The Harmonious Blacksmith: A Music Theory Exploration
The Harmonious Blacksmith: A Music Theory Exploration is a podcast dedicated to unraveling the complexities of music theory, designed for music theorists, musicians, educators, and students alike. Whether you're a seasoned composer, an aspiring music student, or a music historian, this podcast provides insightful discussions, expert interviews, and deep dives into the principles that shape Western classical and contemporary music.
Each episode explores key topics such as scales, chords, chord progressions, melody, harmony, triads, the circle of fifths, chord inversions, I, IV, V progressions, musical improvisation, bass lines, greek modes, keys, key changes, modality, and the evolution of musical structures throughout history. With an emphasis on both theoretical concepts and practical applications, The Harmonious Blacksmith bridges the gap between academic rigor and real-world music practice, making it an invaluable resource for those looking to deepen their understanding of how music works.
Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned pro, The Harmonious Blacksmith provides a rich, engaging exploration of the art and science of music theory, all while fostering a deeper appreciation for the beauty of sound and structure.
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The Harmonious Blacksmith: A Music Theory Exploration
Ep. 2: All About Scales(Part 1)
All About Scales Part 1 | Music Theory Podcast
In this episode of our Music Theory Podcast, we dive deep into the fundamental building blocks of music: scales. Whether you're a music theorist, music educator, musician, or music student, understanding scales is crucial for mastering music theory. All About Scales Part 1 covers the core principles behind major scales, minor scales, and diatonic harmony, providing clear explanations and practical examples to help you apply this essential knowledge to your musical journey.
This episode is perfect for anyone looking to strengthen their foundation in music theory fundamentals, whether you're composing, arranging, or simply exploring the theoretical side of music. We also discuss the historical development of scales, touching on how different musical traditions and historical periods have shaped modern-scale systems.
By the end of this episode, you’ll have a better understanding of how scales function within Western music and how to use them creatively in your own work. Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll explore more advanced concepts like mode theory, pentatonic scales, and the use of scales in improvisation.
Tune in, subscribe, and enhance your music theory knowledge today!
Linear Music Theory Learning For Everyone!
Welcome back. This is episode two of The Harmonious Blacksmith. Thank you so much for joining me today. I do appreciate your time. I am your host, Kevin Patrick Fleming. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. I love you all. I love you all. So let's jump right into today's main topic, which is scales and scale theory. If you're already a musician, then you fully understand that scales are an integral part of what we do on a daily basis. Really, I always tell my students, scales are like a multivitamin for your playing. They have nutrition in many different directions, and I'm going to be talking about that over the course of this episode. From now on in this podcast, when you hear this sound, that means I'm giving you a new concept or definition. So going forward, anytime you hear this sound, pay extra close attention. So let's start with a general definition of what a scale is. A scale is a series of notes in melodic succession... which just means that they're played one at a time in order. They're also in stepwise and alphabetical order, and they generally sound pleasant to our ears. Here is an example of what a scale sounds like.
UNKNOWN:...
SPEAKER_00:So as you can tell, it starts on the lowest note and then gradually makes its way up to the top by getting a little higher, a little higher each time as if it is going up. steps in a staircase and that is exactly how a scale works you start on the bottom you take one step up to the first step of the staircase then the second then the third until finally you're at the top and once you're at the top you have to come back down the exact same way you walked up Now, I'm going to get more specific about scales as we go, but I do need to go ahead and tell you why we are learning scales. Scales contain the fundamental building blocks of everything we create in music. And yes, I mean everything. So, Of course, melodies, as we talked about in episode one, are created from scales. Harmonies, as we talked about in episode one, are created from scales. Eventually, when you start stacking more and more notes, when we get to chords, those all come from scales. So even a full-blown symphony orchestra that has a hundred pieces, for example, or a hundred instruments, I should say, Everything they're playing comes from some kind of scale pattern origin. And so scales are quite literally the fundamental building blocks of everything we do in music. Think about it like this. You know, when I was a little boy... we had legos right maybe not all of you know what legos and i'm probably indefinitely dating myself right now but legos are you know little plastic blocks that you can use to build basically anything you want even though you're supposed to build what's on the box so when you have a pile of legos you have all these little pieces and you can be as creative as you want really to build whatever you want fit them together in various ways whether it's going horizontally or vertically And that's exactly how the components of scales are used to build everything in music. So now that we know the basic definition of scales and also that scales are fundamentally the building blocks of all music that we make, let me go ahead and double back to a couple of pieces of terminology in the definition that I gave you earlier. So the first one is I said that a scale is in alphabetical order. Okay, so we all know the alphabet has 26 characters, A through Z. But now let's talk about the music alphabet. The music alphabet only has seven letters and goes A through G. So it simply goes A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And then once you get to G, if you keep going up, In sound, you will be back to A again, and it just repeats and repeats and repeats. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, et cetera, et cetera. So let me take a moment to play a few scales for you while naming the lettering so you can understand the concept of the seven letters that continually wrap around. So an A scale would go like this. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, A, G, F, E, D, C, B, A. And I'm calling that an A scale because it starts with an A note at the bottom of the staircase and it ends on an A note at the top of the staircase, as you could tell. This next scale is a C scale and goes from C to C and sounds like this. C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. C, B, A, G, F, E, D, C. So in the beginning, it is important to understand this about scales. You can start on any of those seven letters. You're going to go through each of those seven letters in order and without skipping any letters. And then in the end, you're going to end on the letter that is the same as the original letter that you started on. And that is how all basic scales work in the beginning. I will note that, you know, As you know, like a lot of things in life, we learn rules and then we learn how to break them. That is definitely and absolutely the case in music theory and music creation. So eventually, these rules will get sort of pushed and pulled on and broken in a lot of different ways. But for now, just know that the standard is all music alphabet letters in order without skipping. So now that we understand the seven letters of the music alphabet and how they wrap around, how they pertain to notes of scales, the next thing to talk about is how many note choices do we have to use to create music in the Western system? Do you know the answer?
SPEAKER_01:The
SPEAKER_00:answer is 12. There are 12 notes that we can use in the Western system to create music. Now, you may want to pause to think about that. That might blow your mind because I'm sure with the amount of music you've heard in your life, you're like, that can't be right. There can't only be 12 notes. There sounds like there's a thousand. Nope, there's only 12. And once you get through those 12 notes, it just repeats in a higher register. And register is a term I'll come back to later. So there are 12 notes. So now think about this. The music alphabet has seven letters, but we have 12 notes. That doesn't really work, does it? In order to understand how this really works, I'm going to ask you to do for the first time what I'm going to ask you to do many times if you continue to follow this podcast. Look at a keyboard or a piano or just an image of one. So right now, you can always just Google an image of a piano or a keyboard. Save a picture of it on your desktop. If you're driving in your car, obviously you can't do that. Don't pull over and do that. Don't do anything unsafe. But you could always rewind this and replay it when you get home so you can take a look at that. If you have a piano in your car, abode or you have a keyboard, that's even better. You may not even play piano. You may know nothing about it. You may hate piano, but you must be willing to take a look at a piano and how it works to understand how the 12 pitches in Western music work. When I was a young and curious music major all those years at university level, the best advice my freshman music theory teacher gave me whenever we were going to take a big exam was draw a keyboard at the top of your test. That way, anything you're thinking about music theory wise, you can always double check it with the visual verification of the keyboard. So now that you have an image out, or you have a keyboard in front of you, or a piano, or even if you're just picturing what that looks like in your head, what is the most important thing that I'm talking about here with the way that the 12 notes in the Western system work? It's the contrast of the white keys and the black keys. So put quite simply, the white keys represent each of the letters of the music alphabet that we were speaking of earlier. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and back to A again. So what do the black keys represent? Think of the black keys as notes in the cracks or notes in between all the main letters in the music alphabet. And these are, of course, what we call sharps and flats, which I am going to come back to many, many times going forward. So you can start on any key on your piano or your piano image, any key you want. It doesn't matter whether it's white or black. You can count up 12 keys in a row without skipping any. In other words, you're not skipping any whites or blacks. You're going absolutely in order from one key to the next, and you will have the 12 notes in the Western system. And then the very next note will just return you back to the original letter that you started on. On a guitar, the 12 notes in a row would go like this. A, A sharp, B, C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp. And then finally, we're back to the original letter, A. I went from A all the way up to the following A, including all 12 pitches in between that you could possibly play on a guitar, for example. But you can do this on any instrument. And I'm, of course, going to double back to a piano because a piano is the only instrument where you can see which guitar notes are white and which notes are black. In other words, which notes are just the common letters and which notes are the sharps and flats. And what I just described as going through all 12 pitches in the western system in a row is what is called the chromatic scale. So you've probably heard this term before, chromatic. Just to give you a little background on it, the prefix chroma actually comes from the Latin that means color. So essentially what we're saying is that you're getting the entire color spectrum in our music system. So think of it as the entire rainbow of colors that can be included in music all in one scale called the chromatic scale. So now recall my definition of a scale where I use the terminology stepwise and alphabetical order. So we've now addressed what alphabetical order means and what the music alphabet is and does. And I've been using the metaphor of a staircase this whole time to help you understand exactly how a scale goes up and down in sound. But when I talk about stepwise order, I'm talking about a concept called half steps and whole steps. Half steps and whole steps are the two smallest movements you can make from one sound to another in music without bending or distorting the pitches. Half steps are defined as moving from one note to the immediate adjacent note in either direction, up or down. And that would sound like this. If a half step is a movement to the adjacent pitch, either up or down, then what do you think a whole step is? It's just twice that. So a whole step is defined as moving from one pitch up two pitches or down two pitches. So it's exactly twice what a half step is. Half and whole. Whole steps sound like this.
UNKNOWN:Whole steps sound like this.
SPEAKER_00:So now you know what half steps and whole steps are, the smallest units or smallest Legos that you can use in the pile to create everything else. So another term that is used sometimes for these is semitone and whole tones. So a semitone is the same as a half step and a whole tone is the same as a whole step. To summarize and put together what we've learned so far, scales contain the fundamental building blocks of everything we do to create music in the Western system. And now you know that the smallest pieces that create patterns for those scales are called whole steps and half steps. And those small units are attached together in very specific patterns and ways to create music. different types of scales. And so I'm sure you all know different names of scales. We have major, we have minor, we have pentatonic, we have harmonic minor, we have modes. If you don't know what all those are, I am on my way to getting there. But basically, we are going to learn how to express the common patterns of each of those scales using whole steps and half steps. Without further ado, let's go ahead and get to our very first scale type that we're going to talk about. Major diatonic scale. I'm going to break away from the technical jargon for a moment just to talk for a brief moment about the terms that we compare as major and minor. The most important thing to know about the difference in major and minor in the beginning is simply the way they sound, right? No matter how much we explain, don't forget that your ear is your number one asset for everything we do. So let's compare the way major and minor things sound. So at first, I'm just going to use descriptive words. So for example, major... or the majority of music, it's one way to think about it because major is the most popular setting for creating music, sounds happier, brighter. It sounds more prominent. It sounds like it has more energy. It sounds like it's more uplifting. Whereas minor tends to be more on the sad side, more on the emotionally expressive side. If you recall from episode one, I used the melody from Row, Row, Row Your Boat to kind of just explain what melodies are. But to take that a step further, Row, Row, Row Your Boat is actually a major melody. So it's a happy, more uplifting kind of melody. But let's do a little experiment. What I'm going to do is I'm going to play Row Your Boat in major, and then I'm going to allow you to hear what that would sound like in minor and I want you to just compare with your ear. Here's the happy major version of Row Your Boat. And here's the sad minor version of Row Your Boat. The first one I played is the one that we all know. The good old happy row your boat that we learn when we're kids and that we never forget. And the second one, I turned it into a minor tune. As you can tell, it takes on a little bit more of a darker or sadder sound. I don't know, maybe when you're rowing your boat, your oar broke and you fell into the water and now you're fighting for your life. Maybe that's what's being expressed when we turn Row Your Boat into minor. But in the end, the minor version is just lower, sadder, and a bit darker than the major version is. Major and minor are quite simply the two main realms of sound that we use to express human emotion and express human experience. And think about how powerful that is. Most music is actually a mixture of major and minor as just like in life, how we have a mixture of joy and sadness and everything in between. So I challenge you this week to be able to identify the difference between major and minor when you're listening to any music that you listen to, just casually. You could just have something on in your car when you're making a drive or just something in the background when you're at home. Just challenge yourself to see if you can understand if you're hearing a major sound or a minor sound or something in between. Now, how does this relate to scales that we've been talking about the whole time? Well, I'm really glad that you asked that question. Because remember and recall, everything comes from scales. So certainly, Row Your Boat, the melody comes from scales as well. And let's break that down. Both major and minor scales are constructed using a series of whole steps and half steps. And basically, once you learn the formula for each, it's uniform throughout the system. So in other words, there is one formula that will give you every single major scale in every key, and there is a different formula that will give you every single minor scale in every key. We will be talking about what a key is and key relationships and everything involving the word key in upcoming episodes. Let's start with the major scale. So a major scale is constructed with five whole steps and two half steps. It goes whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. And that's going to be something you're going to want to memorize in the near future. Recall the scale earlier that I played that I called a C scale. So that was actually, in fact, a C major scale. So now I'm going to demonstrate on guitar how these whole steps and half steps are put together. to give you the formula of a major scale. So I'm going to start on the pitch C. Do you remember the formula from earlier? Whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. Again, that'll be something you're going to want to memorize. But here we go. I'm going to start on a C. Now I'm going to go a whole step up, which is a D. Whole step up again to E. Then a half step up to F, whole step to G, whole step to A, whole step to B, and finally a half step back to C. This is a much more powerful concept than you even realize at this point, because even though I just built that one C major scale using the proper formula, that formula applies to all major scales in the system. So what I mean by all major scales, you can start on any note you want, and as long as you follow the formula, you will have a major scale starting and ending on that note. To prove that fact, I'm going to go ahead and do one more. What if we start on the note A and build a major scale from the note A? Hmm, what will that do? So here's the pitch A. A whole step up is B. A whole step up is C sharp. A half step is D. Whole step is E. Whole step is F sharp. Another whole step is G sharp. And then a half step is back to A. And voila, we have an A major scale. So now it's time to take a look at the piano again. So notice that when I did that A scale, that sharps came into the picture? Hmm, how did that happen? It happened because of the formula for the major scale. All of the notes that come out, they must follow the formula. So if you look at your piano and you start on an A note, you go up a whole step, you get a B. When you go up another whole step, you get a C sharp, which is a black key. Then a half step up to D, which is a white key. Whole step up to E, which is a white key. Whole step up to F sharp, which is a black key. Another whole step up to G sharp, which is also a black key. And then finally, a half step back up to A, where you started. So now I have another challenge for you. I challenge you to take whatever instrument you play on and take the major scale formula that we talked about. Whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. Start on any letter. any note, and go through the formula and build yourself a major scale. And so now it's time to switch over to minor scales. And remember, the comparison between major and minor in general and sound is that major is bright, uplifting, and happy sounding.
UNKNOWN:...
SPEAKER_00:as opposed to minor, which is, of course, a little lower, a little sadder, a little more emotional sounding. So, what makes the minor scale sadder or lower or darker sounding, as I've described? Well, it's the difference in the way it's constructed in the formula. with the way that you order the whole steps and half steps. Interestingly enough, both major and minor scales have the same number of whole steps and half steps. They both have five whole steps and two half steps. It's just the ordering of them that's different and makes each of the scales sound unique. The formula for a minor scale is... Whole, half, whole, whole, half, whole, whole. So let's run the same experiment that we ran on the major scale. This time I'm gonna start on an A scale and I'm gonna show you how to build a minor scale using the formula we just talked about. So this will be an A minor scale that starts and ends on the letter A. Here's the A. Then a whole step up to B, half step to C, whole step up to D, whole step up to E, half step to F, whole step up to G, and then a whole step to return back to A. So played all together sounds like this. So again, both the major scale and the minor scale both contain five whole steps and two half steps. But just by rearranging the order just slightly, we get a completely different sound. A completely different realm of sound for expression. I'm going to give you one last term here to process, which is called the octave. So everything we've been playing so far in scales, remember how we start on a letter, we go through all the letters in the music alphabet and end back up on the original letter? That eighth note at the top of the scale is called the octave because it is the eighth note of the scale. And it makes sense, right? Because the music alphabet has seven letters. So when we get to an eighth note or an eighth pitch, the music alphabet is starting over again. So you're at the top of the scale, which has the same letter as the beginning of the scale. So we can say that this higher A at the top of the scale is an octave above the lower A, which starts the scale. Or we can talk about it in opposite fashion. We could say this lower A is an octave lower than the high A at the top of the scale. So let's recap what we learned in this episode. This episode was all about scales.
UNKNOWN:Scales.
SPEAKER_00:We talked about the music alphabet and the seven letters that make up the music alphabet and how it repeats over and over. We talked about a difference between the major and minor sounds and how one is happy and the other is sad on a basic general level. We talked about half steps and whole steps and how they are the two smallest building blocks of movement of sound that we use in our formulas to create major and minor scales. We also talked about the chromatic scale, which includes all 12 pitches in our Western system. We talked about the piano and why it's visually important to understand the difference between white keys and black keys. And then finally, we defined what an octave was. Thanks again, y'all, for tuning in to the Harmonious Blacksmith. And I look forward to... Continuing this music theory exploration with all of you.