Understanding scales

Try to learn any melodic instrument and sooner or later you'll learn about scales. If you're trying to compose songs, an understanding of scales is required.

When talking about scales, most music books dive straight into music notation, ask you to memorize scales, and leave you with a book of pages you'll likely never read. I've seen many of these books and lectures and found most of them completely forgettable. We're going to try another approach to help you see why we use scales and how to apply them. This will help you to understand music theory rather than memorize it. In fact, you don't have to memorize much at all; software can do almost all the work for you.

In this chapter, we'll explore answers to the following questions: what are scales, actually? Why do we have them? Why are they important for composing? And how can we apply the music theory of scales in our digital audio workstation?

Let's start by explaining...