Question Home

Position:Home>Performing Arts> Are the musical scales as easily constructed by knowing the intervals, or am I m


Question: Are the musical scales as easily constructed by knowing the intervals, or am I missing something!.!?
On a keyboard, the key of C is all the whitle notes, isn't it!? If you take into account the black notes, then the intervals are seen by how many black notes you skip in the key of C!. Merely starting with any note and ascending or descending the keyboard by the same intervals should produce all the keys, A, A sharp, B, B sharp, etc!., accurately!. Or going the other way, it would be A, A flat, G, G flat, F, F flat, etc!. Is this true!? Is it that simple!? What am I missing!? Aren't the frets on a guitar automatically finding the scales and sharps and flats, if you play them in a row or with the appropriate intervals by skipping the frets according to the known intervals!? Is this what genius composers do or do they just memorize what their mentors tell them!?Www@QuestionHome@Com


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:
The whole key to scales, both major and minor, and the modes, is knowing where the half-steps are!. You have two half-steps, and everything else is a whole step!. By playing with the white keys alone, you get all the modes!. By starting with your thumb on C, counting up 5 notes to G, your fourth finger playing F-sharp, you've arrived at the key of G!. By counting up from G, retaining the F-sharp you've just playing, fourth finger playing the new sharp, you've arrived at the key of D!.

It works the same way for the flat keys!. Put your pinky on C, play down the scale, the fourth finger plays the new flat, your thumb plays the name of the new key!. Keep the old flat, move your pinky to where your thumb was, and so on!.

This is called basic music theory!. To learn more, you can go to http://www!.archive!.org, click on printed materials, then search their collection of books on music!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Let me break this down step by step:
~then the intervals are seen by how many black notes you skip in the key of C~
Not quite!. The intervals are how many KEYS you skip since each one is a half step!. In the case of C, YES they are black keys but this is a backwards way of thinking of this concept!.

That being said, yes, as long as you preserve the intervals between each note of the scale, you will be reproducing that scale on your starting pitch!. So, for the major scale which goes W, W, H, W, W, W, H where 'H' is a half step (or no key in between) and 'W' is a whole step (or one key in between), you can build it on any key!. Align the above with the notes in C: C -w- D -w- E -h- F -w- G -w- A -w- B -h- C

Ok, as to the guitar, it like most modern instruments is built on the same scale as the piano!. Each fret is a half step!. To think that you can follow the same pattern on a string to achieve the same scale is correct only so much as it is using the incorrect technique to play guitar scales!. You CAN go up one string on the guitar, skipping for Whole steps, and not skipping for half steps but you would be using terrible scale technique where you should move your hand position as little as possible, finding the notes on other strings instead!.

Finally, as to the geniuses, they work in completely different ways!. They don't memorize, and they don't learn patterns!. That mundane business is for the ordinary rest of us!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Yes, you can take a certain scale and move it up and down to put it in different keys (whatever the the note is of the "root" of that scale once you move it), but it will still be the same essential scale (pentatonic/blues scale, lydian, locrian, whatever it is) as long as the intervals are preserved!. Most of the standard scales used in the west are also just variations of those same intervals, only that you choose to focus your root on a different point in the scale!. As a naive example: kinda like the way the Emin scale is the same notes as Gmaj!.

That said, you are only "missing" that western music isn't the end all be all of musical scales! Like i've eyeballed notes from india, japan, the south-pacific, north-west africa, and various places in the middle east and the intervals can be noticeably different!. That said, the general ideas usually still apply -- there's usually a fixed set of intervals with a few different focal points that can serve as root and they are sort of "rotations" of each other!.Www@QuestionHome@Com