All concepts
What is a scale?
A small set of notes — usually five to seven — chosen from the twelve on the piano and treated as 'home' for a piece of music. Play only those notes and everything sounds like it belongs.
A piano repeats the same twelve notes over and over, octave after octave. A scale picks a handful of them — the major scale takes seven, a five, the blues scale six — and a piece of music treats that handful as its home territory: melodies are built from those notes, and the ones left out sound 'outside' when they appear. Every scale is named for two things — its , the note that feels like home, and its pattern, the fixed set of distances from that root. Move the root and keep the pattern, and you have the same scale in a different key.
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