Surprise! There is no secret. I’m sure you know that already.

There is only trial and error when it comes to teaching scales to young band students. Give them everything! Teach it all right this second! Be the best teacher to ever teach scales! Has that ever been you? It has definitely been me.

If you’ve been teaching longer than a minute, you know that every group, every grade, and every day is different. And, if you’re like me, you only see your students once a week for 30 minutes max.

After some trial and error over the past few years, I’ve settled on a very simple format for teaching the one-octave scale. Once students have learned at least up to note number 6, (or G, if you’re thinking in concert pitch) I use the 8-note scale to teach them the 7th and 8th notes. Bam. Easy peasy, right? Sometimes, yes. But in the case of clarinet or trumpet, I usually use their low B and C (in their respective C scale) to finish the octave.

Why? Well, as I mentioned, since I only see students once a week they don’t start to learn over the break until April or May, at the very earliest. As some instruments lend themselves to different rates of development, I use high or low notes on the scale paper so that the student can use whichever format they’ve currently developed up to. (Let’s not even get into the horn for which the B-flat concert scale sits right in the spot of either being too high or too low).

The result of my little scale project is this: the B-flat concert scale with modified high and low notes for the clarinet, trumpet, and horn – plus uses the same easy-to-understand format for all of the other band instruments.

By using this format, students get enough information to understand the purpose of the one-octave scale without being inundated with cumbersome information that clouds the simplicity of playing a scale. They are introduced to scale degrees with easy-to-read numbers, and the letter names are there to reinforce their note-reading when learning how to identify notes by the degrees. I have to say, it’s been going very well and I’m only a little upset that I didn’t do this earlier in my career!

If you like this Concert B-flat scale format, you can find all of them in my TpT store here.

Want to read more? Check out this post on Concert Reflections, or this post about using practice logs in the classroom.

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