Course Syllabus
Principles of Scale Fingering
Scale fingering can be daunting: with 24 major and minor scales to worry about (plus the different forms of minor), it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the different fingerings. Never fear: Juliana Han is here! In this 5-lesson series, Han eliminates the need for rote memorization and guesswork in scale fingering, instead sharing key principles that underpin standard scale fingerings.
In Lesson 2 of the Major and Minor Scales series, “Chopin” Scales, Juliana Han starts with the seemingly exotic keys of B, F♯, and C♯. Chopin also taught these keys first: they illustrate the key principle of "clumping," where the long fingers rest easily on black keys.
In Lesson 3 of the Major and Minor Scales series, C Major Pattern Scales, Juliana Han explores the simple but powerful observation that 10 of the 24 scales use the same fingering pattern as C major. This reveals another of Han's key principles: scales are built from pairs of big groups (1234) and small groups (123) of fingers.
In Lesson 4 of the Major and Minor Scales series, F Major Scales, Juliana Han explores F major and its parallel minor, F minor. This scale gets its own lesson because it has a unique feature: its big (1234) and small (123) groups are synchronized between the hands.
In Lesson 5 of the Major and Minor Scales series, Other Black Key Scales, Juliana Han explores a trio of scales: Aâ™, Eâ™, and Bâ™ (and their parallel minors). These scales have irregular big group (1234) and small group (123) patterns: each of them starts and ends in the middle of a group.
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