Piano Scales: For Beginners - Bundle - The Only 2 Books You Need to Learn Scales for Piano, Piano Scale Theory and Piano Scales for Beginners Today

By Preston Hoffman

2 Manuscripts in 1 Book, Including: How to Play Scales and How to Play Piano!

Book 1)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Preston Hoffman
• Release date: Jun 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9798330252404

Book preview

BOOK 1

HOW TO PLAY SCALES: IN 1 DAY

The Only 7 Exercises You Need to Learn Guitar Scales, Piano Scales and Ukulele Scales Today

Preston Hoffman

© Copyright 2018 - All rights reserved.

It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document by either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited.

Introduction

Congratulations on purchasing How to Play Scales and thank you for doing so.

The following chapters will discuss how to play scales on piano and stringed instruments. It will explain the utility of scales as well as the underlying theory. More than that, it will teach you all of the scales that you need to know to be an improvisational master or to have a firm handle on your next composition.

If you’re wanting to become an incredible musician, then this book is the place to start. If you practice the techniques in this book, then you can start from square one and make massive progress in as little as one day. The knowledge in this book is invaluable - I’ve attained all of it over years and years of musicianship. Now, I get to impart all of that wisdom that I’ve gained to you. My goal is to do so as efficiently as I possibly can while not compromising the educational worthiness of the book.

No matter whether you want to play piano, guitar, or learn the theory behind major scales so that you can apply them to any given instrument out there, this is the book for you. So read on to become a much better musician in absolutely no time flat.

There are plenty of books on this subject on the market, thanks again for choosing this one! Every effort was made to ensure it is full of as much useful information as possible, please enjoy!

Chapter 1: Exercise 1 - Understand the Theory

As somebody who wants to start learning the art of playing scales and improvising and having a greater musical knowledge in general, it’s very possible that you have a misconception about how things exactly work in these contexts. Indeed, it’s really easy for people who aren’t as familiar with the fluidity of improvisation and musicality to really not have so much of a grasp on the reality of these things.

People who aren’t as accustomed to music beyond simple chords or potentially even what they’ve heard on the radio tend to think that improvisation and mastering scales is very difficult. This isn’t quite the case. It’s a combination of two things: feel and practice. Feel is the big part. Over time, as you work more and more with your scales and learning your influences, you’re going to gain a greater and greater appreciation for how things should sound.

This chapter isn’t about the feel, though; this chapter is about the structure. The key to playing scales is to understanding the underlying musicality. The purpose of this chapter is to teach you several different things about music theory. There’s a very good reason for this chapter: I’m a long-time music teacher, specializing in guitar. In my years teaching the guitar, I’ve had many people who come to me knowing a basic amount of the instrument, but when push comes to shove, they have little to no understanding of what everything they’re doing actually amounts to. They can play chords, but they don’t really know how chords work or why they’re named like they are. If I ask them to tell me the practical difference between the A major and A minor chords, for example, they may go as far as to tell me that the chords are related but different, or they may just relate the two chords as happy and sad, but sometimes they’ll have no clue that the two chords are even related at all.

Would this stems from is a fundamental misunderstanding of music in general. There is nothing spontaneous in music. The spontaneity - and therefore the art - of music comes from the person creating it, but music itself is actually quite structured.

All of music can be broken down into sequences of notes. Notes are just a way of breaking sound down into chunks. To have a better understanding of what exactly I mean here, think of a siren going from a high note to a low note and back - although it may cycle through many different tones on the way up and down, it’s actually just going through a sonic spectrum and manipulating soundwaves to produce different tones. Giving notes names is just a way of solidifying, identifying, partitioning, and breaking these sonic identities down into smaller chunks.

In the Western musical tradition, music is broken down into 8 distinct chunks which repeat themselves over and over: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. Once you reach G, the cycle starts over again with A. This space between these two 8 notes is referred to as an octave.

If you were to look at a piano, you would see that there are black keys and white keys. These notes represent the white keys. If you look at a full 88 key piano, the lowest note on it is an A. However, music is usually broken up with the C chromatic scale. I’ll explain what this means in a second.

In the Western musical tradition, there is often a midpoint between two notes. These midpoints exist between the notes C and D, D and E, F and G, and A and B. If you will the midpoint above a note, you are playing the note’s sharp variant. If you will the midpoint below a note, you are playing the note’s flat variant. Flat means that a note is lower in tone than normal; sharp means that the note is higher in tone than normal. Flats are represented in music with a b, where sharps are represented in music with a #.

E and F, as well as B and C, do not have these steps between them. This is because the difference between these two notes is the same as the difference between A and A# or