Unraveled: The Blueprint of the Major Musical Scale! This article discusses the formula to build a major scale and how that formula and the scale itself apply to musical keys and the Circle of Fifths.
Do you absolutely need to know this to play guitar? Nope, you don’t. But it’s cool information and you might find it helpful on your own musical journey.
Just to be sure we’re on the same musical page, here’s what a a major scale sounds like. The mp3 below is a major scale in the key of C.
The notes of the scale are shown below on the piano keyboard. Although this is a guitar site, the piano keyboard provides some hard-to-ignore visualization advantages over the guitar fretboard.
the steps
So let’s talk about steps for a moment. The musical distance between notes in a scale can be described in whole steps and half steps. (These are also sometimes referred to as “tones” and “semitones.”)
On the piano keyboard, two adjacent keys are said to be a half step from one another. This of course counts for the black keys too.
To illustrate: C to D is a whole step because D is two piano keys away from C.
On the guitar, every fret is a half step so moving the distance of two frets from your starting fret is a whole step.
E to F is a half step and you can see the keys (and the frets) are right next to one another.
the formula
Okay, what do you do with this information? Well, the formula to create a major scale is this:
- 1st note
- Whole step to 2nd note
- Whole step to 3rd note
- Half step to 4th note
- Whole step to 5th note
- Whole step to 6th note
- Whole step to 7th note
- Half step to 8th note (which is the same note as the 1st note, just an octave higher)
This formula of whole steps and half steps is what gives the major scale its unique sound. So, whatever note you choose for the first note, in order to achieve a major scale you need to follow that formula: whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. Look what happens when we start on G and follow the formula:
The formula requires that we go from E to F# between the 6th and 7th notes of the scale. (And a happy coincidence is that B to C is a half step already without having to make further adjustments.) So based on this formula, we say that the G Major scale has one sharp, and that would be F sharp (written as F#). If you consult your possibly-handy Circle of Fifths, you’ll see that G Major is listed as having a single sharp, F#.
This is how the major scale works and why, if you’re transposing music (for example), it helps to be aware of the sharps and flats in given musical key.
