In music theory, a scale is a specific series of notes played between two pitches - these can be literally any two pitches, and any notes between them, and we can base the music we create and play on the notes of these scales. Although these possible scales are theoretically limitless, there are a number of already established and named scales - or journeys between two notes - and it’s these that almost all of the music we hear is based on. You’ll probably have already heard of a few, like the Major and Minor scales.

The scales used in Western Music are almost always formed between two notes of the same pitch class / name (ie two ‘D’ notes, or two ‘F#’ notes) which are an octave apart. A practical example would be if we take any ‘C’ note on the piano, and then find the next ‘C’ up in pitch on the piano (this distance is an octave), the notes we play in a journey between these two ‘C’ notes would be called the ‘scale’.

Perhaps the most obvious possible scale is the ‘Chromatic Scale’, which simply plays every single note, black and white, between the beginning and end point of the scale, however the scales that form the foundation of most Western music, from classical to folk, rock, jazz, indie and pop are 8 note scales made from 7 distinct pitch classes. That might sound unnecessarily complicated, but in reality it’s very simple. Let’s use the notes of the C Major scale as an example:

C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C

So in this scale, there are 8 notes total, C-C, and there are 7 distinct pitch classes / names (we have two ‘C’’s, so ‘C’ only counts once as a distinct pitch class). The scale is named after the first, or ‘root’, note - the note we begin the scale from, and the quality is named after the formula we followed to get those specific notes, ie Major, Minor, Phrygian.…