What Is the Formula for a Major Scale?

Video Transcript

MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hi. This is Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. What we're going to do now is take our half steps and whole steps that we learned previously and we're going to apply them to building first our major scale, on this case, and then we're also going to see a minor scale. So, written down here is a series of half steps and whole steps. This is actually what we call a formula just like we use in Math and this is how we build our major scale. So, we take any starting note and we move whole step, whole step, half step, whole, whole, whole and another half. And that gives us eight notes total. We're going to end up returning back at our final starting note. Let's apply that really quick so we can see what that's actually going to look like here. In this case, we're actually going to start on the note C and you'll see why in a second. It's one of the most common scales used. So, we start with the whole step, so a C plus a whole step, that's going to take us to the note D. Another whole step from D is going to take us pass D sharp and up to the note E. Next comes a half step. This is convenient because it takes us right to F. We keep going, we've got another whole step from F, that takes us up to the note G and another whole step from G takes us to A; we can also call this the same A. We're just going to cycle back around here now and we've got another whole step from A, that's our last whole step you'll see there that takes us to another B. And the very last thing we have is a half step which, from B, is going to take us back to C again. What's convenient about the C major scale is it uses all what we would call "white key" or "natural" notes; there are no accidental notes in the scale which makes it a little bit easier to get down. Every other scale is going to have accidentals in it though. And so, when it's all finished, we start C, D, E, F, G, A, B and on any scale, we want to return to the same starting place that we had, it's C. That's the formula for building a major scale.

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