What are scales? Types, names of scales. Gamma table

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Music has properties that are incomprehensible to the logic of an ordinary person. She is able to excite, raise morale, calm, or, conversely, bring to hysterics. Anyone who has picked up a guitar knows how bewitching the sounds from the vibration of the string are, how people begin to gravitate towards these sounds. Why buy high-quality speakers or go to live concerts, why is good sound so important to a person? Anyone who decides to understand this himself or simply picks up a musical instrument sooner or later realizes that music has its own laws, notes are not put in any way, but in accordance with musical notation, the rules for building scales. "And what are scales?" you ask.

Music educational program

A person who comes to a music school to study or decides to understand the theory himself begins to encounter such words as the scale, tonic, with questions about what scales, tone, and so on.

With the scale everything is simple, these are sounds all in a row. The tonic or tone of the scale is the main sound. Gamma is a scale from tonic to tonic. To make it clearer, look at the piano keys, you can see how white and black keys alternate. The color change repetition period lasts seven white keys, with the eighth a new period begins. Here is the first and lasta key in the scale will be the tonic. The flat, which looks like a soft sign, lowers the sound by a semitone, and the sharp, which looks like a lattice, raises it by a semitone.

It's still worth sorting out the numbers. Because in music they are pronounced in Latin. Prima - one, second - two, third - three, quart - four, remember the famous fable "Quartet", about four musicians, quint - five, sixth - six, seventh - seven, Claudius Sextus or Julius Septim were often added to Roman names, which meant the sixth and seventh respectively, the octave was eight.

Types of Scales

What are scales? This is a sequence of sounds, so if you have a musical instrument at hand, then you can play it right now. Of the main types, major and minor are distinguished. There are versions of them - harmonic and melodic. Tonal music relies on these types of scales.

The types of scales are very diverse, there is a modal scale, here it is a little more difficult to understand, since scales in modal music can contain more or less than seven sounds. There are pentatonic scales of five sounds. Particular attention should be paid to jazz scales: blues pentatonic, blues and bebop major and minor, jazz minor with a melodic variety, augmented scale, altered dominant scale.

Some people come up with their own scale names when they think they've built something new, but actually getting away from the standards of music is extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Building scales

Major scale is built counting from the firstsound like tone (W), tone (W), semitone (H), tone (W), tone (W), tone (W), semitone (H). The major scale from a note to the simplest, as it does not have sharps and flats. The minor scale is built, counting from the first sound: tone (W), semitone (H), tone (W), tone (W), semitone (H), tone (W), tone (W). Of the minor scales, the simplest scale is from the note la.

In the harmonic major the sixth sound goes down, and in the melodic major the sixth and seventh sounds go down. In a harmonic minor, on the contrary, the seventh sound rises, and in a melodic one, the sixth and seventh sounds rise.

Let's build all types of scales from C to E for better understanding, notes with sharps and flats are on black keys.

Major C scale: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do.

Harmonic major scale DO: do, re, mi, fa, s alt, la b (sixth lowered sound, black key), si, do.

Melodic major scale C: do, re, mi, fa, s alt, la b (sixth lowered sound, black key), si b (seventh lowered sound, black key), do.

Minor scale C: do, re, mi b (black key), fa, sol, la b (black key), si b (black key), do.

Minor harmonic scale DO: do, re, mi b (black key), fa, sol, la b (black key), si (raised seventh sound), do.

Minor melodic scale DO: do, re, mi b (black key), fa, sol, la (raised sixth sound), si (raised seventh sound), do.

MI major scale: mi, fa(black key), sol(black key), la, si, do(black key), re(black key), mi.

Harmonic major scale MI: mi, fa(black key), s alt(black key), la, si, do (sixth lowered sound), re sharp (black key), mi.

Melodic MI major scale: mi, fa(black key), s alt(black key), la, si, do (sixth low sound), re (seventh low sound), mi.

MI minor scale: mi, fa(black key), sol, la, si, do, re, mi.

MI minor harmonic scale: mi, fa(black key), sol, la, si, do, re(raised seventh sound, black key), mi.

MI minor melodic scale: mi, fa, sol, la, si, do(raised sixth sound), re(raised seventh sound), mi.

Scales in music

Surely you have heard the word gamma applied not only to music. It can be a range of feelings to describe emotions and events, or it can be a range of colors to create a picture. A scale of notes is for a musician, like a palette for an artist. It trains fingers to play a musical instrument, learn to navigate among the strings or keys, get used to the sound. When writing works, in the absence of a musical instrument nearby, sounds are remembered by scales. You can probably do without them, and get a good result. But why refuse a convenient and proven tool.

Any scale table is a hint for a musician, of course, knowing the rules, you can build any scale yourself, but it's easier with a cheat sheet. After all, in order to build the desired interval between notes, it is enough to look at the scale of the same tonic as the one being created.piece, and leave the necessary notes.

The art of music

The art of playing musical instruments has been developed over the years. First a music school, then a conservatory, then an academy, and scales are played everywhere. They play for a warm-up, for the flexibility of the fingers. This is the palette of music!

Math and music

Modern scientists have thoroughly approached music from the point of view of mathematics. Music obeys laws that can be calculated. It is difficult to make all the calculations in your head, but by writing the algorithm into a computer, the machine was taught to compose music. They say that it turns out no worse than the works of the classics.

But a car is a car. What are scales for her? For her, this is a set of sounds from which a sequence must be made. For a person, these are colors through which he describes emotions. Any composer imagines music, gives it a mood through amplification, fading and other techniques. Their creations have names such as "Farewell to the Motherland", "Variety Artist", w altz "Birch", "Rivals". Composers describe events and actions using the language of music.

Computers have gone far in development and can write music, but a person composes it!