Understanding Scales
Scales… no, not the little shiny bits on the skin of a fish 🐟, but the groupings of individual sounds in chronological order, in order to satisfy a taste, a mood, a colour…. basically, the sound of musical piece that gives it its feel. Alternatively, we could think of it as a musical ‘ladder’, one that we can climb up and down on, and every musical ladder has its own unique set of notes! This one element combines with others such as rhythm, form, and texture to support and develop the same musical piece’s identity. And in music, form is function, and vice versa. More on that in the coming discussions 😎
“Did you know? The English word for scale comes from the Italian word ‘scale’ (ska-leh), which means, quite literally, stairs! When I was doing my Masters in Italy, I used to find scales such a chore that when I did eventually get around to practising them, I made a point of announcing it to my professor, and his response, each time, would be - ‘You did some stairs at home? - followed by a guffaw. What a character. ”
So, WHY do we even bother with scales? Have you ever learnt a piece without first working on its underlying scales? What did you experience? Confusion, frustration, maybe even a sense of defeat?
I’ve been there, my Friends, and done that.
And I can tell you that stopping every bar and trying to figure out the individual notes is a complete waste of time. That said, it’s a different story if you’re stopping to get familiar with the notes, in the case of learning to read. In that case, I would highly recommend first naming the notes, putting in a fingering that makes sense, and plucking the notes out first, before dealing with the bow. That was a great tip, right there! 🧐
Learning and practising scales, before tackling a piece, even if it isn’t the first time you’ve had a go at it, does two important things:
1) It warms up our theoretical knowledge of each family member in the scale, re-acquainting us each time with the notes on our violin, and this is especially important at the beginning where everything is so fresh and new that they don’t easily stick around in our memory, and
2) It warms up our practical knowledge of how to move our fingers. This seems like a no-brainer, but believe me, your fingers are going to thank you for the purely technical warm-up before moving on to the musical material. If you are already taking lessons with me, you’ll know that checking the intonation of our individual notes is also a vital part in tuning our ears as well as our fingers, and that’s how our scales get better and better, with a little good old conscious practising!!!
And this is plenty enough reason to take some time with stretching out our hands and ears to the scale (or indeed scales!) we need. It’s a little bit of Musical Math, as I like to call it, that takes a little wrapping our heads around the first couple of times, and every other time after that is just revisiting what we’ve already learned! Easy!
So, what do we need to know to construct a scale?
1) A scale is named after its ‘home-note’, its center of gravity. 🏘️
The freedom we admire in music is often inspired by nature! All we need is to wonder at the rich diversity of everything, and enjoy the great exploration.
So an E (Mi) Major or Minor scale always finds itself gravitating to the E (Mi) note, the F (Fa) to the F (Fa), and so on. Much like how you would imagine opening the front door to a little child inside, and telling her, ‘go ahead honey, have fun!’ What’s the child going to do? Peak out a little, see a few grasses waving around in the wind, maybe spot a furry cat stalking something in the distance, and off she goes! She goes and investigates what the cat’s really up to, and one curiosity leads to another, until the sun begins to set and the little kid’s mom comes out saying it’s time to get inside and wash her hands for dinner. That’s what the ‘Home-note’ is to the little path charted by all the notes in the scale (the little girl’s footprints in the ground, if we may). This central note is also called the Root, or the Tonic. More on that later. So far, so good!
2) The ‘mood/colour/taste’ of scale can be Major, or Minor. Plainly put, Happy or Sad. 🌞⛈️
Much of the best music is a combination of many shades of emotions, just like this gorgeous snapshot of the sky…
As you might imagine, this is a very simplistic explanation for all the colours of the rainbow that we find in all music, but this is all that we really need to know in learning the shapes and dimensions in our left hand. Or, as my maestro likes to call it, the geography and geology of the terrain. Isn’t that just so poetic? I’ll admit, I thought he was a little crazy at first, but the more I made friends with my scales and arpeggios (uh-oh, another theory lesson coming up!😂) and the amazing brush - strokes of auditory colour that they give us with just a little elbow grease, I came to the same understanding - that the humble violin fingerboard, with its distance of what, 40 centimetres? I’m obviously guessing here, but the point is that the terrain of the violin fingerboard really does encompass every imaginable type of terrestrial surface. Don’t believe me? Pull out your scales, take a deep, calming breath, and give it a try!
3) everything in music comes down to the combinations of half-tones and whole tones. 🎶
If you’ve had any sort of music lesson, you’ll remember having learned pretty early on the difference between the half-tone (created by the half-step), and the whole-tone, or full-tone (which we make by taking a whole-step). On the piano, this means moving sideways to the neighbouring white or black key, whichever we find there, and counting either one small step (half-step), or coupling two small steps in a row to give us the whole-step. On the violin, on the other hand, the same principle applies, but instead of counting out pre-measured distances of the keys on the keyboard, we count out pre-measured distances by feeling the spaces underneath our fingertips. A half-step between one finger and another, on the same string, gives us two fingers sitting side-by-side, like two good friends, while the whole-step gives us a space between these fingertips. More on that at your violin lesson. 🎻
So now that you know these guiding principles, let’s jump right into scale-construction! This covers the theoretical bit of playing scales, and is by itself no mean feat, so you can pat yourself on the back after understanding it! And it really is very simple…
Major scales all follow the same layout of half- and full-tones. If we gave an identifying number to each note in any given scale in chronological order, the spaces would look like this, with neighbouring notes underlined to highlight their closeness:
1 2 34 5 6 78.
For the sake of singing, we also call these notes by their solfège names:
Do - Re - Mi - Fa - Sol - La - Si - Do.*
“* For the sake of clarity, we like to use the Fixed-Do system. This simply means that, although it is possible to sing every available scale with this order of note names, such that we are singing E, Bb and F# Majors all starting with do-re-mi-etc, it is rarely used in the real musical world, and each scale starts on its own proper note-name, such that E Major starts with Mi, Bb Major starts with Bb, and so on. This makes for some very interesting solfège practice early on in your training, but you’ll see that you quickly get used to it :)”
In a minor scale, and we’re going to be focusing on the harmonic minor** for the sake of the violin, the half-step relationships change, such that the 3rd and 6th notes (or degrees) go lower by a half-step to create a tighter space with their lower counterparts (or downstairs - neighbours 💒), while the 7th note/degree remains as close as possible to the 8th, now giving us a grand total of 3 half-steps, and even a very special interval between the 6th and 7th called the augmented 2nd. Here’s how things play out:
“** The Harmonic Minor is one of 3 minor configurations, as one may call the specific order of whole/half-steps, and happens to be the one that we prefer to focus on as violinists, because of its symmetry, and the existence of the augmented 2nd interval, which prepares our hand for eventual appearances in the music that we choose to play!”
1 23 4 56 (big gap) 78
In keeping with the Do scale that we’ve just started to get acquainted with, here’s what the note names now become:
Do - Re - Mib - Fa - Sol - Lab - Si - Do
What’s that strange italicised b that we see next to the Mi and La, you might ask, and that’s a fabulous question. These alterations, or accidentals, as they’re technically called, alter the nature of the note. As a general rule, and you may have learned this already, since note-reading precedes this section on scale-construction, all notes that exist can be altered a half-step up or down, to give the sharp (#) or flat (b) version of that same note. Now, if you have perfect hearing and think that a C# (Do#) sounds exactly like a Db (Reb) on the piano, you’re absolutely right, since they share the same key on the piano! How does this interest us at all, since they’re audibly interchangeable? Another great question. Here’s how knowing which note it really is affects us as violinists -
fingering
intonation.
Regarding fingering:
Not always, but most of the time, we keep the same fingers for the same notes in any given position on the fingerboard. Playing all the notes in our neutral first position on the A string, for example, we have the notes A, B, C#, D, E.
So,
0 - space - 1 - space - 2 - 3 - space - 4.
If we somehow needed to play altered versions of the same notes, say: A, Bb, C, D#, E, we would keep the same fingers for the B and D, and simply move them in the direction that they are needed - B down, and D up, like this -
0 - low 1 - space - low 2 - big space - high 3 - 4
Here, we have another appearance of the Augmented 2nd interval, represented by the ‘big space’. If we happened to play the C# as a Db, with a 3rd finger for example, not only would it be out of tune, we’d also quickly run out of fingers even before we got to the last note. But if we kept each finger to its own note, we’d easily avoid that problem (and any undesirable noises associated with sliding the finger up and down the string and trying to ‘wing’ it).
Regarding intonation:
You may have heard me talk about this before in class, and this is an important factor for us violinists, since we don’t have our notes conveniently pre-tuned for us, the way a pianist would. Going back to the same example, a C# most certainly does not equal a Db, simply because the sharp and flat have completely different functions, something we can consider to be the intention of the musical line. Sharps go up, and flats go down, period. What this means is that, when a sharp exists at all, it gravitates towards the next upper note, and the opposite is true to the flat (whereas it gravitates towards the next lower note).
Simply put, not being imprisoned by a pre-tuned set of notes such as on a keyboard, we have the liberty of playing the C# sharper, and the Db flatter. This results in having, in actual fact, a higher pitch with the C# (gravitating up to D), than the Db (gravitating down to the C). Fascinating, isn’t it? When would you have ever thought that a D could be lower than a C? Here’s your answer, and it’s something only string players and singers can do. 😎
So you’ve made it this far,
and if I were there with you, I’d give you a hearty pat on the back, cos’ this stuff can seem a little dense, at times! But you’ve done a FANTASTIC job of keeping up with all the twists and turns in the narrative of learning how to construct a scale, so all that’s left to do is to try it out in ernest! Pick a finger, on any string, and chart out your mystery scale by following the skeleton of your desired Major or Minor pattern, and voilà, I think all that we need to do now is to find a piece that you like, and take it all the way!!!
Confident that your scales are going well now? Here’s also another great practising resource I’ve composed and recorded just for you HERE to learn your scales with ever-growing confidence, and to have fun with it too! No spoilers now, go over to that other post called Chords to Accompany Our Scales in the articles section of the website (Thinking Out Loud), and HAVE FUN!
BRAVO for your efforts!!!
Keep up the great work, and remember, always be curious!!! See you next time at our next lesson, or write me an email if you have any questions at all :) And of course,
HAPPY PRACTISING!!!!
X.O. Cheryl
Here’s someone else’s funny (and frankly, slightly confusing) attempt at explaining scales. Obviously, take it with a pinch of salt, since the guy in the video is obviously talking to a specific audience with a specific order of learned information. That said, have fun trying to catch everything he’s saying, and we can talk about the details in person with your questions!
