12.1 The blues scale

Scales are the building blocks of music. You've almost certainly heard scales in your day to day life, even if you have no musical experience. Segments of scales are used as mobile phone ringtones, sound effects in games, on Tannoy systems, in television commercials, and so on. A scale described in musical terms is a set of notes, or to use the more correct term, pitches, arranged like a ladder in steps from low to high, like this.

Each step of the ladder may be identified by letters of the alphabet or given a name or syllable to represent it. I'm going to use a song that you may be familiar with to illustrate the concept of scale. The song Do, Re, Mi from The Sound of Music. In this song, Maria is teaching the children of the von Trapp family to sing by first teaching them about scales. To quote from the show, let's start at the very beginning.

Do, a deer, a female deer. Re, a drop of golden sun. Mi, a name I call myself. Fa, a long, long way to run. So, a needle pulling thread. La, a note to follow so. Ti, a drink with jam and bread, that would bring us back to do.

A scale may be graphically represented like this, reading up the ladder from the bottom to top. But music is normally read from left to right, like words. So perhaps it would be better to present it like this. The notes of a scale operate in a sort of family relationship with each other with do as their point of reference. If you've ever heard the phrase, in the key of, this refers to the family relationship around a specific do, such as C. Thus, in the key of C, refers to the do, re, mi sequence starting from the note C, like this.

There are many types of scale. But the type I'm talking about here, and which is represented in these graphics, is called a major scale. The main reason why blues melodies sound different from other tunes is the way the musicians alter certain notes of the scale on which a song is based. You might hear these as bends or slides, or notes that just sound out of place and that distort the more normal scale patterns. As this kind of alteration happens fairly predictably on the same degrees of the scale, for example, on mi, musicians have coined the term "blues scale" to describe the pattern of notes that a singer or instrumentalist might use. In the blues scale, several of the notes, usually, though not always mi, so, and ti, are lowered or flattened, to use the correct musical term. These are often referred to as blue notes. These blue notes do not replace the ordinary notes of the scale but are used alongside them. So sometimes you will hear the normal note, sometimes the blue note, and sometimes they may both be used and can create a sliding effect. If we represent the blues scale as a ladder and compare it with the major scale, it looks something like this. While it looks like there are more notes in the blues scale than the major scale, this is a way of representing the sound of sliding or bending notes in the melody. They are really variations of a single note, like this.

One easy way to understand scales is to try and sing them to feel where the notes lie in your voice. Singing can also help you hear the sound more closely in your head. You don't need to be a singer or to have done this before, and it doesn't matter what it sounds like. Just start on a note that feels comfortable and sing notes that are progressively higher. As you sing up the scale, you may feel the sound tightening as you go up or relaxing as you come down. Try sliding your voice between notes, both up and down. If you have a phone app that can play sound, you could also try it out on this and experiment with those sounds. The more you hear different types of scales, the easier it gets to spot them while listening to music.