How to practise piano scales

Why practise scales

Scales aren’t just a warm-up ritual. They teach your hands the fingering patterns, thumb under and finger over, that you’ll use in pieces constantly. They make the keys you’ll read in familiar, so a key signature of three sharps stops being a puzzle. And because a scale is the same pattern over and over, it’s the clearest place to hear whether your playing is even: every note the same loudness, equally spaced.

Start with C major

C major uses only white keys, so all your attention can go to the fingering. Learn one octave first, hands separately.

• Right hand up: 1 2 3 on C D E, then the thumb passes under to play F, and 1 2 3 4 5 on F G A B C.
• Right hand down: 5 4 3 2 1 from C to F, then 3 crosses over the thumb onto E, and 3 2 1 on E D C.
• Left hand up: the mirror image. 5 4 3 2 1 on C D E F G, then 3 crosses over the thumb onto A, and 3 2 1 on A B C.
• Left hand down: 1 2 3 on C B A, then the thumb passes under to G, and 1 2 3 4 5 down to C.

If the numbers are new to you, piano finger numbers explains them. The C major scale page has it written out for both hands.

How to practise the thumb crossing

The crossing is the whole difficulty of a scale, so practise it on its own before you play the scale through. In the right hand, play just C D E F with 1 2 3 1, and back, F E D C with 1 3 2 1. Do it slowly, a few times, then add G.

• Move the thumb early. As 2 and 3 play, the thumb is already travelling under the palm towards its next key, so it’s there in time and doesn’t have to lunge.
• Keep the wrist level. Don’t twist the hand or drop the wrist to get the thumb under. The elbow moves out a little to carry the hand along instead.
• Listen for the bump. The thumb is heavier than the other fingers and the most common fault is a louder, late note where it lands. Aim for the F to sound exactly like the E before it.

Hands separately, then together

Play each hand alone until it’s even and you don’t have to think about the fingering. Then put them together, an octave apart, slowly. Expect it to fall apart at first, for a good reason: the hands cross at different moments. Going up, the right hand’s thumb passes under on the 4th note, F, while the left hand’s 3 crosses over on the 6th, A. Coming down it’s the other way round.

Practise just the first five or six notes hands together until the two crossings feel like part of one movement, then the whole octave. Watching the music rather than your hands helps here, because your eyes can’t follow both at once anyway.

Slow, with a metronome, listening for evenness

Set a metronome at a tempo where you can play every note evenly, often around 60 bpm with one note per click to begin with. Play the scale up and down. If it was even, with no bump on the thumb and no note late, raise the tempo a few bpm. If not, stay where you are or go back a step. Once one note per click is comfortably fast, go back to a slow tempo with two notes per click.

Two small rules make this work. Raise the tempo only after a clean run, not because you’re bored. And keep a note of where you got to, so tomorrow starts close to it rather than from scratch. There’s more on this in how to practise with a metronome. Pianomi does the bookkeeping for you: its scales show the fingering in the music, a clean run with the metronome (95 or more) raises the tempo by 4 bpm, and it measures your evenness, the timing spread, the loudness on a MIDI keyboard and the gap between the hands.

Rhythms, accents and two octaves

Once a scale is even, vary it so it keeps teaching you something:

• Accents in groups of 3 and 4. Play the scale evenly but accent every 3rd note, then every 4th. Because the groups don’t line up with the fingering, the accent lands on a different finger each time, including the 4th.
• Rhythms. Long–short, then short–long. Then play it evenly again and listen for the difference.
• Loud and soft. Getting louder as you go up and softer coming down, then the reverse.
• Two octaves. In C major, the right hand plays 4 on the first B and passes the thumb under again onto the C in the middle, saving 5 for the top. The left hand going up puts its thumb on the middle C and crosses 4 over onto the D.
• Contrary motion. Start with both thumbs on middle C and move the hands apart, the right hand up and the left hand down. In C major both hands use the same finger numbers at the same moment, which makes it a good first hands-together scale for many people.

Which scales to learn next

A handy fact: G, D, A and E major all use the same fingering as C major, in both hands, for one octave: right hand 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5, left hand 5 4 3 2 1 3 2 1. Only the black keys change. Learn them in that order, adding one sharp each time: G major has F♯, D major adds C♯, A major adds G♯, E major adds D♯. See G major to begin, and key signatures for why the sharps come in that order.

F major is the first change. Its left hand is the same as C (5 4 3 2 1 3 2 1), but the right hand goes 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4, with the 4th finger on B♭ and the thumb passing under after it. That keeps the thumb off the black key. See the F major scale.

Then the minor scales, starting with A minor, the relative minor of C. The natural minor uses only white keys, from A to A. The harmonic minor raises the 7th note, so G becomes G♯ both going up and coming down, and the melodic minor raises the 6th and 7th going up and lowers them again coming down. The A minor scale page shows all three. The whole list is on our scales pages.

Arpeggios, the notes of a chord played one after another across octaves, come alongside scales. They use the same thumb-under idea with wider gaps between the fingers, so get a scale comfortable in a key before you add its arpeggio.

A daily 5-minute scale routine

Five focused minutes do more than twenty minutes on autopilot. Here’s one way to spend them:

Minute	What to play
1	The crossing alone (C D E F and back), each hand, in today’s key.
2	The scale, hands separately, at your clean tempo.
3	Hands together, slower than hands separately.
4	One variation: accents in 3s or 4s, a rhythm, or loud and soft.
5	A scale you already know well, two octaves or in contrary motion, a few bpm faster.

Rotate the key every few days, or one per day of the week once you know several. Keep coming back to C major too: the scale you know best is the one where you’ll hear unevenness most clearly.