Music Video Lesson: What is a Major Scale?

Hi this is LivingPianos.com and I'm Robert Estrin with a question, what is a major scale? Now I'm sure all of you or most of you probably already kind of know what it is, but for those of you who know what a major scale is you might want to stop the video right now and see if you can put it into words and you might find that you'll be stumbling a bit if you've never asked yourself this question. You kind of intuitively know what it is, but how do you answer it succinctly? Well simply put a major scale is a series of whole steps and half steps. I want to define whole steps and half steps for any of you out there who really are searching out this video because you don't know anything about what a major scale is at all. A half step simply put is any two keys next to each other that's black or white with no keys between. Notice there can be two white keys. These are all half steps. Notice I'm not doing it out here because these keys are between and if you do it over here some of these are whole steps. Two keys together with one key between is a whole step. Here's another whole step. Here's a whole step. Two keys together, one key between. Here's another whole step. So then a major scale is a series of whole steps and half steps. Major scales contain eight notes. The first and eighth notes are the same and they are spelled diatonically. What does that mean? It means it has all the letters in order without skipping or repeating any. So if you started on A for example it would be A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A. It has to have all the letters in order without skipping or repeating any. Yes spelling counts and there's a good reason for it because when you look on the music you see the notes on consecutive lines and spaces. All major scales will go from line to space to line to space to line to space or from space to line to space to line and that's essentially what a major scale is. So the question is where are the half steps? Well as I mentioned they're eight notes. They're all whole steps except between the third and fourth and seventh and eighth notes. That's why on the piano because you have some white keys that are a half step apart this forms a C major scale. One, two, three, four, half step, five, six, seven, eight and there you have your half steps. All other major scales contain either sharps or flats but never both. How can you figure out scales? You could take any note on the piano and remember that the notes are going to be in the order of the alphabet. So if you had a D scale it's going to have some form of D E F G A B C D. It must be spelled diatonically with all the letters in order but those notes don't form a major scale because the half steps are not in the right place. So you use accidentals either sharps or flats never both. It just happens to work out that way as you'll see. Let's take the D major scale. So if I count the numbers one, two and you can see that's a whole step. Two to three I've got to go up here to form a whole step.

Three and four is supposed to be a half step so there we have it. Four to five another whole step. Five to six another whole step. Six to seven we have to go up here for another whole step and seven and eight is a half step.

Of course you can hear when a major scale is correct because you know what it's supposed to sound like. So that is how you can figure out all your major scales simply by spelling them diatonically and arranging them with all whole steps except between the third and fourth and seventh and eighth notes and you can start at any key in the piano and you can spell a major scale. I'm going to do one more for you to show that it's not always quite so simple. I'm going to do a G flat major scale and watch what happens here.

We start with G flat that's one, two, three, four. We started with G flat, A flat, B flat and you attempted to say B but I already said it can't be B because you have to have all the letters in order without skipping or repeating any. So this fourth note has to be called C flat and you might think that's crazy but if you saw it in the music it would be much more logical to have all the letters on consecutive lines and spaces, all the notes. D flat, E flat, F, G flat.

So indeed the spelling makes it more logical visually because a scale will always go alternating between lines and spaces which is why a C flat makes much more sense than spelling that G flat, A flat, B flat, B natural, D flat, E flat, F, G flat. Having that C flat keeps it diatonic, makes it easier to read and it's more logical. If you enjoyed this little tutorial I can offer you more. If any of you wonder about key signatures let me know in the comments below here on LivingPianos.com and YouTube and I'll offer more of these theory primers for you. With music theory the fundamentals must be solid for you to be able to understand more advanced concepts much like mathematics.

Imagine trying to do algebra if you were rusty on your multiplication tables. Try to do multiplication if you were not really great at counting. Everything builds and everything else and so it is with music theory. If you have the fundamentals down you can get to really advanced harmonic analysis and structural analysis or compositions and it will be as easy as reading notes became for you early on because everything builds and everything else with such beautiful logic. It also makes your music easier to learn, to digest and to read. Thanks again for joining me Robert Estrin, LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Thanks to all you subscribers, ringing the bell and the thumbs up. We'll see you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/what-is-a-major-scale-2/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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