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The A-flat Major Scale
The A-flat major scale has four flats, and its black keys fall into two pairs. The thumbs only play the white keys between them. Let's use those pairs as landmarks: once the hand recognizes where it is in relation to them, the thumb tends to pass under in the right place without much thought.
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A-flat Major Scale Overview
| A-flat Major Scale Overview | |
|---|---|
| Keyboard Layout |  |
| Staff Layout |  |
| Key Signature | Four flats (B♭, E♭, A♭, D♭) |
| Notes of Scale | A♭, B♭, C, D♭, E♭, F, G, A♭ |
| RH Fingering | 3 4 - 1 2 3 -1 2 3 |
| LH Fingering | 3 2 1 - 4 3 2 1 -3 |
| Relative Scale | F Minor Scale |
| Parallel Scale | G-sharp Minor Scale |
Visualize the A-flat major scale layout on the piano
The A-flat major scale has four black keys, arranged in two pairs: A-flat and B-flat at the bottom, and D-flat and E-flat in the middle. The white keys C, F, and G sit like valleys between them, and the scale starts and ends on the black A-flat.
Read the A-flat major scale on the staff
Here is the A-flat major scale written out for both hands, one octave up and down. The key signature has four flats, on B, E, A, and D.
Play the A-flat major scale with hands alone
Let’s take each hand separately first. It helps to think of the scale in terms of its core positions, the two groups of notes the hand can cover without moving: three notes played with 1-2-3 (red on the charts) and four played with 1-2-3-4 (blue).
The core positions don’t begin on the first note. In the right hand, the four-note group is F, G, A-flat, and B-flat, so the scale starts partway through it, with fingers 3 and 4 on A-flat and B-flat, then continues with C, D-flat, and E-flat as the three-note group. In the left hand, the three-note group is A-flat, B-flat, and C (3-2-1) and the four-note group D-flat, E-flat, F, and G, with the third finger returning on the top A-flat.
A useful way to work with the core positions is in three stages:
- Block: play all the notes of each core position together, moving up and down the keyboard. This lets us see each position as one shape and get used to the pattern repeating.
- Crawl: play one note at a time, but hold each note down until the whole position is under the hand, then pause before moving on. This builds the physical sense of each grouping.
- Anticipate: play legato, releasing each finger as the next one plays, while keeping the next position in mind before we arrive at it.
Play the A-flat major scale with hands together
When both hands play at once, their core positions overlap in different places, and trying to track both at the same time tends to get in the way. Sync points are more useful here: the moments where the hands share a finger, or where the fingers mirror each other.
The 3rd fingers meet on the black keys: on the starting A-flat, on E-flat, and again on the top A-flat. Once we notice that they mark the beginning, middle, and end of the scale, it becomes much easier to keep our place.
The thumbs come together on C, and fingers 1 and 2 form a mirror image on F and G, the “crab claw”. These are the white-key landing points between the pairs of black keys.
The same three stages work for sync points:
- Block: find each sync point and play it on its own, outside the scale.
- Crawl: play the scale up and down, stopping on each sync point to look at it and notice how it feels under the hands. There’s no need for legato here.
- Anticipate: play in a steady rhythm, seeing each sync point coming and landing on it with a slight accent.
Expand the A-flat major scale to more octaves
Extending the A-flat major scale is simpler than it might seem, because neither hand uses the fifth finger. The same core positions just keep repeating, in both directions, until the top or bottom of the range. The right hand finishes on finger 3 and the left hand on finger 3, exactly as they do in one octave.
Avoid common mistakes in the A-flat major scale
The two pairs of black keys look alike, so it’s easy to lose track of which pair we’re on. The white key C is a useful landmark, since it always comes right after the first pair.
The thumbs only play white keys: C and F in the right hand, C and G in the left. If a thumb lands on a black key, it passed under in the wrong place.
Other techniques related to the A-flat major piano scale:
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