Hi everyone. I’m a self-taught amateur pianist.
I’m trying to make sense of scales— beyond just memorizing them— and understand the patterns. I was under the impression that the circle of fifths would help understand scales and why they are what they are.
Eg:
*Why is a C scale absent of sharps, when the G scale isn’t?*
I’ve been trying to learn to read music and understand theory through a combination of watching YouTube videos and studying sheet music, but the ads on Youtube are totally intrusive, and I keep seeing explanations that seem to contradict each other because of my limited understanding of the background information. There is so much information out there and most of it seems to hinge on context that I don’t understand.
To learn and apply information, I generally need to watch people do something or look at thorough diagrams/charts; as well, I really benefit from actual conversations with other people in which they’re talking to me and I am able to ask them questions directly. I want to start taking lessons as soon as I can afford it so I can have one on one conversations with a trained teacher.
Edited for clarity!
Thanks so much♡
*Edited again: THANK YOU, really, I wish I could give all of you a million reddit awards. Seriously, so many of you have given me totally thorough answers that have still been easy to understand. I love it.*
In: 12
Let’s for a moment forget about the names of the notes and instead just consider the octave consisting of 12 semitones. We’ll number them 1 to 12. Going higher, semitone 13 is the same as 1, just an octave higher. 14=2, 15=3 and so on.
Now a major scale is a certain pattern of dividing these twelve semitones into 1- or 2-semitone steps, such that you have seven steps within the octave. Namely, the pattern 2-2-1-2-2-2-1 (looking at your piano, you may recognize this pattern in the distribution of white and black keys). Starting from semitone 1, this gives us the scale 1-3-5-6-8-10-12(-13) (the last 1-step leading us to semitone 13, but that’s just semitone 1 one octave higher).
Starting the same pattern from the fifth tone on that major scale (semitone 8) gives us the scale 8-10-12-13-15-17-19(-20), or, replacing the numbers above 12 with their equivalents one octave lower: 8-10-12-1-3-5-7(-8). So, the major scale starting from 8 uses the same semitones as that starting from level 1 – apart from substituting 6 with 7.
As there is nothing special about the major scale starting at semitone 1, this pattern holds for any major scale: If it uses a certain set of semitones, the scale starting from its fifth tone will use the same set – except for one semitone which will be swapped out for the semitone immediately above. So if we now define one of these scales as “vanilla”, without any sharps, then the scale starting from its fifth tone will have to use one sharp, the one from the fifth’s fifth will have two sharps, and so on.
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