Every music student has encountered scales. Most of us are not very fond of this part of practice! For all the teachers reading this, wouldn’t it be wonderful if all your students came to each lesson all excited to do scales? If only the students could see how incredibly valuable scales are to performance!

Now, this site is mainly related to Flute Solo Performance. Every piece of music ever written is based on scales. If you take the time to examine your solo, you will find that scales are everywhere, even though sometimes they are only two or three notes long. As you progress and your music becomes more difficult, you will find scales of more than one key throughout your music.

As you begin to look at a new solo, take a bit of time to identify the different scales. Then practice those scales as your warm-up each day. Oh yes, daily scale practice. Now we get into the part so many of us don’t want to do!

Let’s see if we can find a few ways to make it more palatable.  There are many good books out there. Most of them just go up and down the scale. If you take time to explore a bit, you can find quite a bit of variety.

I like to try to make my scales sound like music. Sometimes I go up five notes and down four, working up as high as I can go. For instance, in the key of C:

C, D, E, F, G, F, E, D, D, D.

D, E, F, G, A, G, F, E, E, E.

I repeat the last note, just to give it a little more flavor and fun.

FUTURE PLANS FOR Flute Solo Music.com:

·      Guest authors – if you would like to submit an article, please contact me

·      A book of scales designed for teacher and student to work together. These scales are very musical in nature.

·      A book of scale studies designed to train the fingers and the ear to play a scale in the middle 

·      “Musical Journeys“ a new collection of seven original compositions for flute with piano accompaniments. One is a flute duet. Each piece is three to five minutes of mood music written for performance.