Hi, i’ve been trying to learn music theory and there is a lot of things I don’t get.
Is a scale all the notes that sound good together? If so, why do some of them played together in the scame scale sound bad/dissonant? It makes no sense to me. Also, what is a key? Is it a group of notes/chords that sound good together? How do I start writing my own fingerstyle tabs?
In: 35
We have 12 notes in Western music. Think of them as colours.
Some colours just don’t work with others, so we take them out. This leaves us with seven, and these form the **key.**
A scale is simply playing up/down the key, like going up and down a ladder. Chords are made by taking alternating notes from the scale:
C D E F G A B
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
A C chord starts with a C, then miss the D, take the E, miss the F, take the G.
A Dm chord starts with a D, miss, F, miss, A and so on.
*** edited: was “We have 11 notes …”, now “We have 12 notes …”. Kudos to /u/OldGriffin
A scale is a collection of notes that form a key. A key is the set of notes that sort of work together to form a foundation for a song. Certain groupings of notes in a key work well together and have a purpose, for instance, the first note in the scale of the key is the “home base,” that makes a song sound settled. That’s why songs usually start and end with a chord that uses the first note in the scale.
Scales are formed as a collection of whole steps and half steps (which is the interval between two notes. Easiest to check by looking at a piano). No matter the starting note, a major scale will always follow the same pattern of whole and half steps: WWHWWWH. This creates the seven notes of a major scale.
Not all notes in a scale will sound good together because they serve different functions, and the same with chords. I mentioned the first note as the “home base.” The seventh note is purposely dissonant, because it’s used to “lead” back to note 1, the home base.
If you’ve got the means, you should look around for some beginner music theory classes if you’re interested. It really helps a lot, especially when you get into chords.
A scale is a set of notes, within an octave, in order. That’s it. You can pick any number of notes in between two of the same notes an octave apart and call it a scale. Some scales sound nicer than others, and have thus been standardized. The two main ones are major and minor. These are respectively:
Tonic – Major Second – Major Third – Perfect Fourth – Perfect Fifth – Major Sixth – Major Seventh – Octave
Tonic – Major Second – *Minor* Third – Perfect Fourth – Perfect Fifth – *Minor* Sixth – *Minor* Seventh – Octave
Not all scales have to have 7 notes. The three scales most used outside of these two are the Major and Minor Pentatonic, which as the name suggests, have 5 notes instead of 7, and the blues scale, which has 6 instead of 7. They are
Tonic – Major Second – Major Third – Perfect Fifth – Major Sixth – Octave
Tonic – Minor Third – Perfect Fourth – Perfect Fifth – Minor Seventh – Octave
Tonic – Minor Third – Perfect Fourth – Diminished Fifth – Perfect Fifth – Minor Seventh – Octave
By the way, we don’t count the Octave as a distinct note, we just include it for the sake of completeness. The blues scale has 6 notes, plus the octave, since the octave is just the first note of the same blues scale an octave up.
A key is just a scale (usually major or minor) with a defined Tonic. Notice how I didn’t use any letter names? That’s because the tonic can be *any* note. If you start on a C and play a major scale from there, you played a C major scale. Start on F, and you’ll play a different collection of notes called F major. More specifically, a key is the collection of *chords* that can be assembled from these keys. Play the Tonic, Major Third, and Perfect Fifth together, you’ve played a tonic major chord. Move up and play the Perfect Fourth, Major Sixth, and Octave together, you’ve played the IV chord in that key. These chords are called triads, because they have three notes, and are the main chords used in popular music since the ’40s.
I would suggest that you learn how to construct the circle of fifths. You don’t have to understand it or know its benefits. Spoiler you will learn how to identify how many sharps and flats there are in each scale but that is its least important use. Just learn to construct it. Secondly I would suggest using a keyboard to understand music theory better, anything will do, working or not.
>why do some of them played together in the same scale sound bad/dissonant?
Each note in a scale corresponds to a certain frequency of sound. Notes with frequencies that are (roughly) in small integer ratios sound nice together. For example, the frequency of G is about 3/2 the frequency of C.
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