Do you warm up with music scales or scale pattern exercises?

Do you read music scales or learn them by heart? Do you know your major and minor scales, or just the 12 major scales? Do you like musical scale exercises? Do you know why you should play them to warm up regularly?

I am a flute player, and have taken flute, piano and guitar lessons. I have listened to a lot of lessons while taking my kids to music lessons on guitar, violin and piano. Piano lessons and my flute lessons have involved a lot of scale warm ups. I don’t remember much scale playing with the violin lessons (nor guitar lessons!) I will start asking the lot of string teachers that I know. But I was talking to a local popular cello teacher, and she was surprised that I practiced so many scales or scale exercises every day. She only has her students play one per week. Then she commented that it’s probably because flute music is filled with quick runs (which are made up of scale patterns). Of course each teacher emphasizes different aspects of music based on their own experiences. From my experience and an informal survey, few adult “casual” musicians learned or remember minor scales.

Why do we use scales as warm up exercise?

(in addition to long tones for wind and brass instruments and bow exercises for string players…)

I believe explaining the whys of what we need to do helps with motivation. Who explains to young students why you are playing scales? They are often just assigned! Have your young student take our quiz in our previous blog for some fun and inspiration. (The quiz is where it might say ‘‘‘ survey participant… “ and “Click here to participate”.)

So - in case you are a parent who doesn’t know about music or you are a kid who has to play scales, learning the scales and patterns based on the scales will:

• Help you warm up the muscles you use for your daily practice. I play so much better when I have warmed up my mouth muscles. I can especially play my very high and low notes better.

• Music Scales will help you become familiar with note patterns you will come across in music to better read/play and hear/play music for years to come. The more you learn the earlier, the likelihood of enjoying your music more because it comes easier to you is increased.

• The scales cover every note, so not one single finger is skipped in my warm ups. I practice my scales with a metronome so that I can learn to move my fingers evenly along all the note patterns.

• There are so many scales, Major, 3 basic types of Minor, jazz scales and scales for music of different cultures… But just learning major scales is a start. You can warm up with familiar scales practicing emphasizing dynamics, articulations, various rhythms, speed, a special bowing or fingering, for piano thump over and under, for wind instruments long tones…

Again, starting new scale exercises (like new music) can be tough to do because at first they may be hard. If you start out slowly with a metronome, you will be surprised how fun it becomes when you can play them fast. It may take a few days or a few weeks, but the work is worth it.