Today I'm starting what I hope will become a series in posts explaining some of the key concepts and basic rules of music theory. I hope that my readers will find it useful.
Back to basics: Scale Degrees
I want to begin this series by going through the scale degrees: their names, how to notate them and how we can build chords from them.
Here we have the simplest major scale: C major . There are seven different notes in the major scale, the eighth being the octave and therefore a repeat.
Each note in the scale can be referred to as a scale degree and each has its own name. So for C major, C is the first degree of the scale. D is the second scale degree and so on. I have listed the scale degrees and their names for the key of C ,major below.
Notation
Scale degrees can be labelled in two different ways. You can label it by its name, as shown in the table above, or it can be labelled as a symbol/number. This stops you from having to write out the name every time - which can be rather inconvenient!
To notate a scale degree, you write the number of the scale degree, such as 1 for the tonic, and then add a little "hat" above the number. Below shows a C major scale with all the scale degrees notated in this way.
Harmony: Constructing triads from scale degrees
Now that we have the scale degrees, what's next? A series of single notes can produce one melodic line, i.e. monophony. But if all we heard was a single instrument playing a melody all the time we, as the audience, would probably get bored. And that's understandable.
This brings us to the subject of harmony - the sound of two or more notes heard simultaneously.
From our C major scale, we can use the scale degrees to create triads. A triad is a three-note chord. To do this, we take a note of the scale and add the notes a third and fifth above; all the while staying in our our key signature, which in this case is C major.
This creates the following triads:
And if we label these triads:
These triads have the same names as their corresponding scale degrees, which I have outlined in the table below:
And that concludes my first music theory-related blog post! I do hope that this article is useful, please feel free to email or comment with any feedback. Until next time! :)
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