Improve Your Chromatic Scale | 6 Exercises That Work

By Julianna Evans, BM, MM, PMP

In today’s blog, I’ll be writing about how to improve your chromatic scale by using 6 exercises that help build speed and endurance. It doesn’t matter what level you’re at, these exercises can help anyone advance their chromatic scale.

Let’s talk about the chromatic scale. Most of my students hate it, but I always tell them it’s something you need to learn because you’ll always see it as a requirement for auditions and also you see it a lot in music. I also try to encourage my students that the chromatic scale is easier to learn if you break it down into digestible segments.

These exercises are based on the Virginia Band and Orchestra Association’s requirements for clarinet, so where I teach in Virginia the requirement for clarinetists is to play the chromatic slurred all the way up to altissimo G and then tongued all the way down to low E. That being said, if you live in a different state in the U.S. or a different country and you’re learning these exercises, feel free to adjust the articulations to these exercises.

The first three exercises are helpful for everyone but are appropriate for beginning to intermediate players. Make sure you’re using chromatic fingerings for these exercises to help reinforce your chromatic scale. The idea is to use your metronome and start at QN=60 as your tempo. You can gradually increase the speed after you feel like you’ve mastered each exercise.  

Exercise 1:

Exercise 2:

Exercise 3:

For intermediate to advanced players, we’ll be using the same patterns except we’ll be playing 16th-note patterns instead of eight-note patterns.

Exercise 4:

Exercise 5:

Exercise 6:

Full Chromatic Scale:

I hope this blog was helpful. I’ll leave a link to a downloadable PDF on my website that includes these 6 exercises if you’re interested. I’ll also leave a link HERE to an accompanying video demonstrating all these exercises.

Ciao for now!

💖Julianna