Scales, Arpeggios & the boring stuff – Pt 1

Scales, arpeggios, exercises. Why bother? I mean they’re so absolutely boring right? Who uses them? Who, in their right mind, would use them? Why on earth would I want to spend time learning Bach two and three part inventions? (Keyboard players know what I mean. they were written, after all, just to teach his kids keyboard techniques).

The blog post on this site about being over rehearsed describes part of the process of becoming a martial artist. That you practise a move time and time again until it becomes second nature. Scales and arpeggios come into the same category in that you do them over and over, every day, until you don’t have to think about playing them. but are they any good, any use? Beethoven, Sonata in C minor, OP. 13, bar 4 – a descending scale, bar 10 a descending chromatic scale, both played at speed. If you haven’t practised your scales on the piano, well good luck with those two bars. Yeah well, that’s Classical Music innit? Full of that sort of ***t, I’m a Rock’n’Pop guy and we don’t do that. Ok, don’t. You won’t be playing Cockney Rebels ‘Make Me Smile’ then ‘cos you won’t get past the first bar. you’re also ruling out some Creedence Clearwater Revival songs, and quite a few of Bob Dylans. Mr Bojangles contains a very nice series of chords where each chord can be preceded by a note in a descending C major scale.

Back when I was 8 years old my piano teacher gave me a series of exercises to play that really were boring. I hated them. But, as I said in Over Rehearsed, there are no muscles in your fingers so every finger movement has to be controlled by the muscles in your forearm. Playing a musical instrument isn’t natural. If it was everyone could do it. Except they can but choose not to. So now you have an advantage because you actually want to play. Eventually I graduated from those exercises and was allowed to play some of the Bach two part inventions. I felt pretty much the same way about them as I had the original exercises. I didn’t know back then that many were written in a modal form. Wouldn’t have made any difference; I still hated doing them. At 14 I stopped taking lessons and stopped playing the piano.