Saxophone Scales for Beginners

Learning Scales and Chords

I have put this collection of saxophone scales together so that beginners on saxophone (and other instruments) can see what are the most useful set of scales to get to grips with when first taking up the instrument. I haven't just included the easy scales, nor have I included all the scales you will ever need, but these are what I consider the most useful scales for at least the first year or two (or five) of playing the saxophone, not just to help with your fingering technique but also to help you on the road towards being able to improvise.

Learning Techniques

As well as being a comprehensive set of scales that I have found are the most useful for beginners, I have included a section on how to actually learn the scales on your saxophone. This is very very important. As with learning a language, you don't just need to learn a set of words, you need to learn how to put them together. Using this method it actually becomes easier to learn the vocabulary than if you just sit in front of a book of scales and try to memorise them by playing over and over again.

Of course, scales are not the be all and end all of learning good dexterity or improvising skills, you can think of them as a basic set of building blocks that you can use to construct a house, a cathedral or a palace, depending on your musical aspirations. But you don't just need the bricks, or the skill to assemble them, always remember that they are just one part of the construction.

You may or may not have heard of all of these scales, I have included major, minor (melodic and harmonic), aeolian and dorian modes, pentatonic (major and minor) and blues scales (major and minor). The scales are set out in all twelve keys, not just the easy ones, so this book can serve as a reference that can keep you busy for several years, though I always encourage people to not find it necessary to be reading the notes of scales or scale studies but to learn all the scales.

The Pattern of Steps Method

Learning the intervals can seem quite daunting at first, but after a while you realise that each type of scale does, of course, conform to the same pattern of notes, what we call intervals. For each type of scale, it's of course the same pattern, whatever the key you are in. In the picture below, we use the analogy of a staircase with 12 steps. We can go up them one by one, but we can also miss some steps out. As an example, (assume that standing on the floor is actually our first step - the root note of the scale) look at the image and click on Major, then click on Melodic Minor and see the difference between the major scale and the minor scale. You can see that for the major scale, our second and third steps miss out the alternate stairs, but for the melodic minor scale there is a different pattern. We miss out a stair, but then we tread on the very next one instead of missing one out. So our 3rd step of the minor is lower than our 3rd step of the major (don't forget to count from standing on the floor). This is the pattern of steps.

Click on the Buttons to move forward/backward through the different scales:

Quicktime needed for interactive animation

Download Powerpoint | Alternative HTML version if no Quicktime

As you learn the scales you gradually get to learn not just the intervals that make up the shape of that scale, but by visualising them like this you can get to hear in your head how they sound, so that instead of needing to learn each note of a scale one by one (parrot fashion) you will gradually develop the skill and aural ability that allows your ears to instantly and subconsciously tell your fingers where to go without thinking about it.

In the next illustration you can click on each type of scale and see the pattern. Although there are twelve steps in our staircase, we need to think of these as half steps for a proper analogy with a any of the common musical scales used in western music, this is because traditionally we divided the octave into twelve equal steps which we call semitones. (NB: they aren't always exactly equal, but that's another story which we needn't go into at the moment, for now just think of them as twelve half steps or semitones). And of course there are therfore six whole tones. However the most common scales we use have a combination of whole tones and semitones which make up the "pattern" for each scale. Sonetimes we think of these patterns as Ws and Hs (for Whole and half), e.g. the major scale is WWH WWWH.

To help do this you should not only play the scales on your saxophone, but sing the scales, this will really help you to develop an "ear" for them which will make learning and, more importantly, putting them to good musical use, that much speedier. It's extremely useful to be able to also play them on a keyboard, especially if you ever intend to learn improvising. There is no need to worry about becoming a great pianist, but being able to play even slowly on a keyboard will help when you are learning to sing and hear the scales as well as really help when you start to learn some more advanced theory, especially how to break scales up into arpeggios and to learn about chords and chord sequences, an understanding of which lays the real foundation to creative improvisation.

While on the subject of chords and improvising, a lot of people when starting out wonder why should a saxophone player need to know about chords? As you may know chords are when you play several notes at once, and you can't do that on a saxophone can you? So I have included a short section on why and how chords can be useful for saxophone players.

This is currently only available as a PDF download, for £2.45 £1.95. This is an ideal accompaniment for the beginners saxophone DVD and as a basic prequel to the (intermediate/advanced) Taming The Saxophone Vol 3.