Majoring on Scales

In my last post I talked about how a melody is made up of different pitches that go up and down in a certain order. I also discussed the how Western music is made up of 12 notes called the chromatic scale:

A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#

The picture at the top show the notes on the piano. Notice that the black keys have two note names. I'll explain why later.

So, that's all the colors in the musical rainbow. But, if you try to use all of those notes in a melody, it won't sound very good. Music that uses all 12 notes is called atonal, or 12-tone music, which is sort of an advanced form of jazz. It's not very nice to listen to. If you want beauty and flow in a melody, you have to select certain notes in a pattern that creates a diatonic scale. There are 14 diatonic scales, called major scales, but really, they're all the same.

Just as an example, let's start on the note "C." Since C will be the first note, the song that we are working on will be in the key of C. If it started on "A" it would be in the key of A. Since there are 14 scales, there are 14 keys. A diatonic scale is made up of seven notes, with a certain distance between each note. Those distances are:

tone
tone
semitone
tone
tone
tone
semitone

Remember that a tone is two keys on the piano and a semitone is one key. An easy way to remember this pattern is TTSTTTS. No matter what note you start on, the pattern is the same. So, starting on C, we go up a full tone to D, up another tone to E, up half a step to F, and so on until we come back to C. The C major scale is the simplest scale to play because it only uses white keys. Try it on your piano, or check out the picture on this post.

Any questions? Leave a comment! I'll explain more about scales in my next post.

Tim Heider

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