How (And Why) To Practice Scales
Hi fiddlers! My name is Taylor and I’m a violinist/fiddler/educator based in Mesa, Arizona. It’s such an honor to write for this wonderful blog! As a fiddler, I’ve learned an incredible amount while jamming with Lauren through the years. But, as a teacher, I can’t even tell you how many long, winding conversations Lauren and I have had about education. Honestly, it’s hard to say which is more fun!
This blog is only a part of the educational brilliance happening here at JamWithLauren. Do yourself a favor and keep exploring the site!
As a young student, I remember teachers making me play scales. I never wanted to play them, but I always had to play them for school orchestra tests and youth symphony auditions. To make things worse, I didn’t understand why I needed to learn scales. Or even how to practice them. Why would I work on something if I didn’t understand how it could help me or how to practice it? I only wanted to practice things that were fun!
In college, my amazing violin professor ran a monthly scale class that totally flipped my perspective. She assigned a key signature for the month, everyone practiced a variety of scale exercises in that key, and then we performed randomly selected scale exercises in front of our classmates – it was awesome! (It could also be mildly panic-inducing, especially if you’d slacked on your scale practice...) In studying with her, I learned how practicing scales could save time and energy in other areas of my musical life. Now, scales are what I practice first – and, sometimes, they are all I practice!
As a teacher, I have a mission to help my students understand why scales are one of the most powerful tools at our disposal. I’m not going to make you perform scales for me, but after this post I hope you’ll have a clearer idea of ways to work with scales and why playing scales is the best thing you can do in your practice today.
[Note: if you’re not totally sure what a scale is, check out Lauren’s free, downloadable scale guide!]
ORGANIZE YOUR LEFT HAND
The primary physical reason to practice scales is to organize your left hand. An organized left hand is one that moves with ease, where the fingers know how to fall, with the least amount of necessary energy. A disorganized hand, by contrast, is one where fingers fly all over the place, everything feels tense, and you don’t know if the notes are going to be in tune when you drop your fingers! Put simply, when your hand is organized, playing will physically feel easy.
One of the best ways to organize your left hand is to slowly and carefully reinforce finger patterns. We can pursue this through practicing two useful actions:
1. Leave your fingers down!
Check out this little exercise. When you see a long line after a number, it means you should leave that finger down for the entire length of the line. The red V indicates pitches that are separated by a half step.
When you practice like this, you’re helping your hand to really feel the distances between your fingers. Pay close attention to the half step – your 2nd and 3rd fingers should touch each other!
[Disclaimer: sometimes your fingers will touch when you play half steps, sometimes they won’t. It depends on a lot of factors – where you are on the fingerboard, how thick your fingers are, etc. But, as a general rule, especially if you’re newer to violin, you want to feel your fingers touching whenever you play half steps!]
2. Prepare your fingers
When you drop all fingers that could be down before you play a note, you are preparing your fingers for success. So, for example, if a song starts on a 3rd finger, you would prepare the 3rd finger by dropping your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd fingers before you start. This better ensures your 3rd finger will be in tune because you are using your 1st and 2nd fingers as additional reference points in your hand.
In the one octave D major scale below, the green notes indicate fingers that need to be prepared. When you get to the prepared fingers, stop the bow on the A string, drop 1, 2, and 3 on the D, and then play the last four notes of the scale. The more organized your left hand is, the more in tune the last notes will be! Eventually, you will prepare these fingers so quickly and effortlessly that they essentially drop together and you don’t have to stop your bow.
Here’s the same exercise, but with a two octave G major scale:
An important point: our hands don’t always do this when we’re playing! But, sometimes things are easier when you leave or prepare fingers. Here’s a quick example of how I leave my fingers down in Old Joe Clark, to keep my hand organized and solidify intonation:
One final thought on organizing your left hand. The acclaimed violin pedagogue Dorothy DeLay, a Juilliard professor who taught many of the great virtuosos of our time, once said: “All mistakes happen between two notes.” This insight can apply to so many aspects of violin, but it especially applies to the left hand! If a note is out of tune, we should focus on adjusting the physical action that resulted in the note being out of tune, rather than just moving the finger after it is already down – the note is out of tune because of how the finger was dropped. Or, in DeLay’s framing: the incorrect note isn’t the mistake; the mistake is what physically happened between the incorrect note and the note that immediately preceded it. With this idea in mind, refining and solidifying physical movements between notes will help you to organize your hand and play with ease!
SCALES AS TOOLS
So you’re playing your scales in tune, with physical ease, and your hand is becoming more organized. What next? I could write a whole book on what to do next (and many educators have!), but I’ll share this simple, powerful idea: a scale can be a tool to work on any aspect of your playing. Here are just a few examples to explore:
1. Intonation
One of the best ways to know you’re in tune, especially if you’re playing something fast, is by listening to the sound your instrument is making. Does it sound like it’s ringing or does it sound like it’s a muffled cardboard box? If you play a 3rd finger G on the D string, your open G string will ring and visibly vibrate if the fingered G is in tune. We call pitches like these ringing tones. Here are some ringing tones on your instrument – note that they are the same pitches as the violin’s open strings. Listen for these as you practice scales!
2. Tone
Want to improve your tone? Practice scales with long bows! Set your metronome at 60 and play a scale with 4, 5, or 6 beats per note. Use your whole bow, from the frog to tip on each note. Work to keep your bow speed and weight consistent throughout the scale! Playing just one of these a day can do wonders for your bow control.
3. Bowing
Playing fiddle tunes with flexible bowings requires being able to comfortably play in all parts of the bow! Try changing your bow use while practicing scales. Play a scale using only the bottom half, the middle, or the top of the bow. Start your scale up bow instead of down bow. Improvise slur patterns. Improvise rhythms.
4. General Technique
Here are some common technical challenges that get in the way of making violin feel easier: tense shoulders, thumbs that squeeze (on either hand!), stiff right hand fingers, stiff right wrist, collapsed left wrist, left hand fingers that lift way too high when not being used, left hand fingers that collapse and squish on the fingerboard, tucking the pinky into the palm when dropping the 3rd finger, etc. If you want to work on any aspect of your technique, play a scale while focusing on the challenge at hand.
LEARN FASTER
The discussion on scales above is largely focused on helping you to play – physically – with more ease. But, the real magic of scales is that they also help you to learn with more ease! Scales are good for your body and your brain.
When you’re trying to learn a fiddle tune by ear, if you know the tune’s key – and the scale for that key! – then you know what notes you’ll likely need to use.
Related: Figuring Out the Key: A How To for All Musicians
If you notice a scale pattern in a tune as you’re trying to learn it, describe it to yourself as a scale (e.g., little scale going up, big scale with a turnaround, downward scale starting on G, etc.). Taking time to notice and label helps your brain to more quickly organize what you’re learning.
When you improvise, think about playing around with the scale of that tune’s key signature. For example, if you want to improvise a solo during a jam of Soldier’s Joy, you’ll want to rely on notes from the D major scale.
EVERYTHING IS A SCALE
If you’re not yet convinced that practicing scales is worth the investment of your time, here’s with a simple way to think about music: everything you play on your instrument is really just a long scale, but you’re skipping notes, varying rhythms, and changing directions as you go. If you can easily play all the notes in D major, then learning a new tune in D means you’re just organizing motions and sounds you’ve already practiced. Everything is a scale.
I’ll finish with the best news: it’s never too late to practice scales! When you start, though, don’t lose sight of the bigger picture. We practice scales to make playing music easier. When things feel easier, then we have more fun. And isn’t that why we all started fiddling in the first place?
**Editor’s Note:
Taylor Morris is a phenomenal music educator as I’m sure you can tell after reading this post. I’m thrilled to share him here as a guest blogger. To experience Taylor as a teacher, check out the videos he made in preparation for participants at an American String Teacher Association jam.
If you’d like more help with finding scales in your repertoire, my curriculum is based on discovering how to hear and play this exact kind of theory. It’s fun and freeing. Come join my JamFam!
xoL
