Chapter 6
Chapter 6: Scales and Modes, Moods and Melodies....................................................
and Melodies
In This Chapter
Understanding major and minor scales
Freshening up on the Circle of Fifths
Getting in the right mood — and mode
Touring the different modes
Checking out the pentatonic scale
Exercising your scales and modes
S
ometimes you have more of an idea about the direction you want your
melody to move in than which notes you’re going to use to create your
melody. This is true of the melodies you may imagine building when you look
at a landscape. Even more often, probably, you have an idea of the mood you
want to convey with your music, without thinking about whether the melody
should rise, fall, or take on any specific shape. If you are writing with a sense
of directional movement — that is, up and down the staff — there are times
you can benefit from limiting yourself to notes within a scale or mode.There are twelve different pitches in the Western chromatic scale. That’s the
total number of notes that are available in any one octave. But there are
many other combinations of those notes — other scales — and if you don’t
know at least several of them frontward and backward, you should work on
that, because it can benefit your composing tremendously. The other scales
have fewer than twelve notes, boiling them down to as few as five or as many
as seven.Diatonic scales have seven different pitches in them.Pentatonic scales have five different pitches in them.