Similarly, if you played from E to E you would get a Phrygian scale, and so on. the tones and semitones) would be arranged in a different order, so the scale would have a different quality – Dorian. You could play a C major scale, but if you tried playing a scale from D to D the intervals between the notes (ie. You have all the keys from C to C, but none of the sharps or flats. Imagine you have a keyboard without any black notes. (That’s putting it in modern jargon, because our modern idea of keys didn’t exist yet either.) In other words, the type of scale you used was dependant on the “key” you were in. Instead, the quality of a piece of music was tied to its tonality. Five line staves didn’t become standard until later.ĭuring the Medieval period, our modern idea of transposition didn’t exist. Notice the square note-heads and how some of the staves have five lines, while others have only four. That seems like a long time to us, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s fairly recent. Our modern concepts of transposition and the major/minor duality only go back around 400 years. We also know that we can transpose any scale, chord or song into any one of 12 different keys.īut musicians didn’t always think this way. While we understand that there are many different types of scales and chords, we generally identify tonality in the context of what I call the major/minor duality. These days we tend to think of songs as being in either a major key or a minor key. To understand how we came to do things this way, we need to know a little bit of history. I don’t really know why I was taught the scales in this order – thinking about it now, it seems more logical to start with the natural minor – but I know that, like me, a lot of people learned the scales in this order. Later I learnt the melodic minor, and later still, the natural minor. The first minor scale I learnt was a harmonic minor. Then, a little later, you were taught minor scales. Depending on the instrument, it might have been the C major, G major or F major scale. If you’re like me, the first scale you were taught when you began learning an instrument was a major scale.

In this post I’ll attempt to answer to both of those questions.

My students sometimes ask me, “Why are there three different types of minor scales, when there’s only one type of major scale?”Īnother question I often hear is, “Why does the melodic minor scale have different notes going up and going down?”.

E flat minor melodic scale