What is your practice routine for scales and arpeggios?

[spenstar]

I want to develop a more in depth practice routine for scales and arpeggios so I want to hear what all of your routines are. I'm not sure what I should do with the metronome, although I do know it's important. So far what I've come up with is doing the major and minor scales and arpeggios major and minor 7s, dim and dim7s, octaves and broken octaves. Do you think I should add major and minor 6s, jumping scales (ex. c3,c4,c3,d4,c3,e4,c3,f4...), and octaves like this: c3,c4,c4,c5,c4,c4,c3,d3,d4,d4,d5,d4,d4,d3..? What else should I add? In case you think im trying to sound like im bragging, I'm not; I'm not that great at scales and arpeggios. I just realized that if I aced all of these in every key, I could learn pieces much more quickly, so I'm willing to spend up to 1/2 hour or more on these each day.

[xdjuicebox]

I was on a practice grind I called "metronome madness" for a while.

I play all my major scales, harmonic minors, then specific melodic minors that I might need for the day. If I plan on practicing the Chopin 1st Ballade, for example, I'll play the G melodic minor scale.

I play all 24 major/minor arpeggios I have. Then it really depends. I might play ii-V-I's in major and minor in every key. Then I'll pick a technical difficulty/pattern for each hand (or one for both hands), and then run it through every key. I did all of that with metronome.

Then I'd practice my specific pieces. I don't really do that now because I need time to practice my other pieces but yeah...

So here's a sample "metronome madness" day.

1. Scales, in all major/harmonic minor (and some melodic), 90 bpm eighth notes, and 90 bpm triplets. I skip the eighth if I'm confident. If I'm super confident I go sixteenth.
2. Arpeggios in all 24 keys
3. Practice passing the thumb under, practice white key to white key, white key to black key, black key to white key (takes like 2 minutes)
4. Octaves: Play every scale, then scales, but with the root note played in between them then chromatic, of whatever other patterns I come up with
5. 15.23 tremolos (Vers la Flamme, Appassionata 3) do them in every major/minor triad. Learn what shapes are comfortable and note for when composing
6. Pick a Chopin nocturne LH part and run it through every major/minor triad as well as all of their inversions
7. Pick a Bach motif and run it through every major/minor key, or pick a key and run it through every mode
8. Today is repeated notes day. So do quads in scales, then chromatic
9. Run waltz accompaniment through every major/minor triad
10. Actual pieces

This is GRUELING, and I couldn't keep it up, but I still do it once a week at least
If I have more time, I'd do it every day but yeah...
I'm trying both extremes, extreme exercise based practice, and practice where I don't practice exercises at all. I'd say both have their merits, but it really depends on what you're going for. This style of practice is really good if you improvise/need to learn a lot of music quickly. Not playing exercises is really good if you want to play a few specific pieces with stunning precision/quality. If you want to do both...I hope you have a ton of time