Music Theory 101 - A2

Music Theory 101 - A2

The Major Scale

Hi, 

As I have discussed about what are “Notes” and what are they made of, today I want to talk about music scales. In music scales there are many number of scales but let’s start with Major scale.

A typical major scale consist of 7 notes 3rd intervals apart.. “Hold on what is an interval!!”. An interval is the spacing between two notes (in short), but we will get to that later. So as I had mentioned in my previous blog there are 12 notes : 

A Major scale will contain only 7 notes, so which notes to choose and which ones to throw out! Let’s take example of a C Major Scale the simplest scale of all times.

Ok! you must be thinking all of a sudden why did I chose these notes! As I mentioned this is C Major scale so C is the 1st note. I also mentioned interval (spacing) between notes are “3”. So from table: 1 we can go to the cell number: 4 and count 3 steps (including 4), we land on 6 which is D again we do the same thing we land on 8 i.e. E. Look we already got 3 notes from 1 Major scale (C D E). 

Now if we go like this we will land on 10 i.e. F# but we see we have F. But for Major scale we follow one pattern: Whole step W Half step W W W H. This pattern differentiates between a major and a minor and a dominant scale.  

So as we cleared the air, we are on C whole step D w E h F w G w A w B h C

Now we know what is a Major scale and how the notes are being chosen for the scale. We know what pattern the scale follows and a little bit about intervals, but we will talk more about intervals in later part of this blog series. 

Next we will look into Minor scale and how they differ from Major scale.

Cheers!