Scales: Major and Minor

A scale is an ordered set of notes within an octave, chosen by a fixed pattern of steps.

The twelve notes are the raw material, not the music. Play all of them and nothing stands out: every gap is the same, so no note has a claim to be the one the others are heard against. Leave five of them out in a particular order and the remaining seven acquire a hierarchy — a note that sounds like home, notes that lean towards it, notes that sit still.

Two things make a set of notes a scale. It is ordered, so it is a climb or a descent rather than a chord; and its steps follow a pattern that is kept whatever note you start from. Most scales hold between five and eight notes and repeat at the octave, so naming them once names them in every register.

The same set of notes played downwards is the same scale. What changes the scale is the pattern of steps, and after that, which note is treated as home — which is the whole difference between the two scales in the next two sections.

A major scale is a seven-note scale built from one fixed pattern of steps — whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half — applied from any starting note.

Where the two half steps fall is the whole of its character. One sits between the third note and the fourth, the other between the seventh note and the octave, and that second one is the reason a major scale sounds finished when it reaches the top: the last move is the smallest one there is, so the arrival feels inevitable.

The letters are not the scale. C major uses C D E F G A B and happens to need no sharps or flats, which is a fact about how the keyboard and the alphabet were laid out rather than about the scale. G major takes the same pattern from G and needs an F♯ at the seventh note to keep the last step a half step; that F♯ is not a decoration but the pattern holding.

A major scale has seven different notes and is written with eight, because the eighth is the first one again an octave up. Writing it that way is what makes the pattern close: seven steps out, and home.

A scale degree is the numbered position a note holds inside a scale, counted upwards from the note the scale is named after. (also called do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, movable-do solfège, where the syllables name degrees rather than fixed pitches)

The numbers travel and the letters do not. The fifth degree of C major is G, the fifth degree of E♭ major is B♭, and the two do the same job in their own scales: they are the note that pulls hardest back towards home. That is why musicians talk in numbers. "Go to the fifth" is an instruction that works in every key; "go to G" is one that works in exactly one.

Each degree also has a name, and the names are geography. The dominant is a fifth above the tonic and the subdominant a fifth below it; the mediant sits midway between the tonic and the dominant, the submediant midway between the subdominant and the octave. The leading tone is the one whose name is a description: a half step below home, leading to it.

Only a scale with a half step under its top note has a leading tone. A natural minor scale has a whole step there instead, and its seventh degree is called the subtonic — a different name because it does a different job, which is the subject of the next section.

A natural minor scale is a seven-note scale built from the step pattern whole, half, whole, whole, half, whole, whole — a major scale with its third, sixth and seventh degrees each lowered by a half step. (also called the Aeolian mode, modal naming, taken up again in Chapter 9)

Lowering the third is what makes it minor; lowering the seventh is what makes it hard to finish. A major scale closes with a half step, from the leading tone into the tonic. Natural minor has a whole step there instead, so the top of the climb arrives without that final pull, and the scale sounds open, modal, unresolved.

Harmonic minor puts the pull back. Raise the seventh degree a half step — G to G♯ in A minor — and there is a leading tone again. The price is the gap it leaves underneath: three half steps between the sixth degree and the seventh, wider than any step in a major scale, and the reason harmonic minor sounds the way it does. That step is written as an augmented second.

Melodic minor smooths the gap out by raising the sixth degree as well, so the climb to the tonic is five whole steps and two half steps — the same two sizes a major scale uses, in a different order. Traditionally it is used only going up, reverting to natural minor on the way down, because the pull towards the tonic is only needed while you are heading for it. None of which makes three separate scales: it is one minor key with choices in it, and composers raise the sixth and seventh where a line has to close and leave them alone where it does not, sometimes inside a single phrase.

A scale formula is a scale’s pattern of steps written on its own, with no note names in it, so that it can be applied from any starting note.

Building a scale from one is four moves. Choose the note you want to start on. Apply the steps in order, counting each one from the note you are on rather than from the bottom. Spell the result so that each letter name is used exactly once. Then play it, because the ear is the only check that catches a mistake the counting did not.

The spelling rule does real work. Applied from F, the pattern’s third move lands on the key between A and B, and that note can be written A♯ or B♭. It has to be B♭: the scale already contains an A, and a seven-note scale uses each of the seven letters once, so writing A♯ would leave F major with two As and no B at all. The sound would be identical and the notation unreadable.

This is why the formula is worth more than the scales it generates — twelve major scales, written in fifteen different spellings once the enharmonic keys are counted. Memorise D major and you know D major; learn the pattern and you can produce any major scale, from any note, in the time it takes to count seven steps — including the ones you never practise.

A pentatonic scale is a five-note scale: any scale that divides the octave into five steps rather than seven.

The two you will meet constantly are the two that sit inside the scales you already know, and subtraction is the quickest way to find them. Remove the fourth and seventh degrees of a major scale — the pair that lean hardest, and the pair that carry both of its half steps — and what is left is C D E G A, open, bright and almost impossible to make sound wrong. Remove the second and sixth of a natural minor and you get A C D E G. Those are the same five notes as C major pentatonic, differing only in which one is treated as home, exactly as A minor and C major do.

The blues scale is the minor pentatonic with one note added: a note a half step below the fifth degree of the key, which is the fourth of the pentatonic’s five notes. It is written as a lowered fifth and called the blue note, and it belongs to neither the major nor the minor scale of the key — which is precisely why it works, as a note from outside, passed through rather than rested on.

None of this makes pentatonic scales simplified versions of real scales. They are older than the seven-note system and appear independently in Chinese, West African, Celtic, Andean and Native American music, which suggests the ear reaches for them on its own. Deriving them by subtraction is a convenient route in for a reader who already knows the major scale, not an account of where they came from.