From the live class

Tone, tone, semitone: one pattern instead of 1,800 notes

Stephen spent fifteen years learning scales the traditional way before working out that the whole thing collapses into a single pattern. The fastest way to learn that pattern involves walking around your house shouting it.

Ask most people how you learn a scale and they will tell you the same thing: you memorise the notes. E, F sharp, G sharp, A, B, C sharp, D sharp, E. That is E major, and it is correct, and it is the slow road.

The problem shows up the moment you want a second scale. Start on C instead and play those same notes and it sounds wrong — because the notes change every time you start somewhere new. What does not change is the shape between them.

The major pattern is: tone, tone, semitone — tone, tone, tone, semitone. Two tones and a semitone, then three tones and a semitone. If you prefer the American names, it is step, step, half, step, whole, whole, half. Same thing.

And the two words mean something very small. A semitone is a movement of one on the piano — the nearest note, the smallest move you can make. A tone is a movement of two. That is the entire vocabulary.

Why the note names are the slow road

Here is the arithmetic that makes the case. There are twenty-two scales. Learn each one as a list of note names and you are memorising well over one thousand eight hundred combinations of notes. Stephen did it that way. It took him fifteen years.

Learn them as patterns and there are twenty-two patterns. Twenty-two is still a lot. It is not one thousand eight hundred.

The other thing that arrives free is that you stop seeing eighty-eight keys. Play one scale for ten minutes and the shape starts showing itself on the keyboard — two black notes, two white notes, two black notes. Every other note on the piano is simply not in this scale, so for the next ten minutes it does not exist.

Step one is the bit people skip

Before your hands touch the piano, you learn the pattern as a piece of language. Out loud. Away from the instrument. Stephen’s instruction is to walk around the house shouting it — tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone — and he is not joking about it.

It works because the pattern has a rhythm. Say it a few times and you will hear the little cha-cha in it; he claims you can feel it in your hips, and he is not wrong. Once it is in your mouth as a rhythm, it stops being something you have to recall and becomes something you already know.

“A lot of people miss step one,” he says — and that is the whole point. They go straight to the keys, work the notes out one at a time, and end up back where everyone else is: memorising lists.

Only then does it go to the piano, and slowly at first. Pick your starting note. Count up: one, two — tone. One, two — tone. One — semitone. Then three tones and a semitone to finish. You can come back down exactly the way you went up.

If you take one thing from this: do not learn the scale tonight. Learn the sentence. Say it in the kitchen until it has a beat, and let the piano be where you confirm something you already knew.