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Music
Major Keys and Scales
By Catherine Schmidt-Jones
Aug 25, 2006, 11:11 PST



Major Keys and Scales

By: Catherine Schmidt-Jones

ass="para" id="p1b"> Listen to these examples. Can you hear that they do not feel "done" until the final tonic is played?



Major Scales

To find the rest of the notes in a major key, start at the tonic and go up following this pattern: whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. This will take you to the tonic one octave higher than where you began, and includes all the notes in the key in that octave.
Example 2
These major scales all follow the same pattern of whole steps and half steps. They have different sets of notes because the pattern starts on different notes.


Figure 1


Listen to these major scales.

Problem 2
For each note below, write a major scale, one octave, ascending (going up), beginning on that note. If you're not sure whether a note should be written as a flat, sharp, or natural, remember that you won't ever skip a line or space, or write two notes of the scale on the same line or space. If you need help keeping track of half steps, use a keyboard, a picture of a keyboard, a written chromatic scale, or the chromatic scale fingerings for your instrument. If you need more information about half steps and whole steps, see Half Steps and Whole Steps.
If you need staff paper for this exercise, you can print out this staff paper PDF file.
Figure 2
Scroll down for the solutions
















Solution 2
Figure 3


Notice that although they look completely different, the scales of F sharp major and G flat major (numbers 5 and 6) sound exactly the same when played, on a piano as shown here, or on any other instrument using equal temperament tuning. If this surprises you, please read more about enharmonic scales.


Figure 4


In the examples above, the sharps and flats are written next to the notes. In common notation, the sharps and flats that belong in the key will be written at the beginning of each staff, in the key signature. For more practice identifying keys and writing key signatures, please see Key Signature. For more information about how keys are related to each other, please see The Circle of Fifths.


Music in Different Keys

What difference does key make? Since the major scales all follow the same pattern, they all sound very much alike. Here is a folk tune ("The Saucy Sailor") written in D major and in F flat major.
Subfigure 5.1
Subfigure 5.2


Figure 5: The same tune looks very different written in two different major keys.
Listen to this tune in D major and in F major. The music may look quite different, but the only difference when you listen is that one sounds higher than the other. So why bother with different keys at all? Before equal temperament became the standard tuning system, major keys sounded more different from each other than they do now. Even now, there are subtle differences between the sound of a piece in one key or another, mostly because of differences in the timbre of various notes on the instruments or voices involved. But today the most common reason to choose a particular key is simply that the music is easiest to sing or play in that key.

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