Scales Bootcamp: The fastest, clearest way to get to know your scales, and then master them.

A good resource but too expensive. Also, there needs to be a condensed student version at a lower cost.

This book has been my most fun of all my music books. I'm an adult beginner and while this book won't teach you how to play music it does teach you scales and educates your hands so that they get an intimate feel for the keyboard. I'm working on the A, Am, B, C, D, E, F, and G scales and have completed between 10 and 25 (out of 128) exercises for each of these scales. At this level, I can sit down and play the scales at speeds of 120-190 bpm with few if any mistakes. When I first got the book I dove into the C, F, and G scales and worked on them quite a bit. Then I gradually added a scale every few days and put time into it at the beginning of my practice. Now I will pick the scale with the fewest achievements and knock off a few, then review the rest of the scales that I know before continuing into the other parts of the practice. Each new scale has gotten easier than the prior one as my fingers feel more "educated" and the fingering becomes easier. An exciting "ah hah" that I had was after concentrating on one of the scales for a while I gradually came to "see" the keys of the scale as separate from the other keys of the keyboard, and I was no longer thinking about the scale but just played the keys in the order that I saw them.The Achievements part of the training really works and keeps you focused on trying to get the next checkbox ticked off. This provides both direction and motivation during the practice, and some of the achievements can seem like they'll be easy but are not. For example, doing a 4 octave tour seems pretty simple (you have to do the scale 4 octaves up and down twice to satisfy an achievement), but it's easy to make one little mistake. This requires you to start over and keep at it until you get it perfect twice. So at the beginning you may have thought it was going to be easy to get it on the first try, but once you finally get it you've really done it 15-20 times (or more!), and your fingers have benefited from all the repetition.One last thing that I really like about scales is learning to improvise melodies while practicing the scales. If you have an electronic keyboard you can put on a nice percussion accompaniment at a tempo that is comfortable, and just practice going up and down the scales while varying the rhythm and skipping some of the keys to create your own melodies. This book doesn't help in this specifically, but while you are trying to push your speed up it's natural to start varying the rhythm at different parts of the scale, speeding it up to two notes per beat here and there, and eventually you're doing the whole scale at twice the initial speed. I've found this part of my practice to actually be the most fun.My plan is to gradually add the rest of the major scales to my practices, and then the minor ones. I can easily see this book being a regular component of my practicing for the next year or more. And I also doubt that I'll ever complete all 125 achievements of any of the scales as some are pretty tricky and look very difficult. I'm thinking that once I reach a certain level of proficiency with the scales, I'll be putting that extra time into learning new pieces instead of getting every last achievement out of the scale book. But, I'm not there yet so I'll have to wait and see how I feel when I get there. :-)

This is basically a book of scale drills for all the major and minor harmonic scales. The fingering is clear and easy to follow, but the real value is in the sheer variety of drills, which range from very simple to fiendishly difficult. Sure, you can play the scale, but can you play it with your eyes closed? Can you play it simultaneously in triplets in your right hand and quarter notes in your left? Can you play it with your left hand while your right plays an entirely different scale? The gamification system is also nice. While a little cheesy, it offers an easy way to track progress, and it really does feel good to check off another box.I took a star off, though, because the book is not sufficient in and of itself for learning about scales. It doesn't tell you, even in brief, how scales are constructed. It doesn't say what the natural minor of any given major scale is (it also doesn't have drills for those minor scales). It doesn't mention the melodic minors. It doesn't even show any key signatures!Treat it as a book of drills only, and it's worth the money. Just don't expect more from it.

I've always known the major, minor and harmonic minor scales but to play them at great speeds is a whole other challenge. This book is not easy, but it seems like the most direct route a pianist could take to become more effective. The only thing I can't understand about this book is the "splatmaster" exercise. The instructions don't tell how to play it exactly. It seems like they're telling you to press down four keys at the same time. But why on earth would you press down on b and c or e and f in a harmonic minor at the same time? You end up with minor seconds, dissonance. Also, it's not something you would ever play. I guess I am probably not understanding the directions of that exercise. If anyone can clear it up, I'd be grateful. Other than that, however, it really is an awesome book - as far as I am, which is not far - It hasn't yet been a week. But I am optimistic!

Great book, but the one flaw is the glued binding. The book won't lie flat on a music stand or the like. Probably should've been spiral-bound or the like. We happen to have a comb-binding machine, so we were able to carefully pull all the pages out (separate them from the glue along the spine), punch them and comb-bind them, which works a lot better. But "I pity the fool" who wrestles with it as-is!

Love this book! Fun & addictive way to learn scales. Largely self-taught piano as a young teen, missed out on learning many of the fundamentals, including scales & fingerings. Now in my 40’s, I’m enjoying acquiring these skills. I’m also finding that many of the exercises are sneaking in other skills as well (e.g. dynamics, articulation, memory, speed, etc). The only thing I would change is to publish it with a spiral binding-but this was easily fixed at my local Kinko’s. Highly recommended!

I just starting using this book in my piano teaching studio. So far, my students (and I!) are enjoying the creative and fun lists of ways that help them learn a scale, hands separate, hands together, and in contrary motion. I'm delighted to have found this book. This book is a key element in removing the usual boring factor of learning scales.

If I was stranded on a island with a piano and 1 book this would be it.

The left and right hands are on opposing pages of the book, so in terms of field of view totally useless. This makes the book more difficult to learn from physically.You still need memory and same effort to play the keys and scales themselves.However it does help to identify the fingering more clearly than traditional score approaches. However, the book presents another constraint as it doesn't show any score notation, so useless here too.Lastly, it is way too expensive for the poor quality print and above shortcomings.

This book is excellent for pupils who find it difficult to use standard scale books, for example examination board scale books. I found the pictures of the piano keyboard in the book really helpful, but did not find the vast amount of additional exercises and timing games underneath helpful at all. In my opinion this was overkill. The space could have been better used to show arpeggios for example.As for the physical book itself, one has come apart after 9 months of use. Maybe better to have a different binder system to allow ease of page turning. Overall though this book is proving of great value to aid scale learning.

This book is fantastic if you want some guidance on scales in visual form. Can be used for all piano grades. The hands are on separate pages into left and right (though would be better if they were on the same page so you could see both hands together). There’s also sections to practice rhythm with funny word games. As a teacher this book helps make scales a little more interesting for the kids and adults alike with “levels” that can be ticked off as they go. Overall a great book but could have been refined to be even better in its edit. Definitely a new staple to my shelf though so was worth buying :)

Bought for a musical teaching friend, she’s happ with it!

Hace de la práctica de escalas, que puede llegar a ser monótona, algo dinámico, progresivo y divertido.