AW: How should students practice clarinet scales on a daily basis, as well as on a weekly basis?

Ricardo: Clarinet scales must be practiced a great deal and often, because just about everything in Western music is based on scales and arpeggios. It only takes a few seconds to look at any piece of music to find how integral scales and arpeggios are to how melodies are constructed.

The trick to practicing clarinet scales is to have "music" in mind when practicing scales. If one does not, while it may be helpful in a technical sense, it will not be as useful as we need them to be. Practicing clarinet scales in an abstract way is about as useful as learning vocabulary randomly from the dictionary - it may be good for a spelling bee contest, but when it comes to music, we should learn the words for writing, or singing poetry through music.

The chromatic scale should be practiced daily, as it comprises of all the half steps in our instruments. It is also used in a great deal of passage work that requires speed, so familiarity with it is of great importance.

Weekly study of our "challenging" key scales will keep our fingers nimble and getting used to the finger patterns that are hard. Familiarity with the difficult finger combinations is the best way to eliminate or ease our use of those keys.