How to Organize Scale & Arpeggio Practice

The best way to maintain a complicated system of scales, arpeggios, and other exercises is to play EVERYTHING YOU KNOW EVERY DAY. This works well for music majors and people who love technical routines who also have plenty of practice time.

However, for the rest of us, there needs to be a way to circulate our scales, arpeggios, and other key-based exercises systematically so that we don’t leave any out or repeat anything unnecessarily. For example, it is not necessary (or practical) to start your routine by playing things in C major every day!

Additionally, we need to be able to do this without having to spend a huge amount of time creating and maintaining a complicated plan in a spreadsheet, notebook, or application.

How can we minimize the time we spend planning a routine and maximize the time practicing while not leaving anything out? The answer is to use flash cards. However, you need to use them in a very specific way for this to be effective.

Note that this article contains information that you might want to reference later on. I highly suggest you create a bookmark!

Flash Card Practice

You likely already have some experience using flash cards academically. You might even have some experience using them to practice piano. However, I would like to propose a system that uses flash cards in a way that you probably have not used them before.

Here are the main advantages of my flash card system:

• You can practice a simple routine using flash cards that would otherwise be very complicated and time consuming to maintain.

• You can limit your technical practice to any amount of time (and you will still progress as long as you show up).

• You won’t have to worry about what is coming next.

• You will spend less time on things you know well and more time on things that are insecure.

• You can practice all keys for a particular technique or all techniques for a particular key, or both!

• This system is incredibly flexible and adaptable!

This system can be customized to any skill level and will adapt to any duration of practice. You would be surprised with what you can achieve in five minutes! For best results, you have to be willing to do this every time you sit down at the piano.

Flash Card Practice Guidelines

In order for this to work, there are a few parameters to keep in mind.

• You actually need to use physical index cards. In my experience, any means of digitally recreating this system will severely limit its effectiveness and potential randomness (and we actually want randomness).

• You should use a timer for this part of your practice. Using a timer encourages you to focus long enough to get something done but also protects the rest of your practice time and reserves it for other things.

• You should practice using flash cards for the first few minutes of every session. This is what enables you to have short technique practice sessions. The more practice sessions you have in a week, the less time you need to spend on this category of practice.

• Do not put a flash card away until you have mastered the relevant exercises. This is the most important part of the system! This is how you will spend small amounts of time on things you know well while focusing much more intensely on things that are new or yet to be mastered. We will talk more about this later.

If you follow these guidelines, you'll see results even if you have very short practice sessions! I also think you'll find that this system makes practicing key-based exercises much more engaging and less tedious.

Flash Card Practice Instructions

When you are ready to try my system, follow the instructions below:

1. Purchase a set of index cards.

2. Write the name of each key on an index card. I highly suggest you separate minor and major keys. The reason for this is that your minor keys generally will circulate slower than your majors, and this system accounts for that. You should also only write down one key per physical position on the keyboard (so pick either Gb major or F# major, but not both).

3. If you prefer to practice a particular technique in all keys, create a card for that as well. For example, you could create a card that says “Major Arpeggios” or “Melodic Minor Scales”.

Here is a baseline sample list of cards:

1. C Major

2. Db Major

3. D Major

4. Eb Major

5. E Major

6. F Major

7. Gb Major

8. G Major

9. Ab Major

10. A Major

11. Bb Major

12. B Major

13. C Minor

14. C# Minor

15. D Minor

16. Eb Minor

17. E Minor

18. F Minor

19. F# Minor

20. G Minor

21. G# Minor

22. A Minor

23. Bb Minor

24. B Minor

25. All Major scales

26. All Major arpeggios

27. All Harmonic Minor scales

28. All Minor Arpeggios

As you can see, this list includes 24 key cards and 4 technique cards. They are all part of the same deck and get shuffled together.

This is a good starting point for most students and applies at all skill levels. Later on, you can add additional technique cards such as melodic minor scales, natural minor scales, dominant seventh arpeggios, diminished seventh arpeggios, and so on.

What to Practice for Each Card

What you practice when each card comes up is generally determined by your skill level.

For example:

• A late beginner might play all techniques in one octave in parallel and contrary motion (when applicable)

• An intermediate student might play everything in two octaves and be working to incorporate additional variations (such as inversions or playing a 3rd or 6th apart)

• An advanced student might play everything in 4 octaves with all possible variations

It’s worth mentioning that I generally only use the metronome when practicing a technique card (all keys for a technique). This is because I use the technique cards to focus on speed and the key cards to focus on exploration and security in each key. However, this is my personal preference.

On a side note, this is a good time to mention that I created a comprehensive piano curriculum complete with hundreds of video tutorials, all arranged by skill level. After figuring out your repertoire level, you’ll know exactly which exercises to be practicing to support pieces at that level. You can learn more by clicking here.

The Most Important Rule

The most important element of this system can be defined simply in this way:

If it still needs work, leave it out for tomorrow!

Each time you practice using the flash card system, you must decide whether to leave a card out or put it away. This is where you can impose your own personal standard. The higher your standard, the slower you will circulate the keys, and the better you will know them.

Here is what I personally do and suggest when drawing a flash card:

1. Work to circulate all of the techniques that are associated with the card.

2. Practice any well-known technique once or twice.

3. Spend the most time on the techniques that need the most work. Try to create a circuit of these techniques.

4. If everything is effortless, put the card away (and draw a new one if there is still time remaining).

5. If the timer goes off before all the techniques are circulated, leave the card out for the next session.

6. If the timer goes off before all the techniques are effortless, leave the card out.

7. If any particular technique requires a good bit of warm up, leave the card out.

Your goal is to get to the point where you can easily circulate your chosen exercises without warmup and without issue. On any day that this happens, you can feel good about putting the card away.

This is the way that you’ll be applying most of your practice to things that need it while minimizing your practice on things that don’t. This is what makes the system work!

Should You Have a “Discard Pile”

One additional consideration with this system is whether or not to have a discard pile. In this system, a discard pile refers to a place to put cards that have been used already in the current cycle.

My recommendation is that you do include a discard pile as part of your flash card system because it allows you to shuffle all the cards once you finish a cycle. This ensures that the order of keys that you practice is always different, which I find to be beneficial. I also appreciate the sense of completion from finishing a cycle of cards.

However, if you don’t care about shuffling the cards and don’t wish to have a discard pile, you can simplify things by placing each card at the back of the deck whenever you are finished with it.

How to Use Flash Cards While Learning New Keys

You can use this system even if you don’t yet know all of your scales and arpeggios. However, you will need to have two practice sessions instead of one (they can both be short).

One practice session will be dedicated to circulating cards that are associated with things you have learned. The other session will be for learning something new. In both cases, leave the relevant card out if it still needs work.

Here is an example:

Let’s say you only know a few major scales and nothing else. In this scenario, create a card for the keys that you do know and practice these exercises in a short practice session. When each card comes up, try to repeat the key in all the ways you know how. If the “All major scales” card comes up, just cycle all the ones you know. If you don’t know your minor scales or arpeggios, don’t use those cards yet.

Next, you’ll have an additional short practice session where you learn the next key or technique that you don’t know. You can even create these cards as you go. Once you master the technique, you can add that new card to your general pile and practice it as part of your other session. Once you learn arpeggios, you can start to practice those as well each time a key card comes up.

Also, you might appreciate knowing that I created free sheet music for the one octave scales and arpeggios. To access these sources, click here and scroll down to the "Free Sheet Music" section. These resources are intended to lead a student to the Complete Book of Scales, Chords, Cadences, and Arpeggios. All of this is is part of the same curriculum that I mentioned earlier.

Go Forth and Practice!

I like to think of this system as an extremely simple system, once you get it down. All you do is create flash cards, use them as exercise prompts in your practice, circulate them often, and leave them out if they need work.

While I used to find practicing scales and arpeggios to be very tedious, I no longer feel this way. The reason for this is that my practice sessions can be super short and painless when I use this system. The “leave it out if it needs work” rule is a total game changer because it takes advantage of how your brain improves when you sleep on something and then repeat it again over a period of days.

One criticism that I am anticipating is that this system doesn’t cover everything a pianist is supposed to do. I have three responses to this:

1. This system is very flexible. You can easily make it cover anything you need it to cover. Be creative!

2. These exercises that I suggested are the most important ones. For example, a student really shouldn’t be working on dominant seventh arpeggios if they don’t even know their scales. Scales and arpeggios in their base forms are the most important priority. Don’t worry about anything else until these are mastered.

3. There are SO MANY STUDENTS who don’t practice scales or arpeggios at all. Going from practicing nothing to something like this will be a massive boost to technical ability, at any level.

Lastly, I would like to encourage you to leave a comment or a question below if you don’t understand something or want my advice on how you can use this system to meet your needs. I am always happy to help!

I hope you found this article helpful. Happy practicing!