The more you practice and develop your technical skills, the more you will “open the door” and gain the skill set necessary to play more advanced repertoire. With practice, scalar passages quickly begin to be recognized as “hey, that’s a G Major scale” instead of note-by-note “G-A-B-C-D-E-F#-G”. Not to mention that once you have memorized your scales, you have also internalized the fingering used for them. The more that you practice them, the more automatic they will become and the easier pieces will become to learn. The point is: Scales are everywhere in music. (Okay, I might have been showing off just a little bit with my music theory knowledge there.) From there, the A Major scale is used going both up and down, with periodic moments of chromaticism and skips. This excerpt starts off with a descending A minor 5 finger scale, then quickly turns around and ascends using the A Major scale. Here’s one more example that shows some more scale usage, the famous: “Rondo Alla Turca” by Mozart.

Without lots of practice, you cannot expect to ever gain the speed necessary to pull off a piece of this difficulty. This excerpt is also meant to be played quite fast, which reinforces the importance of mastering your scales and arpeggios. Arpeggios are basically just chords that get played one note at a time, instead of all the notes in the chord being played simultaneously.Īs you can see, scales and arpeggios make up a pretty big part of this piece. The material circled in red is scalar type material, ranging from textbook Major scales to slight variations of different five-finger scales and scales in thirds - which can be quite tricky! The material circled in blue are arpeggios, which are another crucial song component that you will come across while studying the piano. (For those that are curious, this is Beethoven's 3rd Piano Sonata (Op.

This is why learning scales will drastically help to improve your skills and give you a serious push towards becoming a more experienced pianist.Ībove is a piece one of my first teachers showed me to help drive in the importance of knowing your scales. A family friend of mine (and wonderful pianist!) Carol Stivers once told me that “scales are the bread and butter of music.” Learning scales is so important because entire songs from the Common Practice Period revolve around and use them. If you are serious about this whole piano thing, then at some point you have probably studied scales and arpeggios. I will also explain some of the skills that can take you from a novice piano player into the land of intermediate and beyond.Ī lot goes into playing the piano. There are often sublevels in these categories that get used to quantify a pupil's exact level of skill, but in this article, I will focus on these three overarching levels. I will help you categorize your skills into three groups: Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced. I hope this article will help show you what some key differences are between the three main categories used to distinguish a pianist’s skill level. As someone who has taken classical piano lessons, these will focus more on that realm. With that being said, some objective things can help to draw some obvious lines and help to identify what level you are as a pianist. This helps to illustrate a critical point: knowing what level you are (or leveling a piece of music) can be very subjective.

5 yr old piano prodigy