Scales

SCALES: Now let’s get real for a sec. When I’m playing a bunch of intervals in the c chromatic scale, it doesn’t all sound so great. I’d say there’s a 50/50 chance that the next note I blindly hit is going to be jammed with dissonance. In other words, it’s going to sound not so good. This is where diatonic scales come in handy. Now, the greater majority of the music you’ve heard and love is comprised of notes within a major or minor diatonic scale. And a diatonic scale is a combination of 7 notes that are arranged in a specific order. That order creates a unique pattern of intervals that when we hear it, we feel a particular emotion. For example, the c major scale is usually interpreted as feeling Happy and joyous. There are maths that can describe the relationships between these 7 notes and draw conclusions on why we as humans are drawn to specific collections of pitches and intervals, but for the purposes of this crash course, you don’t have to concern yourself with that. So back to the interval pattern of a major scale. That pattern is written as a combination of whole tone and half tone intervals. So moving up the keyboard from A, the interval pattern is WWHWWWH. If we play this same pattern of intervals starting from any other note of our piano roll, It will communicate the same happy and joyous feeling because the interval pattern hasn’t changed. Let’s build a major scale starting from the C note. And the reason why I’ll choose this note is because from here the major scale interval pattern will only play the white keys on the piano roll. This can be used as a helpful way of remembering your major scale formula. WWHWWWH. The 7 notes in a scale, whether they are major or minor, are referred to as the degrees of a scale and are given a number. These are: * 1st degree – The tonic * 2nd degree – The supertonic * 3rd degree – The mediant * 4th degree – The subdominant * 5th degree – The dominant * 6th degree – The submediant * 7th degree – The leading note (or leading tone) The benefit of referring to the notes in a scale as numbers or degrees instead of the names of the specific notes is that it gives you the option to easily play or program the same melody or chord progression higher or lower on the piano roll without changing the emotion of that part. This is especially useful when we start talking about chords and chord progressions in the next videos. Commonly, the degrees of a scale are represented using Roman numerals. When we start talking about chords, you’ll see that the Roman numerals are upper case to represent Major Chords and lower case to represent minor chords. But we’ll talk about this later! What I want to show you now is how we can find the interval pattern or formula to create our next scale type, the minor scale. For each major scale, you also get a natural minor scale. The two types of scales are closely related because they are comprised of the exact same pitches, but the only difference is that they are played in a different order. To find the natural minor scale, all you have to do is start the scale from the 6th degree. So if we count up from the tonic of a c major scale, we’ll find that the natural minor begins on an A. Let’s play the c major scale but start from the A to hear the difference. In contrast to the major scale sounding happy, the minor scale sounds quite melancholy. A bit sad. So just like building a major scale using a pattern of intervals, let’s count the interval pattern of a minor scale so that we can build one manually from any tonic we choose. Let’s count the whole tone and half tone steps starting from the A. The formula is: WHWWHWW Cool! Let’s try this out by building a minor scale manually starting from a random tonic. Of course, as a Click Composer, we can easily just transpose a previously programmed interval pattern up and down to adjust the tonic but selecting all of the midi notes and simply pressing up and down on our QWERTY keyboard. This is the same as transposing these scales manually. For this portion of the crash course, the Major and Minor scales are all that I’ll dive into, but some examples of the other scales types you might be interested in exploring are Pentatonic scales (comprised of 5 notes), Whole tone scales, Blues scales, and Harmonic Minor Scales. Not to mention the various modes of each scale! In a later video, I'll provide you with some tools that you can use to experiment with and integrate them into your music. That’s it for this one! In the next video, we’ll talk about how Chords can be built from the degrees of any scale, and how they can be used to create the blueprint of a song, as a progression.