Hi! This is Darren with Strumpatterns.com and 
welcome to another video in the beginners music
theory series. In this lesson we're going to
talk about: What are scales?
In the previous video we looked at What
is a note? And what is a pitch? And the
main thing to have taken away from that
video is that there's an infinite range
of sound possibility out there. However,
in music we limit ourselves to a very
narrow number of pitches. So, within a
certain range we will only have twelve
possible notes. One last thing before
we move on- and that is if you actually
asked musicians "what's the difference
between a note and a pitch?" and what you
actually find is that the two words are
used completely interchangeably. In the
first lesson we talked about using
different scales to accompany either a
storm or sunny day. But, we didn't
actually talk about what a scale is. So,
let's fix that. In this video we're only
going to look at what scales are and how
they are used in general. However, in
future videos will look at the details
of individual scales. Now that we know
what a note is, we can talk about what a
scale is. A scale is when we limit
ourselves to a certain collection of
possible notes. So, a song often won't use
all the possible notes and it may
repeat a note several times as well skip
around from one note to another.
A scale, however, is the collection of notes
where each different note is represented
once and only once and then arranged in
order from lowest sounding note to the
highest. So, mostly your scales are going
to be made up of seven or five different
of the twelve possible notes. However,
other scales do exist. There are six and
eight and nine note, and so on,
scales. But they're certainly less
common. So, I've already talked about
music as language and I love that
metaphor. Another metaphor that I love
for music is music as a visual art.
Just like an artist will select a
collection of colors and only paint
using that collection of colors,
musicians can also do the same thing by
choosing specific scales. So the choice
of color palette that a painter uses
will have an immense effect on the
visual impact of their painting. Here's
an example of a monochromatic painting,
meaning one color, by Picasso. It's called
"The Old Guitarist" and notice how
everything in this painting is pretty
much blue with the exception of some of
the muted browns in the guitar and on the
floor. This is almost completely blues.
That lack of other colors really
dominates this painting and really
contributes to its impact in the lack of
life, the lack of vibrance, that we feel when
viewing this. And that was very intentional. 
That's what he wanted, I believe, the viewer to
feel- is that coldness and that lack
of life. If he added more colors to it, it
would become more vibrant, more alive, and
that would kill the effect of this
particular painting. In contrast is this
image here. It, too, is monochromatic. It's
only reds and yellows and it has the
opposite effect. It's very vibrant, very
full of life. So even though they're both
monochromatic, they have very different
impacts on us because of which color
they have chosen to use. So moving along,
here's an example that has more colors
present. Yes you have multiple reds
greens blues purples and things like
that, but they're still the same kind of
brightness factor to them. You don't have
a subdued drab green, drab yellow,
and then a vibrant red and a vibrant
purple. They all have a similar
saturation or brightness to them. So that is
a unifying feature here and even though
there are multiple colors here we can
still distinguish them well from each
other.
Here in this picture, we have just
absolute mess of colors. This is an
example I created and to my eye this is
hideous.
I think part of the reason why this
is so ugly is because it has so many
colors present that they fight each
other and each color loses meaning
because of all the surrounding, competing,
colors and we don't know what to look
at... What's more important... What's less
important? So, as artists will choose very
carefully the selection of colors they
want in order to have a specific impact
on their viewer- so musicians want to
have an impact on their listeners. So too,
they will limit themselves by selecting
specific scales for specific tasks.
Now we'll listen to some different scales.
the first we're going to listen to is one that
should be familiar to most of us... and
that's the major scale.  [music] and that was the
major scale. You might have noticed
it's a fairly bright sounding scale. Some
people call it happy, and that might be a
decent way of describing it, but I tend
to stay away from emotions like happy
and sad. Even though they often will
make the listener feel those ways,
sometimes you can use a major scale in a
way that will still make someone feel
sad. Or, you can make a minor scale not
sound quite so sad. I tend to stay a
little bit away from those emotional
terms and favor light and dark... but you
may choose to do differently. That's just
the way I do it. This next scale will be
Dorian, and you'll notice it'll have a
darker sound to it and it belongs to the
minor family of scales [Music]
And for our last example we'll listen to the 
Pelog scale. This scale is not
traditionally found in western music and
it has a bit of an exotic sound to our
ears. [Music] ...and that's it for this video, 
but it's not the end of the video series so
be sure to click here to catch the next
video in the series. Also, click here if
you'd like to catch the very first video
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