Help - dd2 cannot learn her scales

[pigsinmud]

Dd2 (7) is doing her grade 2 trumpet this term. Now, dh is a trumpet player/teacher. He's taught for 20 years, but he's stumped with how to help dd2 learn the scales. He has never printed the scales out for pupils, but has got them to work the scales out and learn them that way. Dd2 cannot remember them, especially the arpeggios. He has endless patience with his pupils, but not so much with dd2 .....never teach your children springs to mind.

She has no problem playing other tunes without the music in front of her - just scales! Any teachers or parents out there who have a magical way to help her to remember them? As a non-musician scales seem really easy. When I played the recorder years ago, I loved playing scales

[FastLoris]

Do you have a piano or keyboard? A number of music students I know who have wind instruments as their first study and piano as second, prefer to work out new scales on the piano and then transfer them to their main instrument. Something to do with actually seeing the notes and patterns physically in front of you.

I can only contribute the way I do it (on piano), and I know it's not everyone's way or even a common way. But I personally think the way ABRSM grade syllabuses suggest rote learning of individual scales as isolated elements is barmy. I just can't teach that way.

To me, learning a scale pattern is ONE PART of gaining a whole, general, holistic familiarity with a key. That includes aural appreciation of the different scale steps - hearing how 3-4 and 7-8 are semitones and playing around with what that means; understanding the importance of 1-3-5 as a CHORD, playing around with it and THEN seeing how you can break it up into an arpeggio; and improvising, lots of improvising. Also transposing pieces: if you want to learn 3 or 4 major keys really well, take every piece you've ever learnt in any of them and transpose it into all the others, noticing which notes you have to sharpen or flatten to do so.

Then learn NATURAL minor scales by experimenting with how you can start the major scales on different scale degrees, and starting on the 6th degree gives the relative minor. (ABRSM bizarrely skips this step). Then, when that's well and deeply known inside-out, and ONLY then, start thinking about why you might want to sharpen the 7th degree to make the harmonic minor, and what difference that makes to the sound as you improvise.

I don't care if kids spend three years doing this with C, F and G. They're still learning more usefully than any amount of mindless rote learning of finger patterns would provide. Once they get it, solidifying it into particular patterns over two octaves is pretty easy. And it's pretty easy too to generalise it to the other keys, because they're just transposing a single piece of musical logic and are led by their ear. The scales emerge out of aural and intuitive musical understanding, not vice versa.

I've never used a scale book with any student in my life.

[FastLoris]

We would forget scales, but needs them for the exam! The concentrating on one scale a week could work...

Which begs the question: Why do you need the exam?

[morethanpotatoprints]

FastLorius

That sounds the same way as dh is teaching dd, her other instrumental teachers insist on buying books and it infuriates him.

[Trufflethewuffle]

Just had a quick look at the syllabus. Four scales, only one octave. Bb and D major, A and D minor. What we have done in the past is split scale load into manageable portions and concentrate on just that portion. So perhaps work really hard on A minor one day. Then the next day move onto another one but also go back over Am to check still ok. Keep adding a bit more in. My kids found this helped as they could somehow visualise that the percentage of known scales was increasing. Sometimes looking at the whole lot is just too scary for a child.
We also used cards with the names on to do lucky dip tests nearer the exam. Heads or tails with a coin for tongued or slurred.