The next time someone asks you if all of your scales, ask them if they know the Hungarian minor or the double harmonic. Knowing scales is a little bit like knowing fancy knots. There are a lot of them.
Just for fun, I started to compile a list. Starting on any given pitch, there are 50, maybe 100 different scales that you could play. And like knots, pretty much nobody knows all of them.
But there are a handful that you should put under your fingers. Starting with this one. Yep.
That’s your vanilla major scale or the Ionian scale. And from it, you can derive the other six church modes. Notably, the Aeolian or natural minor.
Raise the seventh degree and you have the harmonic minor. You can come back to some of the useful modes like Dorian or Lydian, but the next scales you should investigate are the symmetrical ones, the whole tone scale and the diminished scale. There’s a nice surprise in those in that you don’t actually need to learn them in every key because they repeat themselves.
The whole tone scale has six notes. The diminished scale has eight. There are also two pentatonic scales, meaning they have five.
The minor pentatonic shown here in A minor and the major pentatonic shown here in C. Conveniently, they share all the same notes. And then finally, there’s the blue scale.
I’m a little reluctant to share it. I think it glosses over a bunch of important stuff, but what the heck? Stick it in your toolbox.
It looks like this. I’ll leave you with this thought. A scale, it’s a kind of abstraction.
You can come up with all sorts of harmonic ideas if you get adventurous about combining different scales with various chords. Just remember that the scale doesn’t make it musical. You do.
And sounding like you’re playing one is a great way to clear a room. Sure, that was someone who belongs in a Beat Kitchen class.
