The Major and Minor scale

This article is designed for my foundation Understanding Music Theory students but is available to anyone else who is staring out with composition or production and wants to understand how scale construction works.

By the end of this you should be able to

• Figure out a major scale on any given root
• Figure out the minor scale starting on the same root
• Understand how relative majors and minors are worked out
• Figure out all the sharp keys
• Figure out all the flat keys

In tonal music scales form the basis of melodic writing. A scale can have numerous definitions but I want to establish a couple of rules for the scales we’re going to be discussing. Before doing that let’s understand what a semitone is.

On a piano or guitar, a semitone is the smallest musical discrete pitch we can ascend or descend. On a piano they correspond to the nearest adjacent key up or down, and on a guitar they correspond to frets. Below we see a keyboard displaying two octaves (twelve semitones). All of the scales today exist within one octave, the distance between C to C, D to D, F to F or whatever.

The white notes on the keyboard represent A through to G before repeating. This image is cropped with C as the lowest note, but the principle is the same. The black notes can either be thought about as relative to the note above or below. For example the black note between C and D can be C# or Db depending on context. When we add a sharp to a note we indicate it’s the black key above that note, F# is above F, G# is above G and so on. When we add a flat we denote it’s the black key below it. Bb is below B, Ab is below A, and so on.

All of the scales we’re going to discuss today have seven different notes before cycling back to the root note, or tonic. There are scales with five notes (pentatonics), six (blues, whole tone), eight (octotonic/diminished), but today we’re just covering majors and minors.

A general rule of thumb for diatonic scales is you don’t tend to mix sharps and flats with a scale. Additionally each diatonic scale contains the notes A through G, with some either sharp or flat. For example, you wouldn’t have both D and D#, because there would be no “E”. Again outside the paradigm of majors and minors these rules can be broken.

Other than a semitone, the other interval we’re going to need is a tone. A tone is simply two semitones. All of the scales we’re going to look at today will be made from tones (T) and semitones (S). A tone up from C would be D, a tone up from D would be E and a tone up from E would be F# (this is because there’s no black key between E and F). Scales that aren’t major or minor (such as the harmonic minor or blues or pentatonic scale) can contain intervals larger than a tone. To recap those rules for the scales today:

• Scales exist between two of the same note within one octave (for e.g C to C)
• Contain seven different notes
• Are made up of tones and semitones
• Contain each letter from A to G once
• Contain sharps or flats, but not both

Constructing a Major Scale

Let’s start with the major scale. All major scales have the same pattern, starting from the root we move tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone (T T S T T T S). You can think about this numerically if you want (2 2 1 2 2 2 1) or in terms of semitones away from the root (0 2 4 5 7 9 11 12 – this includes the root and octave, 0 and 12 respectively).

Let’s start with C major. It contains all of the white keys between C and C, so C, D, E, F, G, A, B and C again. However if we didn’t know that, we could start from C, move up a tone to D, up a tone to E, up a semitone to F etc. The semitones in a major scale always fall between scale degrees 3 and 4 and 7 and 8.

Let’s try that again but starting on D. It’s important to realise that it now wont be the white keys between D and D, as the pattern will now include some black keys. For the following images I’ve not included the tone and semitone boxes on the diagrams.

This has given us sharps on the third and seventh degrees, F# and C#. If we repeat the same pattern starting on E we get this:

This produces four sharps, F#, G#, C# and D#. However not all major keys will have sharps. If we start our pattern on the next white note (F), we’ll get a flat on scale degree four:

I would encourage you to figure out G, A and B major too. You can try the flat and sharp keys (some of which will come up in this article) but there are some anomalies with things like double sharps, double flats and other non-standard enharmonics (Cb, E# etc).

Constructing a Minor Scale

There are a number of different types of minor scale, the harmonic, melodic, dorian and other modes, but we’re going to focus on the natural minor today. The natural minor scale has a flattened third, sixth and seventh degree compared to its major scale starting on the same root note.

Let’s look at the same root notes, C, D, E and F. While it is possible to memorise a T, T, S-like pattern, I’ve never done this and always remember the scale as a modification of the major scale. We now have the same notes except with Eb, Ab and Bb replacing E, A and B. Note the semitones now appear between scale degrees two and three and five and six.

D major contained two sharps, F# and C#. If we drop F# one step we get F natural, C# becomes C, B natural becomes Bb.

However, not all minor scales have just flats in them. E major contained four sharps (F#, G#, C# and D#), but flattening the G, C and D still leaves us with an F#.

Lastly here’s F minor, containing four flats.

Repeat the process for G minor, A minor and B minor. Again, sharp and flat keys are worthwhile but some are extremely uncommon to write in because of their enharmonic notes.

Figuring out Relative Minors and Majors

All major scales have a minor scale that contains the same notes called a relative minor. Minor scales also have a relative major. There are two ways we can derive a relative minor.

Relative Minors

Let’s start by looking at C major and it’s relative minor, A minor. We can see that A is the sixth degree of C major. By starting the scale from the sixth degree we can get our relative minor.

The sixth degree of D major is B. Starting D major from the sixth degree gives us B minor. For those of you who have read about modes, this is the same process, in-fact the major and minor scales can be thought of as modes, Ionian and Aeolian respectively.

How could we find out the relative minor without writing out the whole scale? Another method is start from the tonic and count down three semitones. Always start on zero for the tonic, so E, D#, D, C#.

Lastly here’s F major and D minor.

There is a relative minor for every major scale, you can work the rest out, although I’ve listed some other ones below.

Relative Majors

Let’s work backwards and start with a minor scale and then extract the relative major scale. We can use the same two methods as above inverted. Instead of counting down three semitones, we can count up three semitones. Again it’s important to start from zero as your tonic. C, Db, D, Eb.

We don’t need to do D minor because we covered it in the relative minor section, with F being the relative major. For E minor the relative major is G major.

Instead of counting up we can look at starting the scale from scale degree three. Starting F minor from scale degree three (Ab) gives us Ab major.

Figuring out all the Sharp Keys

Let’s figure out all of the sharp keys. I was taught a really easy method for working-out all of the sharp keys. Let’s start with C major. Write it out with the scale degrees numbers above each letter.

Then, start the scale from fifth degree (G) and write that out underneath. That would give us G A B C D E F G. All we need to do the is sharpen the seventh degree (F becomes F#) and that gives you a G major scale. G major is one perfect fifth above C major. Repeating this process would give us D major, which is a perfect fifth above G major.

Below is C, G, D, A, E and B major. We could continue to F# major but the seventh degree would be E# (enharmonic to F on the keyboard). There’s nothing wrong with this, but this article is designed for beginners so I’ll leave those scales out.

Figuring out all the Flat Keys

Now let’s figure out all of the flat keys. This is slightly trickier. We start the scale from the fourth degree. The fourth degree of C major is F. Write out the notes F to F (F, G, A, B, C, D, E and F) and then flatten the fourth degree.

I’ve gone as far as Db (5 flats) as Gb major contains a Cb (enharmonic to B natural). Interestingly enough Gb is enharmonic to F#.