C major scale

When you listen to one of your favorite songs you become aware to the fact that it is built up of notes and chords that are changing and causing the song to evolve in a way that is pleasing to the ear. The question that I want to look at today is: why do some chords sound good together and others sound absolutely terrible?

To answer this, we need to look at root notes as they are the base that chords are built upon. If we take the notes of a scale and number them from 1 to 8, you will find movements between notes 1, 4 and 5 consistently sound better and stronger than between any other

number. Let's take a look at a scale (for learning purposes we will use the C Major Scale):

 

C Major Scale 2 octave 

         c     d    e    f     g    a    b    c    d    e    f     g    a     b   c

" There are many different scale types.  Each of these scales has a unique sound.  Some of the scale types are:  pentatonic, minor, natural minor,  and harmonic minor. For now we will only study the major scales. Each scale type has it’s own formula. The formula for the major scale is: The distance from one note to the next is one whole step (2 frets), except from the 3rd to 4th note and from the 7th to the 8th note, where the distance is one half step (one fret) "