Piano Video Lesson: Practicing Your Scales in Contrary Motion

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin. You know, I've made so many videos about scales and arpeggios, exercises, but here's one for you that I've never shared and I think you're going to enjoy this, which is practicing your scales in contrary motion.

One of the biggest challenges when you're playing scales, you're playing your hands together and you're not sure if your fingers are landing squarely together. It's hard to hear the differentiation of each hand separately when you're playing together. You know, and maybe one hand is louder than the other or not even, or the durations of the notes, but when you play in contrary motion, you hear everything clearly. Let me show you how this is done.

Now I learned all my scales, major minor scales, this way in conservatory and it is a great way to practice scales if you've never done it. To show you basically, I'm going to slow it down a little bit because I know I just zipped through that. You go up halfway, then you go the other way. Once you get to the two octave point, then you come back down and up, and then you'll go out again and then back down.

Now keep in mind that you should always practice your scales with the metronome. There's never a good reason to practice scales without the metronome because you want to measure your work. You want to strive for evenness. After all, it isn't music. It's strictly technique, finger work, the evenness, the evenness of the attacks, the evenness of the releases, the evenness of the volumes. And by playing them in contrary motion, you can hear things more clearly. Not just playing them fast, but playing them slowly. Try this with your scales. Let me know how it works here in the comments at LivingPianist .com, your online piano resource again, Robert Estrin. Thanking all of you subscribers. If you haven't subscribed, this is a great time to do it. There's so many great videos coming your way that you're going to not want to miss. Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/practicing-your-scales-in-contrary-motion/

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