It only takes a few minutes to do and will serve you the rest of your life. 🙂Ĭonstruct the remaining scales: D, A, E, B, F# or Gb, Db, Ab, Eb, and Bb. Everything else is a whole step.” Say it out loud 3 more times, it’s that important. So repeat after me, out loud: “Between 3 and 4 and also 7 and 8 are half-steps. All the other notes are a whole-step apart. Between the 3rd and the 4th notes of the scale is a half-step, and between the 7th and 8th notes is also a half-step. You don’t always have to remember where you are in the “whole, whole, half” formula if you can remember this short-cut. Plus you’d have used the letter g twice, once for “g” and once for “gb” which doesn’t make sense. If you called it gb the scale would go “g, a, b, c, d, e, gb, g” and there would be no letter f. All keys have a unique combination of sharps and flats that gives that key its identity.Īnd speaking of f#, how do you know whether to call it f# or gb? Well, the short answer is that you must use all the letters for each key.

If all the notes had been exactly the same as C, it wouldn’t be in a different key at all it would still be the key of C. Note that the key of G has one note different from the key of C, namely the note f#. Whole: e to f# – Note that e to f is a half-step, but the formula calls for a whole step, so you need to go one more half-step above f which is f#. When you start on g and follow the formula above it looks like this:

If you didn’t get back there, something would have been wrong, because as you can see from the keyboard diagram, the same notes repeat over and over. Half: b to c – Note that you’re back where you started at c.

That’s the first “whole” and let’s follow the whole formula through: This means if we start on c, we must go up 2 adjacent notes to get to the next note, which is d. The formula for creating a major scale is “whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half.”

Use the following diagram to help you see that the distance between d and d# is a half-step and the distance between eb (the same note as d#) and f is a whole-step. A whole step = 2 half-steps, and a half step is simply the distance between 2 adjacent notes. The major scale is constructed using whole and half-steps. Therefore it’s essential that you understand how to construct a major scale as your first step in understanding music theory. Everything, even other scales that have nothing to do with the major scale, gets named in relationship to it. All music theory begins with the “1, 2, 3” or “do, re, mi” of a major scale.

D flat major scale answer key