What on earth is a scale?

I have many musicians who asks me what is a scale. What are scales for? What are the different types of scales? How do you use them?

I could go on and on recalling those questions and it led me to one conclusion. These musicians are so blinded they were literally living and groping in the darkness of their so called music.

I am writing these topic to help everyone who are interested to understand scales. My objective is to somehow enlightened them with the basic concept of scales and then take the next step into creating music out these concepts.



 
Performers practice scales to develop their technique. The recurring patterns and notes in scales help performers a lot in their technical aspect of music and even in their creation of musical compositions.

Scale
- is a collection of pitches or notes in ascending or descending order.


Here is an example of a C major scale

Listen to a piano playing the C major Scale


Listen to an overdrive guitar playing the scale



Diatonic Scale

- this literally means "across the tone". A scale of mix half and whole steps and sometimes a step and a half where each individual tones plays an important role.


Scale Degrees


- each degree of a seven tone diatonic scale has its own function listed below.






















- the first degree of a scale is called the tonic and it is the tonal center of a scale, also the final resolution of a scale.
- the 2nd degree is called supertonic it is one step above the tonic.
- the 3rd degree is called the mediant and is halfway between the first degree and the fifth degree
- the 4th degree is called subdominant it is referred as the lower dominant because it is the fifth tone down from the tonic.
- the 5th degree is called the dominant because it is the second next important tone after the tonic.
- the 6th degree is called the submediant and is halfway between the tonic and lower dominant
- the 7th degree is called the subtonic and is use only to designate the 7th degree of a natural minor scale.


Major Scale

 - is a scale of 7 different pitches with whole steps seperating adjacent tones except for the third and fourth degreee and the seventh and eight degree.

We have a very simple formula in constructing a major scale.















This is how we build a major scale on C Major by using the formula above.
























Transposition

- the formula for constructing a major scale can be done on any given pitch, rewriting it on another pitch aside from the given example above is called transposition.

Here is where the major scale formula is applied and transpose on the scale of G major.












Now that you have understood how to construct a major scale, there is no stopping you now from creating any major scale. Just practice constructing and playing them. Have fun!