Theory Thursday: Scales & Numbers

Scales & Numbers

You likely decided to become a musician because hearing your favorite songs causes you to uncontrollably tap your foot or wiggle some part of your body to the beat, and even if you're not ready to admit it to others, you know that the right song at the right time has even caused your eyes to well-up with tears or caused your heart to skip a beat.

So the last thing you probably want to hear is that you often have to use numbers when communicating musical ideas. Don't worry though, this focus on numbers isn't about turning an art-form that is rich with emotion into some sort of clinical and calculated science (not that there's anything wrong with science). This is about learning a universal way of putting names to the relationships that musical sounds have with one another.

In music, we use numbers in a lot of different contexts, so it can be challenging to keep things straight. To help you keep these different numeric contexts organized in your mind, I'll try to present these different contexts as clearly as possible. Just remember that a lot of concepts in music theory are a bit of a chicken & egg scenario where foundational concepts can sometimes interdepend upon each other. If you don't understand a concept at first, hang in there and try to work through it. It could be that the following concept provides the clarity you need.

As you learned in the A minor scale exercise from last week, scales repeat their pattern of tones, so the tones A through G of the A minor scale actually look more like:

A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A (etc.)

Not too bad so far, right?

One of the ways musicians make it easier to relate what they know about one minor scale to another is by using numbers. Because our A minor scale starts on the tone A (hence the name "A" minor), "A" gets the number "1". So following that, we get:

TONE: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | A |

   #: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 1 |

So to clarify: using numbers and the A minor scale, the first scale degree (i.e., the tonal center) is "A", the second is "B", third is "C", etc., up to the seventh degree being "G". This type of numbering is the foundation for a lot of future concepts, so it's very important that you start to memorize the tones and their corresponding numbers.

Review

• If you were going up the A minor scale, fill in the 5 tones in this sequence:

A B C D E F _ _ _ _ _

• If you were going down the A minor scale, fill in the 5 tones in this sequence:

C B A G F E _ _ _ _ _

• In the A minor scale, which tone is represented by the number 5?
• In the A minor scale, which number represents the tone C?
• Which number represents the tonal center of the A minor scale?
• What is the corresponding tone?