As a now retired piano teacher who taught the instrument for 25 years, I can tell you many reasons why learning scales are important for students.

To start with, once your beginner piano student has advanced enough in their progress, you can introduce the scale of C major. C major is the beginning key, (pardon the pun,) to starting to learn scales.

What is important about scales, is that you as a student have an understanding of how music functions, proper fingering techniques, and a complete understanding of the key signatures you are dealing with. If you don't know scales or were never taight the scales, then your knowledge of playing piano music is very slim.

Scales require good fingering in order to do them properly. So part of the reason piano teachers should assign the scales, is to teach you proper fingering techniques, and how to move the fingers over and under each other properly. Scales also improve speed and dexterity as well. Students that are just beginning scales start simply with one octave, each hand alone, and then one octave hands together. They can play them in contrary motion, or in a parallel motion. As the student continues to advance, adding two octaves hands alone then together is essential to keep on gaining that dexterity. Eventually, more advanced students should be playing four octaves hands alone and then together.

This is also the way that students learn major and minor, and the differences between the two of these tones of music. Major scales are such as C-G-D-A-E-B-F#-C# in the sharps, and in flats the scale order would be C-F-Bb-Eb-Ab-Db-Gb-Cb. We always start off with C major as the core to beginning either sharps or flat scales. Understanding both of the sharps and flats scales, will help students to know which key signature they are in, and what sharps or flats they need to memorize to play the music properly.

Now as for minor scales that also need to be understood and taught by the teacher, are those scales which relate to the major scale since every major has a minor and vice versa. To figure out the minor side of things, the piano student needs to go six steps up from the major key in order to find the minor key. So if you take C major, and count up six keys counting C as one, you should land on A. So A minor is related to C major. There are three forms of minor which are the natural minor form, which copies its relative major key exactly, and then there are the harmonic minor forms, where the 6th step of the scale is raised ascending and descending. In the melodic minor scale, both 6th and 7th steps are raised, and then returns to the natural minor form descending.

Students need an understanding of all of this to know their piece's structure. They should be taught that songs which have a more odd, sad, strange, or ugly tone, is in the minor key. So a piece that has no sharps or flats, but starts on the note A, and usually ends with A, is written in A minor , not C major, it's relative major.

Major keys are upbeat, happy, and have prettier tones. So if a piece is truly in the key of C, and starts that way, ending on C for the most part, it would be in C major.

Students have a weak background if they don't know this stuff. Knowing it the way I am telling here is important for a complete understanding of music.

Learn more about this author, Jennifer Kirkman.
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