Building Scales PART 1

The Parts of a Scale

The Amount

A SCALE is made up of notes.(NOTES are the pitches we hear or read in music.)

Each SCALE will have 8 notes in it.

It starts on one NOTE and goes until it gets to that same NOTE again. It usually takes 8 notes to get there

or

We can count 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 -7 and back to 1.

We don't call the last note 8 since we've already used it in our scale. It already has a name (1), so we just call it that again. I don't change your name every time you reappear in my classroom, do I? Nope. So I don't change the number for repeated notes.

so TLDR: Scales got 8 notes total with one of 'em repeated.

The Notes

The names of the notes we read and hear are

A - B - C - D - E - F and G.

In a scale, you must make sure each letter exists. We don't repeat letters or skip letters. If, say you start on E and you only get E, F, G, because you've run out of letters, but you don't have a scale yet because you only have 3 notes ANNNND you have to get to 8....you start over at A. so you'd go E - F - G - A - B - C - D and all the way back to E. Now you've got 8 notes and all the letters were used.

So: A scale is a set of 8 notes that includes all the note names: ABDCDEFG.

MODES

Modes tell us what set of rules to build our scale with. Think of the notes and numbers like a pile of legos. You've got long and short pieces that are all different colors. To build certain things you need specific pieces. You can't build the Star Wars Death Star set with the Harry Potter Castle pieces right? (Well maybe you can but it's not gonna look the same). Anyway, when you pull out the manual it tells you the patterns and steps to follow to build the thing it wants. Modes are like your Lego manuals in music. They tell you the rules that build the sounds so that you hear them a certain way.

Ionian / Major mode

The mode (or set of rules) we're looking at in this unit is the IONIAN mode or MAJOR mode.

That means our scale uses a

Whole Whole Half Whole Whole Whole Half (WWHWWWH)

pattern to build its set of notes.

Whole Steps/ Half Steps

Here's where we pull out our measuring tape. When we measure sound we're measuring how fast a soundwave is going. We measure its frequency in Hertz ...but we don't really have a way to do that in our classroom. It's even harder for our ears to measure these sorts of changes, but with practice and drilling, we can train our ears to hear the change in space between the speed of soundwaves. Sounds really fancy right? I think it is and my ears are pretty well trained. #scienceiscool

Whole Steps and Half Steps (a part of building INTERVALS that we'll get to later) are a more visual way we can measure sound. It's easier when we look at a piano to see how we move our sound.

A Whole step is made up of 2 Semi-tones, or Two notes that have one note between them. Like a Note-Sandwich.

To create your whole step, you need to make sure there's a note in between. This can also be called a MAJOR SECOND. The whole steps are a major second. They involve two notes that are two notes away from each other.

A half step is just getting to that note in between. It's 1 note away from your note of choice. So it's just the bread and the inside of your sandwich with no top.

A half-step is also called a minor second. It's two notes, but only one step away from each other.

So to get a whole step...go two notes away from the note you're on.

To get a half-step...go one note away from the note you're on.

Check out part two for how to build a Scale!