A Player's Guide to Chords and Harmony Read Online Free PDF Page A

white keys on the keyboard, starting at C and playing each key until you arrive back at C, you'll produce a familiar-sounding scale. This is called the major scale, because the first and third notes (C and E) form the interval of a major 3rd. We'll take a more systematic look at this interval, and how it relates to other intervals, in Chapter Two.
    If you look at the arrangement of white and black keys on the keyboard (see Figure 1-10), you'll see that the major scale is made up of a pattern of whole-steps and half-steps. This pattern (two whole-steps followed by a half-step, and then three more whole-steps followed by another half-step) is what defines the major scale. Other scales can be built by combining whole-steps and half-steps in different ways. We'll look at some of the more useful alternatives in Chapter Seven.
    As long as you keep the arrangement of whole-steps and half-steps the same, you can build a major scale by starting on any note in the chromatic scale. The note on which the scale starts is called the tonic, because it provides a reference point for the tonality of the music. Another term for the same concept is key. When the major scale starts and ends on the note D, for example, we say that it's in the key of D, and that D is the tonic.

    Figure 1-10. The pattern of whole-steps and half-steps in the C major scale.
    In addition to their letter-names, the notes in the major scale have another set of names, which are also shown in Figure 1-11 - do, re, mi, fa, so, la, and ti. (In Europe, "do" is also known as "ut," and "ti" is sometimes called "si" "Sol" is an alternative for "so," but because it's followed by "la," the final "1" sometimes gets dropped.) Many young music students learn these nonsense syllables in grade school. The syllables have one advantage over the letter-names for the notes: Do, re, mi, and the other names are the same no matter what note the scale starts on.
     

KEY SIGNATURES & ACCIDENTALS
    Since the major scale is used in so much of our music, and since our tuning system so conveniently allows us to start a major scale on any note of the chromatic scale, music is often full of notes that are played on the black keys of the keyboard. Maybe you can imagine how messy it would be if, each time we encountered an A in sheet music, the sheet music had to indicate whether we were to play an A6 (the black key below A), an A# (the black key above A), or an An (the white key). To make music easier to read, this information is placed not within each measure but at the beginning of each staff.

    Figure 1-11. The notes of the major scale have nonsense names. (In Europe, "do" is often referred to as "ut " and "so" is "sol"). These names are the same no matter what key the music is in; they're shown here with a C major scale purely for convenience. "Do" always refers to the tonic, "re" to the 2nd step of the scale, and so on.

    Figure 1-12. The key signatures of the major keys. The flats or sharps placed at the beginning of the staff (or after a double bar line, as shown here) indicate which notes on the staff are to be played a half-step higher or lower than the white key that would otherwise be played. In the key of D, for instance, all of the occurrences of the note F in the staff would be played as F#, and all of the occurrences of C would be played as C#.
    In sheet music, whenever the music is in a key other than C, a key signature (a group of one or more sharps or flats) is found at the beginning of each staff. The key signature tells you which notes to raise or lower by a half-step in order to produce a major scale. It's placed at the beginning of each staff, and applies to all of the notes of that pitch class that are found anywhere in the staff, whether or not they're in the same octave as the accidental in the key signature. The basic key signatures are shown in Figure 1-12, and Figure 1-13 shows how to interpret a key signature.

    Figure 1-13. The key signature with three flats indicates