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People who decide to teach themselves how to play the piano often start by trying to learn a favorite, familiar song. While it can be fun to learn a few pieces that will impress friends or family members, just learning songs won’t turn anyone into a professional musician. Anyone who takes learning the piano seriously needs to learn not just completed melodies, but the building blocks from which they are comprised. Those building blocks are known as scales.

What Is a Scale?

In piano terminology, a scale can be defined as a set of pitches organized in a specific way. There are many kinds of scales, but each of them applies to all 12 keys. Learning the scales as series of whole steps and half steps rather than specific notes makes it easy to figure out the same scale in different keys, so that’s how this article will present practical instructions.

Why Learn Scales?

Learning scales is not the most glamorous activity. It requires sitting down and focusing on playing the same basic sets of notes over and over again in different octaves, which can get boring and is certainly not going to impress anyone at a party. That said, learning basic piano scales is an essential activity for any novice pianist. Students learn scale exercises to:

• Strengthen fingers
• Develop finger dexterity
• Strengthen both hands equally
• Improve sight reading abilities
• Learn the building blocks of modern music

Needless to say, these are all crucial skills and abilities for any pianist, regardless of style and genre. Unless a novice pianist wants to hire piano storage experts to cart away that beloved instrument after just a few months or years of study, learning at least beginner scales is a must.

The Basic Scales

There are dozens of different scales, but even professional musicians rarely know all of them. Most choose a handful of scales that apply to the specific genres or styles they want to play in and focus on those. There are, however, a few basic scales that every pianist needs to know.

Major Scales

Major scales are often described as sounding bright and cheerful. They’re used frequently in most styles of music and are generally pretty easy to learn. Major scales use the same notes regardless of whether a musician is playing an ascending or descending scale. The interval pattern is as follows:

• Whole step
• Whole step
• Half step
• Whole step
• Whole step
• Whole step
• Half step

Try starting in the key of C. On the piano, a C major scale is very easy. It begins on C, then ascends following the pattern above, which includes only the white keys. Focus on playing position and fingering, and get the transitions between notes smoothed out before moving on to play the same scale in other keys.

Minor Scales

While major scales are usually described as being bright and cheerful, minor scales sound darker and sadder. As with major scales, though, at their base, minor scales are simply patterns of pitches.

There are three different minor scales, but the most essential of them is the natural minor. The natural minor scale has a lowered third, sixth, and seventh when compared to a major scale, though that’s not how all musicians choose to conceptualize it. In terms of intervals, the natural minor scale follows this pattern:

• Whole step
• Half step
• Whole step
• Whole step
• Half step
• Whole step
• Whole step

There’s a second way to think about natural minor scales that is helpful to recognize when learning the piano, and it refers to a concept known as modes. Each mode of the major scale includes the same notes but starts at a different degree, or note.

The natural minor scale is the sixth mode of its relative major scale. That may sound complicated, but it’s simple enough in practice. Take the example of the C major scale, which uses all of the white keys on the piano. To figure out the relative minor, play the sixth note in the scale. In this case, it’s an A. The A minor scale will thus have all of the same notes as the C scale, meaning players only need to use the white keys.

Beginning pianists typically learn and practice all of the major scales, then all of the minor scales, before moving on to more complicated ones. It can help to learn minor scales alongside their associated major scales, instead. It may not seem important right now, but students who plan to play professionally, or even just to learn basic theory for their own edification, will have an easier time conceptualizing more complex modal scales if they learn the basics in this way.

Pentatonic Scales

Unlike major and minor scales, which contain a full seven notes per octave, a pentatonic scale only has five. Pianists can play either major or minor pentatonic scales. Either way, they contain the 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 scale degrees. The exact notes will vary depending on whether pianists are playing major or minor pentatonic scales and what keys they are playing in, but those intervals will never change.

Intermediate Scales

Once pianists have gotten the basics down, they can move on to learn more specialized scales. Which of them a student chooses will depend on the style that he or she wants to play. Aspiring blues pianists may want to learn a blues scale, for example, which contains a flat third, fifth, and seventh. People who want to learn jazz will need to get many different scales under their fingers. Learning each mode of the major scale is a good place to start, but students will need to seek out the additional resources that are most relevant to their intended musical paths.

Scale Exercises Are Essential

Playing scale exercises over and over again can get boring, but it’s an essential part of learning any instrument, including the piano. Try focusing on one scale at a time, playing it in different keys each day, or even changing the time signature to keep things interesting. Breaking up practice sessions between scale exercises and learning new songs is also a good way to keep things interesting without distracting students from learning the basic building blocks of music.