10 years ago by
A Pianist
I'm no expert, but I think I can safely say this:
There are many reasons to be practicing scales.
No one could do justice to all those varying possible reasons in one practice session, so it will be necessary on any given day to choose a purpose (whether narrow or somewhat broader) for the day's scale work.
I believe that the correct practice technique will be determined at least in part by the chosen purpose of the session.
If you consider yourself to be retraining, one of the biggest things you will work on is replacing bad habits with better ones. That takes endless supplies of curiosity and patience. Curiosity and patience might also be good advice for scale practice.
Best order to learn scales: the sequence doesn't matter to anybody except you - so choose a plan that you enjoy or that makes sense to you. There is no healthy or unhealthy order as long as you keep your practicing itself healthy. (If you are a little nervous about a particularly difficult scale, then I suggest you begin with it. Getting that one over with makes all the rest seem so much easier.)
Rhythmic exercises to help with scales: Absolutely any rhythmic pattern can be used to "mix things up". Don't allow yourself to get "in a rut" of playing the same rhythm over and over for very long. When you've started to become accustomed to a certain pattern, then it's time to change to a different one.
Tension always has a reason behind it, it isn't random. The result is physical but the cause doesn't have to be. Discovering the EXACT moment that the tension starts is often half-way to solving it. Often it will be triggered earlier than you thought, by something that seems very minor.
Books: When you use a book outside of the actual repertoire you mean to play, then that book must serve your purpose, or else it's wasting your time. Scales IN THEMSELVES are not a worthy goal - but you can accomplish things using scales as a medium. For example, "B flat major" by itself is not much good to anybody, but "finding the source of this tension" and later "tension-free through three octaves" can employ the B flat major scale in the process.
Regarding tension: I use a couple of computer programs that are under constant development, which means that they frequently malfunction. (They're for typesetting, not for nuclear reactors, so that's OK.) When someone finds a bug in one of these programs, they are often asked to send the software developer a "minimal example" - that is, the shortest possible input that still makes the program crash. This does two things: first, the developer can quickly figure out what the problem is without wasting too much time in blind alleys; and second, the user may find that he himself has made a minor error, and that there was no bug in the program after all. It might be interesting to try to create your own "minimal example" of tension - the shortest possible musical example that will always cause your tension to flare up. (For example - what happens if you omit the first two octaves, and start your scale in the third octave?)
Both you and the software developer are intently and curiously watching things crash, so that you can say "a-HA! That's what happens!"
