Play Your Scales Slowly

Who says that? We all need and want to have our scales going at a good clip. Scales are meant to help your fingers move faster so that you can play those fast passages in Mozart and Bach. They all use fast scale passages somewhere along the way.

What I am talking about specifically is that you can learn a lot about your playing, and you could fix a lot of problems, if you take your scales at a slower clip. When you play any piece slowly you begin to hear where the problems are. Problems such as glitches and fingers that are not moving evenly. Sometimes we think we are playing evenly because we are keeping up with our metronome. But really the inside beat is uneven.

Playing Slowly Reveals Problems

Playing the scales slowly with a metronome at a slower tempo, allows me to hear exactly what is happening in the scale. We need to listen to our fingers. Just because our fingers moved really well two weeks ago, does not mean they’re moving really well today. There are a lot of factors that go into our muscles, and we need to be training them all the time. I’m not just training them for one solo that I played two weeks ago. We need to be training them for every day or else we lose it.

Play a scale two octaves slowly. Listen to what is happening both in unevenness and what is happening between notes. Do you hear any glitches happening? Glitches are when your fingers all don’t go down or up at the exact same time. Even though playing the scale up and down does give you some insight into your technical issues, my shtick is that you have to interact with scales for the most benefit. Interacting with scales means playing scale exercises such as the Reichert studies or the Moyse method or Taffanel and Gaubert. Whatever method you have that has scale exercises which allow you to interact with those scales.

Interact with Scales

I will also listen to the way my tone sounds. I want to match my octaves when I play the scales. Do they all match in volume and weight and resonance, or do I get bigger as I get to the bottom and smaller as I go to the top?

Scales played slowly reveal glitches. Glitches are always hidden by speed. They are there and are the thing that makes runs not sound absolutely fluid. However, we can fool ourselves into thinking that we can play a run just fine and then we play slowly and hear that the fingers glitch. We often think that we are playing really well, but we are really hiding a glitch. Glitches can be tedious to work on. They are not the most glamorous thing to practice, but the pay off is great. Your runs will sound effortless. Maybe you are still working really hard, but to a listener, that work sounds effortless. You want that as a goal. You want the listener to think that what you are playing is effortless. Then the listener can concentrate on the music that you produce.

Make Your Embouchure Flexible

So, this is what I mean when I say you should practice scales slowly. You can play your scales up two octaves and down two octaves and then move on to the next one. But interacting with scales helps to reveal more problems and thus make you a better performer. A lot of times this is the kind of thing that separates the amateur from the professional. Sometimes it is really tedious work. But the payoff is fabulous. So, work on playing your scales slowly. You will like the results.

Have fun!

DoctorFlute

Watch me demonstrate this:

Play Your Scales Slowly – FluteTips 139