Practising scales

July 28, 2005

Practising scales

Posted in: Music

I've not met anyone who enjoys scales but I love them - the sheer mindlessness of them is fantastic, musical meditation. The Associated Board provides students with their world-famous graded syllabuses. Amongst those are scales requirements. Problem here again is I don't have those scales, but I found this great Flash scales app at teoria.com - ten minutes goofing about with it and I was convinced my $10 paypal donation had gone to a good home. The applet doesn't show arpeggios or multiple octaves but it does allow you to compare Phygrian dominants with Bepop melodic minors...

TODO:
1. peel out the scales from the AB syllabus and render in Lilypond. Surely someone has already done this?
2. Take a look at this. There was 'til recently a rather good Windows woodwind scales practice app, ScalePerfect, at musicadept.com but he's taken down the download. After I emailed a feature enhancement suggestion, oops. It would even listen to your playing and rate on tonguing, accuracy, etc. He promised to consider open sourcing it at some point... Best I could do!

Posted by Paul Makepeace at July 28, 2005 19:08 | TrackBack

Comments

apparently jerry garcia used to fiendishly hunt for new guitar books everywhere he went. He liked to practice any new scales he could to enter new stuff into his muscle memory (or some such).

Jazz, man, Jazz.

Posted by: avocado tom at July 29, 2005 18:20

Avo, yeah definitely - drilling motor paths with endless repetition is the way to get good fast. I used to practise all my juggling moves left and right-handed religiously, and then variations on timing, left, and right, and then variations on height, left, and right, and so on and on until I could move around the same move seamlessly.

Fantastic byproduct was being able to ad-lib fairly solid looking routines, which I guess is the same as Jazz improv.

Posted by: Paul Makepeace at July 29, 2005 20:52

I am in need of different scales and trills for the flute any help would be most humbly accepted. thankyou for youe help and concern.

Posted by: Suzan Lincoln at August 11, 2006 23:56