Musical scales

What it's for

To know which notes make up a scale, handy for improvising, composing or studying an instrument. The most-used scales and main modes are included.

How it works

Each scale is a sequence of intervals from the root. For example the C major scale is C-D-E-F-G-A-B.

What tells one scale from another

Not the notes themselves, but the sequence of distances between them. The major scale is tone-tone-semitone-tone-tone-tone-semitone, and that formula applied to any starting note gives the major scale of that note. Change a single distance and the character changes: the natural minor lowers the third, sixth and seventh degrees, and is the same major scale read from the sixth degree.

That is why C major and A minor contain the very same notes. All that separates them is the note the music settles on: a scale is not a list, it is a centre of gravity plus a set of distances.

The three minors, and why there is more than one

The natural minor is the one born from the major scale. It has a flaw for classical harmony, though: the seventh degree sits a whole tone below the tonic, and does not «pull» towards it. Hence the harmonic minor, which raises the seventh and restores that tension, at the price of a tone-and-a-half leap between sixth and seventh, which is awkward to sing.

The melodic minor solves that too by raising the sixth on the way up, and in classical practice returns to natural coming down. In jazz it stays raised descending as well. Three scales for a single key: proof that scales are not abstract definitions but solutions to practical problems.

Modes, which are one scale seen from seven points

Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian: they are the seven rotations of the same major scale, each with a different note as its centre. Playing the notes of C major but landing everything on D gives Dorian, which is minor but with a raised sixth and has that suspended colour typical of modal jazz and rock.

The commonest misunderstanding is studying them as seven different fingerings. The notes are always the same: what changes is which note you come to rest on, and therefore which chord sits underneath. Without a bass holding the centre, a mode cannot be heard.

The scales people actually play

The pentatonic removes the two most delicate degrees and leaves five notes that almost never clash: it is the scale of most rock, blues and folk music around the world, and that is why it is the first one taught to anyone improvising. The blues scale adds a note from outside the key, the blue note, which is exactly what gives it its colour.

Outside the West the distances can differ from our semitones: many modal traditions of the Mediterranean and Asia use intervals a piano cannot play. The scales on this page belong to the tempered system, which is one convention among many and not a universal law.

Nearby tools

The distances between two notes are in Musical intervals, the families of keys in Circle of fifths. For the chords born from a scale there is Chord notes and Chord progressions, and to practise Metronome.