[MUSIC] [MUSIC] In the last Module, I talked about tonal and atonal music, scales, and keys. I said a scale consists of seven pitches that go up step-wise from a tonic pitch to the next tonic pitch, an octave higher. [MUSIC] One easy way to illustrate scales is with DO, RE, MI syllables, usually referred to with the French term solfege or the Italian word solfeggio. Using solfege syllables, a C major scale is DO, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA, TI, DO, one syllable for each letter name. Notice that I prefer to sing SO instead of SOL, even though it's very untraditional. I like to have all my syllables be two letters ending with a vowel. It's easier to sing and more consistent, but feel free to use SOL. Most of the world does. Much of the world also uses the syllable SI instead of TI. More about that, later. The major scale just sang went from C [SOUND] to C [SOUND]. There are several ways of associating Solfege syllables to pitches. All of them place the syllable DO on the note C [SOUND] for C major. In many places in the world, and even some here in the US, the note C is always DO, even for scales other than C major. As a result, D is always RE, E is always MI, and so on. When done this way, the syllable for the note B is SI and not TI. So a scale from D to D would be, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA, SI, DO, RE. E to E would be, MI, FA, SO, LA, SI, DO, RE, MI. Notice the use of the syllable SI instead of TI. This is called a fixed DO. Fixed because DO is fixed to C [SOUND] regardless of key. A 1 with a caret over it means the first note of a seven-note scale. We refer to it as the first scale degree. Going up the scale through the scale degrees takes us to the seventh scale degree, written as a 7 with a caret over it. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Here in the US, we tend to keep DO as the first note of the scale, rather than fixing it to C. In this system, RE is always the second note of the scale, MI is the third note, and so on. So a D major scale would be DO, RE, MI, FA, SO. An E major scale would be, DO, RE, MI, FA, SO. This is called moveable DO because DO moves with the key. I'll be using moveable DO from now on. Because I think it's an easy way to explain the relationships between notes in a scale. I realize that it can be confusing for those who are used to calling SI, DO, no matter what. In the seven-note scale, DO up to DO, the distance between each scale note is a step. [MUSIC] All of those are steps. There are two kinds of steps. The distance DO to RE, [SOUND], is called a whole step, as is the distance between RE and MI, [SOUND]. The scale gets its character from the next step, MI to FA, [SOUND]. This is actually half as large as the first two steps. I've tried to show it here by moving FA closer to MI. Since it's half as large as a whole step, it's called a half step. It's the smallest interval we deal with in most of the music we'll be discussing. Each whole step consists of two half steps. So here's DO, RE. In between those two notes, is this note, [SOUND], so DO, [SOUND] RE. In a major scale, there is a half step between the third and fourth scale degrees. 1, 2, 3, 4, there's the half step. Let's keep going up. FA to SO is a whole step. SO to LA is a whole step. LA to TI is a whole step. But listen, TI, DO, there's another half step. And that's our major scale, two whole steps, then a half step. Then three whole steps, then a final half step. The half steps are between MI, FA and TI, DO. Or between the scale degrees 3 and 4 and 7 and 8. 8 is the tonic, so it could also be called 1. This pattern of seven step-wise notes arranged whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step when we start with DO, is called the diatonic set. In general, the diatonic set has five whole steps and two half steps with the half steps separated by either two or three whole steps. The diatonic scale is one that uses all seven notes of the diatonic set, DO through TI, once and only once. There can only be one of each syllable or letter name, A through G. The most common diatonic scales starts and ends on DO, which is a major scale. But it can also start and end on LA, which a minor scale, also very common. Or one of the other syllables, which would be the modes. I'll discuss this in a lot more detail when I talk about minor scales and the other modes. One final point, the term half step describes a sound, regardless of notation. This half step, [SOUND], could be written D to D-sharp, D to E-flat, or even E-double-flat to E-flat, or C-double-sharp to D-sharp. Regardless of spelling, it sounds like a half step. When it's written with two adjacent note names, D to E-flat, we call it a diatonic half step. Because it could happen in a diatonic scale since the letters are different. When it's written with the same letters, like D to D-sharp, we call a chromatic half step. Because two notes with the same letter can't happen in a diatonic scale. In this lecture, you learned about the diatonic scale using movable Do solfege syllables. We saw that whole steps fall between all the syllables except Mi and Fa and Ti and Do. Which have half steps, at least when we're using movable Do. This collection of eighth notes, in which the eighth note equals the first note, has the pattern whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. And is called a diatonic set. A scale built from a diatonic set is called a diatonic scale. Major scales and minor scales are both diatonic scales. We also discussed the different kinds of half steps. Diatonic, between different letter names, and chromatic, between the same letter name. In the next lecture, we'll talk about major scales. That is, the diatonic scale that goes from Do to Do. [MUSIC]
