Section 2: Scales & Intervals

Up until this point there has been no musical organization, just examples of excerpts from music. This is where we begin to put it all together, beginning with scales and intervals.

Scales and Intervals are very important to writing music. We will start with two very important definitions and move on from there.

Scale: An ascending or descending collection of pitches proceeding by a specified scheme of intervals.

Interval: The difference, usually expressed in the number of steps, between two pitches.

In a scale, the notes, (pitches), are uniform and ascend or descend. For example, if you were playing the C major scale, the notes would be C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C ascending or C-B-A-G-G-E-D-C descending.

An interval would be the number of steps between each pitch. Go on to the next section and we will elaborate more on intervals.