I’m trying to understand how music is made and a lot of sources say that they make them out of scales but I still don’t understand what part of the scales change and what they change into or anything like that. Thanks.
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This could go into a long explanation so I’ll try to keep it short.
It doesn’t matter the note you’re hearing, what makes music *music* is the “distance” between notes. Basically if I play a sequence of two notes (or two notes played on top of each other) it’s the *jump* from one note to the next that makes the sounds “pretty”. And that’s what scales are, sequences of jumps from one note to the next that sound “pretty”, what’s different is the note they start with. An A major scale, a G major scale and an E major scale just start on different notes (A, G, or E) but then do a series of steps in exactly the same where from there. Since you start at different points the steps will also bring you different places, so the notes in a G scale aren’t the same notes as in a C scale, but the relationships are all there.
So when it comes to music, you don’t even need to know the core note of the scale, you can just focus on the jumps. If you name each note in the scale by the jumps you could name them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. 8 and 1 are going to sound the same so we just repeat the sequence.
Here’s the joke – notes 1, 3 and 5 sound great when played at the same time. We’ll call that a *major chord*. Notes 1, 4, 5, 6 sound great when played *in sequence*. We’ll call this a “progression”.
The joke is that 99% of popular music is the progression of notes 1, 4, 5, and 6, when played using the notes 1,3,5 major chords. The “key” of the scales might change to suit the singer’s voice, but that progression is every where once you learn to recognize it. [Watch this!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I)
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