Ah yes, scales again. Much has been said about scales and the importance of practising them regularly, just like brushing our teeth. Despite this, I’ve realised that it can be difficult for us to motivate ourselves to practise scales! This isn’t surprising. Simon Fischer wrote in one of his books, ‘The Violin Lesson’, that there are soloists/competition winners who play major violin repertoire without practising scales regularly. He also admits that before he realised the benefits of scales, he also put off practising scales until they were required in exams, but worked on exercises instead and he saw how his scales improved along the way while working on those exercises.
It was the same for me. When I was younger, I never liked scales at all because I found them boring. No surprise, so do most of my students when I first asked them. However, that usually happens because they do not see the importance of scales and the purpose of practising them! In that regard, I will attempt to explain these briefly and hopefully make scales more interesting (or, less boring) to work on.
Simply put, scales are important because they are used to build a strong foundation in the beginning (one octave scales in first position, for example) and for fine-tuning/technique maintenance as you get more advanced. Scales are so important in helping us play with good intonation, especially for string instruments like the violin. For a start, they help us to gain familiarity with the fingerboard and to develop a critical ear. And usually, the first blemish to be picked up in performances is out of tune playing! As you progress, try to appreciate the colour of every note in the scale (and across different keys too). However, I have to clarify that scales are made up of a combination of techniques and it takes a certain level of mastery of the different elements (like string crossings, shifting, good tone production etc.) to play scales well (i.e. exercises).
If we were to go deeper, scales can be used to practise the many aspects of violin technique – not just the left hand, but right hand too (I’m pretty sure this applies to other instruments as well). For example, you can play a scale in all the different positions themselves, play a scale just on one string, across different positions (especially in three and four octave scales), and even practise vibrato on notes of the scale. For the right hand, there are different bowing variations such as number of notes in one bow, length of notes (and tempo), different sounding points etc. The list goes on. Also, not forgetting double stops and extended technique such as left-hand pizzicato. Combine these and you get infinite possibilities on what to work on! Just take a look at scale books such as Carl Flesch, Galamian, and Simon Fischer, and you’ll know what I mean.
It could be shifting, tone production, intonation, and so on. Just choose something to focus on and once you get into the nitty-gritty stuff, scales become far from boring as you’ll probably realise that there’s so much to be done! That’s when scales become far from boring and all the more exciting when you know that you will be making some real progress which can be felt when working on repertoire.
In addition, make sure that you play through the entire scale to see what worked and try to find solutions to improve what didn’t work so well. It is also recommended to balance practice sessions with etudes and repertoire so that you don’t lose track of the ultimate goal of playing an instrument – to make music. As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, the maximum time that we should spend on scales seems to be an hour or so.
I hope this helps and try to practise scales regularly! I’ll also be sharing more articles on my pages and updating the blog whenever I can. Stay safe everyone!
As always, do leave a comment to let me know your thoughts.
~Vanessa