The Music Student

The major scale really does seem to be the foundation of most music, well western music. If you get it down in your head and on your instrument it’s the perfect starting place to leap to other scales, modes, musical keys, how chords are put together and I’m sure a whole bunch of other things I don’t know about. This does mean learning a little bit of theory but don’t shy away or get discouraged if it doesn’t come to you at first. Music is a language and with any other language it takes a long time to understand. Theory at the end of the day is just a bunch or words to describe a bunch or sounds, the distance between two sounds (intervals) what sounds are when played together (chords) and so on. Knowing this language makes it easier for you to visualize and understand how all these sounds work together and to communicate them simply to others you play with. Long story short, Theory = Good.

So, what is the major scale?

Well, out of the 12 available notes in an octave, it’s just a group of seven notes really. How do we find that group of notes? Start with one note, any note, there’s the start of the scale. Let’s use an example. Everyone else used C major as an example because it starts with no flats or sharps but were going to be different, we’ll start with D major. To find all our notes in the D major scale we use a little formula (Yes, I’ve explained this before but to really solidify it well go again).

Whole tone = up two pitches e.g D-E

Half tone = up one pitch e.g D-Eb

The formula to make a major scale is, find your root note then the steps from there are:

Whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half.

Starting with D whole step up to E another whole to F#, half to G, then following the formula up A, B, C# and back to D (you could think of it as 8 notes with the D the octave up as the 8^th note). Again, this formula works for any major scale, start on whatever note you want the scale of, use that formula and you have the major scale.

The starting point for other scales and modes.

Once you have the major scale under your fingers and in your head it’s the perfect place to start when you want to learn other scales. Instead of learning a whole lot of new formulas and groups of notes it may be simpler to take the major scale you know then change little things to make new scales. Here are a few examples.

The pentatonic scale.

The pentatonic scale is fantastic, a real crowd pleaser and super common in lots of music. It is made up of five notes (penta = 5, tonic = notes). To get the major pentatonic scale we just use our major scale and take away 2 notes, the 4th and the 7th degrees of the scale. There you have it, using a little quick math and our knowledge of the major scale, we’ve discovered the pentatonic scale.

Natural minor scale

Subtraction too easy for you? Fair enough, we’ll try another example, the natural minor scale also known as the Aeolian mode (modes is a big old rabbit hole we’ll try to climb down another time, for now well stick to calling it the natural minor scale) for this we need to learn two more musical words. Flatten and sharpen. To flatten (b) a note is to lower its pitch by a half step, to sharpen (#) a note is to raise the pitch by half a step. To get our natural minor scale we take the major scale and flatten the 3rd, the 6th and the 7th notes in the scale, all other notes stay the same.

Chords and chords in a key

There are 7 chords in each key that correspond to the 7 notes of the major scale, each note being the root note of each chord. All the notes in all of the chords are from the major scale. So, we have the root note of each chord being the 7 notes in the scale but how do we know what type of chords they are? Well, here’s another formula for you.

Starting from the first note of the scale and moving your way up each chord function goes as follows.

Major, Minor, Minor, Major, Major, Minor, Diminished.

So that gives us all these chords in the D major scale.

We can make these chords using the major scale too. For each chord start on your root note, skip one note up for the third, then skip another note from there to the fifth. This works for any of the chords, take B minor, the 6 chord, B as the root note (when you go past the 7th start again at the 1st as if it’s a loop) we skip C# to D (the 3^rd) then skip E to F# and we have out B minor triad.  

Songs generally stick to a key and use the chords within that key as they sound good together and can create recognizable feelings and sounds people are drawn to. Chords outside of the key are sometimes thrown in for a little extra flavor, to create tension or a different emotion to the song. There are a few common chords outside of the key that are used. Have a little play around and see if you find and hear anything you like. At the end of the day theory is not a set of rules for music, its guidelines to show you what musicians have commonly used in the past and how to communicate those ideas, learning the rules (guidelines) is a great place to start, then you learn how to break them later.  A great bass player Victor Wooten has said “We need to learn theory well enough that we can be wrong with it”.

Practice

The major scale is a fantastic place to start on your instrument and a foundation for many other aspects of music to help you get a small glimpse of the bigger picture of sounds and songs and how their put together. I would recommend just having a play around in the scale, play some chords together, learn come common chord progressions, play some notes over them from the scale, get it under your fingers and listen. What do you like the sound of? What do you not like the sound of? Even this might change over time but getting it under your fingers and starting to get an idea of the sounds and how they feel is such a fundamental of music. A lot of it may not sound like you want it to at the start (sound S#it) but that’s the point, you kind of have to be bad at the start. If you go out and try to learn Japanese, you don’t go out fluently and speak it after a few weeks, it takes time, patients and practice.