Interactive piano reference to major and minor scales

This is a topic that I think is covered poorly sometimes. It's one of those things that is actually a much longer discussion. Think of it, in increasing complexity,

1. There is a major scale and a minor scale.

2. Actually, there are three minor scales: natural, melodic, and harmonic.

3. Actually, forget about those scales. Think instead more freely about tonality, modal mixtures, secondary dominants, and voice leading.

I think that anyone studying music is better off stopping at #1 or going all the way to #3. The problem with stopping at viewpoint #2 is that it's complex enough to make you really think, but not grounded enough in actual musical practice to make that thinking fruitful[1].

There are a lot of reasons why you might want a particular note to be sharp or flat. Sometimes you want a stronger resolution, like V -> i, rather than v -> i, which sounds weak. For that reason, to make better harmony, you may choose to make the 7th scale degree (B) a major 7th (B natural) instead of a minor 7th (B flat). You may also want to resolve a melodic line by half-step, which often sounds stronger, like B->C. But when you are stepping downwards, C->B, that's likely not any kind of resolution, so C->Bb is fine (it's likely not a resolution if you're in the key of C). These melodic concerns drive the "melodic" minor scale (and we drag in the 6th scale degree to avoid an augmented second interval).

The catch is... all we're really saying here is,

1. You are free to borrow notes from outside the key, for lots of reasons, and

2. There are lots of reasons in particular why you might want to borrow for the sixth and seventh scale degrees.

These deeper concepts get shoehorned into the notions of "melodic minor" and "harmonic minor". So much is lost by shoehorning these ideas into scales that I wonder why we even bother. I think it's really that people like categorizing scales and learning new names for things, which also drives people's fascination with modes, which is totally out of proportion to how much you'd actually want to use them in music. Modes and scales seem to have a particular fascination for hackers in the music scene.

I have a lot more to say on this subject, but I'm working on a blog post.

[1]: Please note that you definitely can choose to write music using one of these scales as a device, and many people do, and it's good stuff. It's just that most music that most people listen to doesn't make any sense to analyze as using particular minor scales.

Very good, I agree with every word of that, I look forward to reading it.

Of course it's a thing. C major, C natural minor, C melodic minor, C harmonic minor, the whole shebang: all the scales are there for every note, A through G and the sharps/flats. Heck. You could start somewhere in between recognized notes and make a major/minor scale based off that, if you had the right instrument. It's a ratio of frequencies, that's all.

That's what all Western music music is based on. Divide the frequency space between N Hz and 2N Hz into 12 segments, pick seven tones out of the 12, then figure out where you're actually going to put the two notes that are right next to each other, half-steps. Extend that for your entire frequency space. (Also, if you devise two neighbor-patterns that are the same when you rotate them around, you're doing modes.)

Now, whether anyone plays them in general practice is another thing. Is the harpsichord a real instrument? Obviously on paper, but is it actually a thing?

>and the rest follows easily.

For you maybe. None of music theory makes even a smidgen of sense to me. Absolutely none of it.

FTA:

>First, a reference chart of the major scales, with keys in order of 5ths, as with the circle of fifths. This illustrates that there's just one note difference (at the 7th scale degree) between scales formed from keys that are separated by a fifth.

Uh.. nothing about the circle of fifths illustrates anything. Also it's plain to hear that all those scales have different notes given that they all start on different notes, so clearly they differ by more than just the seventh degree.

I dunno, I hate music theory