales, just the one the book is focusing on for that page (a lot of times I’ll sync that up with the key signature that I’m playing in for my repertoire). That’s a lot more time than 2 minutes.
Those exercises in the scale books are there to even out your fingers so you can play your runs evenly. They do that through different rhythms and articulations. Most of the scale exercises go through all the church modes, not just Major or minor. That way you can begin and end on a different note of the scale and not get thrown off in your repertoire.
In other words, running through all your scales, major and minor, from memory is kind of like mopping. It keeps everything clean, it doesn’t take as much time as you think, and it’s important.
Running through a page or two of a scale book is kind of like scrubbing grout with a toothbrush. It’s not feasable to do the whole floor, but the section that you run through is gleaming. This is why we think that scales can take a long time.
Both things are important. It may or may not be necessary for you to run all your scales every day, but it might be smart to do so once every week or two. If you’re going to rehearsals, you’re (hopefully) running through your scales beforehand during your 5-minute warm-up.
I’m not going to rehearsals right now, so I don’t know about you, but I’m going to start running all my scales once a week just to keep things clean. It might be on a day that I’m a little pressed for time because practicing scales like this doesn’t take long. Once rehearsals start back up, I won’t have to worry about it anymore.
