Eckart Altenmüller, in Progress in Brain Research, 2015 5 Music and Emotion in Human Speech and Parallels in Other Species If you’ve made it through this article you’ll have a great start for working with the chromatic scale in your music.Charles T. While it may seem like a trivial set of notes, thinking chromatically is an easy way to unlock fresh sounds. The chromatic scale is a music theory concept you should be aware of as you develop your skills.
#CHROMATIC NOTES FREE#
Genres like free jazz typically take advantage of the discordant, disorienting sound of the chromatic scale to manipulate listeners expectations.Ĭonsider the chromatic sound if you ever need a chaotic, unfamiliar feel in your music. When you think of it that way, the chromatic scale can take on its own sound.
That means it has no similarity to any other scale in your arsenal. The chromatic scale contains every possible musical note. Use chromatic passing tones and chords to add interest to boring linear melodies and progressions. In many cases adjacent notes or chords can be connected by smooth chromatic motion.Įven though the chromatic note or chord doesn’t belong to the main key, the contour of the line’s motion makes the connection for your ears. In fact, one of the easiest ways to break out of a single key is to think chromatically. You don’t need to always play in the song’s main key when you write songs or melody lines. Here's a few places the chromatic scale works well. The chromatic scale isn't often used on its own, but it can compliment other scales in plenty of situations. If you think chromatically you can use the concept to learn your way around them faster. In these situations chromatic notes bridge the gap between chord tones and pentatonic scale steps with stylish chromatic flourishes. It’s most obvious in scales with connecting chromatic sections like the blues scales or the bebop scale. The notes from the chromatic scale often show up in other scales. Since the chromatic scale contains all twelve tones, it has no specific chords associated with it.
Diatonic refers to scales built following the pattern of tones and semitones in a major or minor key signature.Įach major and minor scale has a set of chords built from each scale degree called the diatonic chords. Here’s the chromatic scale the way it’s normally written starting on C:Ĭhromatic scales are often seen as the opposite of diatonic scales. That means there’s only a single possible chromatic scale no matter how it’s transposed.Įven so, chromatic scales are often shown beginning on middle C to make things easier. Since each step in the scale has the same interval value of a single semitone, you can start on any note and follow the pattern to fill in the scale. The chromatic scale is the simplest scale to build because it’s made up of all twelve musical tones. The chromatic scale is all twelve notes of the musical alphabet arranged one after the other in a stepwise scale.Įach degree of the scale is separated by a half-step interval so that the chromatic scale covers both the white and black keys of the keyboard. In this article I’ll explain everything you need to know about chromatic scales. They situate your music in a key and determine the character of the notes and chords used in your song.īut aside from the major and minor keys, the modes of the major scale and all the other weird scales out there, there’s another essential scale that’s important to know-the chromatic scale.Ĭhromatic scales might seem like an obvious scale type, but they’re worth paying attention to as you build your musical vocabulary. Musical scales are an essential building block of music theory.
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