"There’s a phrase often repeated both in sports and performing arts:
HOW YOU PRACTICE IS HOW YOU WILL PLAY.
I have found this to be spot on. When I play with people who’ve practiced very stiff and methodically, the way they sound to me is, well, stiff and robotic. I’ve noticed this in my own playing too.
Scales are helpful to musicians in the way that ingredients are helpful to chefs (as I mentioned recently in this forum post). Scales aren’t the meal or even the recipe, but simply the ingredients that we can use to create and understand melodies. And to be able to play them in a musical way, it’s wise to always practice them in a musical way too.
Step one when learning any scale is to memorize it, and that requires us A LOT of repetition to build up the muscle memory. But even in this “robot” phase of the process of mastering a scale, here are some ideas to consider making the exercise more musical, my “play like a human - not a robot - scales cheat sheet”
- Play all the notes as quietly as you can
- Play each note with a crescendo (soft to loud)
- Play each note with a crescendo and diminuendo (soft to loud to soft)
- Play the scale with different articulation such as “Ka,” “Ta,” or “Taht”
- Play the scale using tongue blocking
- Play each note with a tongue slap
- Play each note with a hand wah (closed to open to closed)
- Play each note with a throat vibrato / tremolo
Here’s me demoing several of the above, notice how this is training your musical skills?
Pick a scale, and try and memorize it while you try these ideas out.
for 
.
Twinkle 
I bought for my girls many years ago I have become more interested in the piano and am now learning all the major scales. I like adding the major chords and arpeggios to make it more interesting as I move around the circle of 5ths to hit all the notes 
) , my first two 
songs I have written have been based in the Blues Scale and Minor Pentonic Scale.