Where to Begin - The Major Scale

Hi, it's Chris with Implied Music. Where to begin? Today I want to start with something very simple. A very good place to start. I want to start with the major scale. Future me here. Before we get into this video about major scales, let's acknowledge that it's very closely related to the video that I did earlier about note naming and note spelling. Essentially the same concepts looked at from a different orientation. And you may find that one way of looking at it works better for you than the other. I say watch both. Let me know what you think. All right, let's get going. I want to start with the octave. This note is a C, and it's an important note on the keyboard. You can see it lives right here just below two black keys. There's another C there below those two black keys. In fact, those two notes, if you listen to them, sound really similar, don't they? Certainly more similar than, say, those two. This is a C down here and even lower. We say those are octaves, and octaves are a really important part of how we begin to build scales. I'll show you why. The basic idea of the octave is that it's a mathematical relationship between two notes. In fact, it's the easiest mathematical relationship. This note C is vibrating at around 262 cycles a second, a little bit less. And then this one up here is vibrating twice as fast. If I was going to play a C on a guitar, in fact, let's take a look at this on the guitar. If I was going to play a C on a guitar, I might play it right here, and then I would have to go up 12 frets to play another C up here. This is the low one, and then the high one. As it happens, the way the guitar is set up, you can do that same high C in a number of different places. Interesting, right? We're going to divide the octave into bits, and here's the way that over centuries we've decided to divide it. We divide it in 12 equal pieces, and then now I'm back to C. We call that the chromatic scale, but we're not talking about the chromatic scale. We're talking about the major scale. Now, let's take a look at what the major scale actually is in comparison. When you look at them side by side, you can see that I've omitted, you know, not played a bunch of notes. Now, as it happens in the key of C, the notes that I didn't play were all the notes on black keys, and that's because the major scale has a very specific intervallic pattern. An interval is the distance between any two notes. For instance, this is an octave, and this is a major second. There's also minor seconds. When I build a chromatic scale, I'm building a scale out of all minor seconds, but the major scale uses a really specific formula. The formula is this. Whole step, whole step, half step, and then I begin again a whole step above that, and I'm going to do that same thing. Whole step, whole step, half step. In fact, the major scale is two Adams family riffs connected together. Those things are called tetrachords. Whole step, whole step, half step, and then another whole step, whole step, half step. I've joined two tetrachords by a whole step themselves, and I get a major scale. But what about a major scale that begins on any other note? What do I do? On the guitar, you just play the shape, but on the piano, it's more irritating, and I'll show you what I mean. Because if I want to play the major scale beginning on D, whole step, whole step is an F sharp. Half step, I'm at the G, and now here, A, B, C sharp. It's a black key. I have to do it because I have to go up a whole step. D, two tetrachords, D, E, F sharp, G, A, B, C sharp, D. It does sound like the Do-Re-Mi scale, and I began on D instead of C. Because I began on D, I had to include black keys. And if I'm making a melody that's in the key of D, I'll have to use black keys. And that's just because the scale calls for it. The scale is a formula, a formula of whole and half steps. Let's do a couple more. We'll begin on a black key. Let's begin on a black key because that's a whole different kettle of fish, isn't it, on the piano. So I'm going to begin on a black key, but before I do, I'm going to tell this app that I'm using, which is called Chordy, that I'm going to be in a flat key. Right now it thinks I'm in the key of C, and it's going to want to name certain notes based on that idea, which means sometimes it'll either choose a sharp or a flat, depending on, God knows, some algorithm that's built in. So I'm going to tell it that I'm in the key of E flat, and that will sort of help it do its job naming notes. So let's spell the scale. We're going to begin on E and go E, F, G, A flat. That's the tetrachord on E flat. And then another tetrachord, B flat, C, D, E flat. That's the tetrachord on B flat. They go together, and I get the scale. In fact, if I do this, the program correctly identifies the E flat Ionian scale. There's a major scale built on every key of the keyboard, every note of your guitar, and we know that in the octave, there are 12 equal divisions, so there must be 12 major scales, right? Well, it's sort of irritating, but there are more, and I'll tell you why. There are a few places on the keyboard where we actually name or spell the notes two different ways. For instance, I might spell this scale D flat major, and the computer definitely thinks it's D flat major because I'm gutted thinking in terms of flats. I told it we were in the key of E flat, but let's make it think in the terms of sharps. Now, if I start in exactly the same place, it names that scale with exactly the same notes, and you can see on the screen they're the same. It names the same notes, exactly the same sound, C sharp major, and it's just because that's what we've decided to name things. Naming is a really important thing, and there are three important places where you can rename notes. There's the D flat and C sharp, there's the G flat and F sharp, and oddly, there's C flat. That's a real possibility. Part of this challenge, and we've talked about this before, is that you've got to have one of each letter name in your major scale. Now, if I didn't have one of each letter name in the scale, things could get weird. For instance, I could go C, D, E, E sharp, G, and that would be very, very irritating for my poor notation program or any musician who I was trying to get to read. The use of correct spellings and correct whole and half-step patterns in your major scales will make your thinking about your music and your communicating with your buddies about your music much, much easier. There's three components to music that you have to master. Kinesthetic, doing it, playing it, programming it in your computer, playing it on the guitar, playing it on the keyboard. Syntax, this is syntax, the musical vocabulary, the nuts and bolts. I know what a major scale is. I can play a major scale on B flat or B or E or D. I don't care. I can do it. The third thing is meaning or semantics. We've got to find a way to get meaning into that. When we talk about where to begin, we usually talk about syntax and kinesthetics. Can you play it? Do you know what it is? You may find that actually getting that stuff straightened out will help you enormously with semantics, with what your music means. My hope for you is that by really understanding these fundamentals, you'll be able to move forward in every area of your music. Well, I hope this has been useful. Let me know what you think. What else should I cover? I'm loving doing these basic discussions because the truth is there's all kinds of depth to the simplest things. Like and subscribe, ding the bell. You'll be notified when I do my videos, and I will see you next time.