{"id":543,"date":"2016-02-13T10:09:56","date_gmt":"2016-02-13T10:09:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.songtive.com\/?p=543"},"modified":"2016-03-10T16:12:58","modified_gmt":"2016-03-10T16:12:58","slug":"tutorial-1-note-names-placement-and-major-scale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.songtive.com\/blog\/tutorial-1-note-names-placement-and-major-scale\/","title":{"rendered":"Tutorial 1 – Note Names, Placement and Major Scale"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you are willing to be a musician and want to express your own ideas and feelings, it is really essential to learn at least some basics of music theory. Especially if you are thinking about writing your own songs and musical compositions. For many people who has never been a musician, a \u201cMusic Theory\u201d sounds scary and seems complicated at the first glance, but in a reality it isn’t, depending on the way it\u2019s presented of course. Luckily we are living in the world of technology and have so many tools, resources available, for such an easy learning of anything we want to. A Piano Companion<\/a>\u00a0is a wonderful application that will make your music learning process as simple as possible, without a touch of any musical instrument or even a computer. All you need – is just your phone or your tablet. Here at\u00a0Songtive Blog<\/a>, we will attempt to explain a \u201cMusic Theory\u201d subject and how a \u201cPiano Companion\u201d can help those of you, who have never learnt or have just a little knowledge of music theory, but really would like to give it a try and improve own musical\/composition\/songwriting skill. Shall we start our trip into the world of music?<\/p>\n

Today is our first tutorial and we are going to start from the very beginning! We will learn how the music notes are placed on the keyboard, how are they called (their names), what a major scale is and how to create it. Before we carry on, we would suggest you to download the Piano Companion<\/a> app to your device and open it. In case if you are still thinking about downloading the application and not ready yet, you can just open any other virtual keyboard. Having the keyboard in front of you will make an understanding of a topic much easier. However, when you open a \u201cPiano Companion\u201d you can see the following picture on you screen:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>Please choose a \u201cPiano\u201d button to open the keyboard.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Great! This is your piano roll and you can follow the tutorial. However, this a pure keyboard, with no note names on it. That is why we are including another picture with the same app\u2019s keyboard but already named one. Please have a look below:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>As you can see, each key has a letter and those letters are the real names of the notes.\u00a0There are only 7 letters\/notes that you need to learn in this specific order: \u00a0C-D-E-F-G-A-B. \u00a0This pattern repeats again and again throughout the entire keyboard: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C an etc. Now, if you press the keys in this order, you will actually hear what we call a C Major scale. Note \u201cC\u201d itself and a \u201cC Major scale\u201d are the starting points for beginning of learning a music theory.<\/p>\n

Take a look at the following screenshot from Scale Dictionary in\u00a0Piano Companion<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

You may have a question in your mind, why is this specific order which starts from the note \u201cC\u201d is called a \u201cC Major scale\u201d? To provide you with the answer to this question, we need to explain what the music scale is, isn\u2019t it? In simple words, a music scale is a melody that consists of 7 notes (actually 8 notes, but the 8th note is always the same as the 1st note) but always arranged in ONE SPECIFIC ORDER.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t be afraid, everything is not that complicated as it may sound! Have a look at all the white keys on the keyboard! One again, If you start on the \u201cC\u201d note and press white keys one by one, going from the left to the right until you reach a \u201cC\u201d note, this will be that SPECIFIC ORDER for a \u201cC Major scale\u201d. This order will help you to create any major scale in the future, but we will talk about that later on.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve just had a chance of playing a \u201cC Major scale\u201d by pressing the \u201cC-D-E-F-G-A-B-C\u201d keys on your keyboard. So what can you tell about the actual sound? We are pretty sure that even if you\u2019ve never heard a word – \u201cMajor Scale\u201d, by playing it just now, you could have heard that it represents a happy, uplifting sound. Doesn\u2019t it? And this is a truth! Any major scale – is all about happy sound. There is also one more interesting fact about it. A Major scale has another more specific name, rather than just a Major. It\u2019s called – \u201cIonian\u201d. If you stay tuned with our blog posts you will find out why is it called like that, but in the meantime, let\u2019s answer to the main question: \u201cHow do we create a major scale?\u201d<\/p>\n

Please have a look at your keyboard in the application and look at this picture afterwards as well:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To create our \u201cC Major scale\u201d we had to leave out all the black keys. But these keys actually represent the necessary gaps to achieve this beautiful sound. From the picture above, you can see that there is a black key between \u201cC\u201d note and a \u201cD\u201d note, the same applies to \u201cD and \u201cE\u201d, or \u201cF\u201d and \u201cG\u201d and etc.<\/p>\n

These gaps between keys are called \u201ctones\u201d and \u201csemitones\u201d. \u00a0We can also call these gaps as \u201csteps\u201d to make it easier for understanding. For example: 1 semitone is one step between each key, whereas 1 tone = 2 semitones or two steps between keys.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>Let\u2019s say we want to calculate how many steps there are from the \u201cC\u201d note to \u201cD\u201d note. Looking at the keyboard, it\u2019s clearly seen that a journey from \u201cC\u201d (white key) to \u201cD\u201d (white key) first brings us to the black key in the middle. This is the first step\/semitone. Then we arrive at the white D key, which represents another step\/semitone. All this means that there are 2 steps\/semitones between the \u201cC\u201d note and \u201cD\u201d note. If you check your keyboard carefully, you will detect that most of the notes from the \u201cC Major scale\u201d have gaps of 2 semitones. But here is only 1 step\/semitone between the \u201cE\u201d and \u201cF\u201d note, as well as between \u201cB\u201d and \u201cC\u201d because these are not separated by a black key.<\/p>\n

All you need to do, is just to calculate the gaps between each note\/letter of the scale. Once you\u2019ve done it, you will end up with these calculations: \u00a02-2-1-2-2-2-1<\/b>. THIS IS THE SPECIFIC PATTERN\/ORDER for any Major scale. You can use it to create any Major scale starting from any note that you want. So, let\u2019s practice by creating a \u201cD Major scale\u201d.<\/p>\n

As it has already been told, we have to use a sequence \u00a02-2-1-2-2-2-1<\/b> of steps\/gaps to create another major scale.\u00a0You can see the steps between semitones in the scale details:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It will be very useful if you take a piece of paper and write the 8 letter\/note progression on a piece of paper, starting from \u201cD\u201d and going up until reach \u00a0a\u201cD\u201d again. This would look like: \u00a0D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D.<\/p>\n

Great! Let\u2019s start from a \u201cD\u201d and according to the order, our next note of the scale will be 2 steps\/semitones away from the starting point. That means If we start from \u201cD\u201d and go up with 2 steps (the first step will be from D to black key D#, the 2nd step will be from D# to E), we reach our destination\u2013note E. \u00a0Relying on the 2-2-1-2-2-2-1<\/b> order, the next step you need to make consist of 2 semitones too. From the note E we need to go up with 2 steps, which makes our destination F#. Please complete all the steps until you reach your second \u201cD\u201d note of the scale. You can check yourself by playing the notes that you’ve written down. Can you hear that the scale sounds like a major? If you are not sure, you can close your piano roll for a\u00a0while, go back to the main menu of Piano Companion<\/a>\u00a0and choose \u201cReverse Scale Lookup\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Then you will see a piano roll again on the left side of the screen. Press a \u201cD\u201d note on the keyboard. A dropdown menu will appear and you will need to choose a \u201cD Major scale\u201d. Once you\u2019ve done that, you\u2019ll be able to see this picture on your screen:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0Now, you can compare what notes have you written down for the \u201cD Major scale\u201d practice exercise and what the actual notes are. But we really hope that the information that we\u2019ve provided for you today, was useful and your exercise was completed successfully.<\/p>\n

The huge benefit of knowing how to create music scales, is that once you have created a music scale as well as \u00a0selected the notes which you will be working with, you can never go wrong if you use this 7 notes of the chosen scale, in your own songs\/compositions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you are willing to be a musician and want to express your own ideas and feelings, it is really essential to learn at least some basics of music theory. Especially if you are thinking about writing your own songs and musical compositions. For many people who has never been a musician, a \u201cMusic Theory\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9,20,2,19],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-android","tag-music-theory","tag-pianocompanion","tag-tutorials"],"yoast_head":"\nTutorial 1 - Note Names, Placement and Major Scale - Songtive Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.songtive.com\/blog\/tutorial-1-note-names-placement-and-major-scale\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tutorial 1 - Note Names, Placement and Major Scale - Songtive Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"If you are willing to be a musician and want to express your own ideas and feelings, it is really essential to learn at least some basics of music theory. 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