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Scales in other keys

So now you know about C major and A minor. You also know that there are other keys, like E major, or D minor, etc. A key is a ground tone and a scale. If you want to know the tones in e.g. D major, you know the ground tone is the D, the scale is the scale of D major. But what notes are in the scale of D major?

In other words: how do you put together scales? It may look more complicated than it is. There is an easy way.

On page three of this course you learned the folowing two rules about scales:

1. Each note in a scale gets its own letter. Letters only ever appear once;
2. The distance between two notes is a semitone or a whole tone.

We have looked at the distances between tones in a major and minor scale. We can add that to the rules:

1. Each note in a scale gets its own letter. Letters only ever appear once;
2. The distance between two notes is a semitone or a whole tone;
3. In a major scale the distance between the tones is W-W-H-W-W-W-H;
4. In a minor scale the distance between the tones is W-H-W-W-H-W-W.

The approach to write down a scale is as followed.

1. You determine the ground tone.
Let's take the scale of G major as example. The ground tone is "G"

2. You write down all the letters from A to G, starting at the ground tone.
Remember: after the G you go to A. For G major this is what we write down:

3. Write down the distances between the tones.
Note: in general the distance between letters is one (Whole), except between B and C, and between E and F (Half). This is what you get:

4. Compare the distances with the type of scale you want.
We want a major scale, so the distances should be W-W-H-W-W-W-H. There are two "errors", at the end:

5. Fix the errors by using sharps (#: make the tone a semitone higher) or flats (b: make the tone a semitine lower).
Note: you can not change the name of the letters. Every letter can occur only once.
In the example, the distance between E and F is a semitone, while it should be a whole tone.
The distance between F and G is a whole tone, while it should be a semitone.
We can fix it by adding a sharp to the F:

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