By reading the first music theory blog on the Book Piano Lessons website, we understand the definition of Melody, measures in music, and the musical alphabet on the piano. To play a melody, we need to know the variation of the scales in music to curate the heart of the song. All the existing melodies artists and writers craft to form songs are formulated from designated scales. Various scales in music are included, such as Chromatic, Diatonic, Pentatonic, Blues, etc.
The Chromatic scale is the easiest one to understand. This scale has all the 12 semi-tone notes in, depending on where you start the tonic (home, key signature or the first note of the scale). The chromatic scale is beneficial in music theory but not very practical in performing Western music. We will talk more about this scale in the next post when covering intervals.
Diatonic scales are the most common ones in Western music. They consist of seven notes with a natural tonal gravity starting from one of the twelve keys. The main two diatonic scale types are the Major and Natural Minor scales. Therefore there are 24 diatonic scales.
*note: some musicians might have a different idea of the diatonic scales by including the minor harmonic and melodic as a diatonic scale. But we want to keep it different and simple!
The Major scale is generated from a simple formula by the following measures :
Tonic (key) - Tone - Tone - Semi-tone - Tone - Tone - Tone Semi-tone
C major scale consists of seven white keys on the piano. Therefore it's the simplest major scale to start with (other major scales have a mix of black and white keys). Looking at the example below our tonic (home key) starts at C. Let's have a look at the formula above in this tonic:
Let's keep the major degrees as numbers: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ( we will return to these later).
The Natural Minor scale is slightly different from the one above. The measuring formula to populate a natural minor scale is:
Tonic (key) Tone - Tone Semi-tone - Tone - Tone - Semi-tone - Tone - Tone
Now we can use the measuring above to find the C natural minor scale:
*if you happened to forget about the musical measures go back and review the content here!
If we put the minor scale into numbers they look like this: 1 2 b3 4 5 b6 b7. This means three notes are flattened compared to the major scale. Let's have a look at the C natural minor scale on the piano.
This scale has three accidental notes ( 3, 6, and 7) which are Eb, Ab, and Bb.
Degrees in Diatonic Scale
It's efficient to address each note of the scale with a name. The seven degrees are as below:
Harmonic and Melodic Scale
The harmonic and melodic scales are two subcategories of the natural minor scale. We want to have a look at how they are formed and compare them to each other and the major scale for a better understanding. For this, we want to put them in a table with the scale numbers.
Now let's see how they sound and play on the piano:
Using the formulas in this blog, challenge yourself by populating some other scales. For the practice find the following scales and put the alphabet notes in the comments.
A minor harmonic
B major
F# minor melodic
Finally, try to play any of those scales on your piano or other instrument. Happy practising!
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