Hey Friend,
Okay, so you now know what the major and minor scales look like. The pattern of intervals is the template that lines the proper notes up so that those notes sound like a scale.
Perfect.
But scales do not a melody make.
Scales are a reference, a tool to chart out the pitches belonging in a grouping of notes. They’re great for practicing your technique and for learning the fingerboard.
They can even be musical - think “ Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music. But they’re usually pretty boring on their own. That’s why melodies typically have notes bouncing all over the place and spanning ranges above and below the primary group.
These ranges are called octaves. Octaves repeat themselves infinitely over the sound spectrum. They occur at sonic levels from 0 Hertz (Hz) to virtually unknown numbers.
We can only physically hear sound waves between around 20 Hz and 20000 Hz (20 kilohertz). Anything below 20 comes out sounding like a thump, and sounds above 5000 hertz start to get real annoying, since the normal range of most things we hear is between 2 Khz and 5 Khz,
What an octave gives us is a point of reference within a scale. You have a start and a finish, at which point the scale starts over, just at a higher pitch.
But despite the massive sonic range of possibilities, when it comes to creating a song, it is still down to just seven notes, the notes that make up the scale.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (8)
C D E F G A B (C)
The eighth note “C” is the octave. It’s the new beginning of the scale at a higher pitch. That’s why I have it in parentheses - to signal that it is a new beginning.
From a sound wave perspective, the octave is double in hertz what the starting point was.
For example, if you were looking at the very center white key on a piano. That note is C. Its frequency is 261.63 Hz.
If you move up in pitch to the right on the keyboard to the next instance of C, that frequency is now 523.25 Hz. See, doubled.
Oops, sorry, I was letting the inner geek get the better part of me. I’ll stop.
Because the physics doesn’t matter in the end. What matters is the basic seven notes of the key as they’re used within a melody.
Music isn’t created in a sterile lab, and while understanding how sound works is fascinating (and important if you decide to go into recording music), it doesn’t help you to create pleasing melodies.
We’ll talk more about that tomorrow.
Peace~
Dave
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