3 Quick and Easy Steps on How to Remember Your Major Scales

As a musician, remember scales is one major thing you need to know because without the knowledge you won’t be able to play songs. Remembering scales can take up a lot of time and effort but here are 5 easy ways to start remembering your scales.

1. Half and Whole Notes

When playing the Piano or a Guitar you can see the differences between a whole note and a half note. In case you don’t know the difference, a half note is moving up one note, a whole note is moving up two notes. For example is you start on note C a whole note from C is D, a half note from C is C# or D♭. So for a Major Scale, there is a pattern, the pattern is, Whole, Whole, Half, Whole, Whole, Whole, Half. This will work on any note, but only for major Scales

2. Mark the Notes

If you want to learn your scales faster you can use a marker to mark the notes of the scale. Now people would say that’s a slow way of memorizing scales, but here’s the catch, when you’re comfortable with scale after marking it, erase a marking or two and try playing the scale again. This will help you memorize your scales even faster because you’ll be able to see some notes and help you remember the notes you have erased. After you are comfortable with that erase a couple more and practice and repeat until you’ve erased all the markings then you’ll remember your scales.

3. Train Your Ears

Remember how a scale feels is important, but also knowing how a major scale sounds like is just as important and it’s not that hard to do. Think of Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do. There are only five whole steps and two half steps, so knowing where those whole and half steps are important but if memorizing isn’t your here is a trick to remembering scales by using the C scale as an example. Do is C, Re is D, Mi is E, Fa is F, So is G, La is A, Ti is B, Do is C (an octave higher). Like I said before there are only two half steps, going from Mi to Fa is a half step and going from Ti to Do is a half step, everything else is whole steps. If you can train your ears to hear the differences between whole and half steps, you’ll be memorizing your major scales in no time.

What instrument do you play? Do you know all your scales? Feedback would be great.