Wow, I knew that I was gonna get these kinds of questions as soon as this lesson goes up hahah. Keep in mind folks, that this is just part ONE of the basic music theory series. I'll explain in more detail as we go throughout the uke minutes.
A "note" is best defined by wikipedia as:
"The term note has two primary meanings: 1) a sign used in music to represent the relative duration and pitch of a sound; and 2) a pitched sound itself. Notes are the "atoms" of much Western music: discretizations of musical phenomena that facilitate performance, comprehension, and analysis (Nattiez 1990, p.81n9).
The term "note" can be used in both generic and specific senses: one might say either "the piece Happy Birthday to You begins with two notes having the same pitch," or "the piece begins with two repetitions of the same note." In the former case, one uses "note" to refer to a specific musical event; in the latter, one uses the term to refer to a class of events sharing the same pitch."
Basically, any time you hit a string on your ukulele is a note. When you strum a chord, it's notes played in unison. When playing the major scale, you play a set of 8 notes. From the starting note (let's call it 'R' for 'root' note) it goes R W W H W W W H
A "scale" is defined in wikipedia as:
n music, a scale is a group of musical notes that provides material for part or all of a musical work. Scales are ordered in pitch or pitch class, with their ordering providing a measure of musical distance. Scales differ from modes in that scales do not have a primary or "tonic" note. Thus a single scale can have many different modes, depending on which of its notes is chosen as primary. The distance between two successive notes in a scale is called a "scale step." Composers often transform musical patterns by moving every note in the pattern by a constant number of scale steps: thus, in the C major scale, the pattern C-D-E ("doe, a deer") might be shifted up a single scale step to become D-E-F ("ray, a drop"). This process is called scalar transposition. Since the steps of a scale can have various sizes, this process introduces subtle melodic and harmonic variation into the music. This variation is what gives scalar music much of its complexity
There are a TON of different musical scales. For various different types of music. To me, a scale is the basis of every song. Say, if you were to play "Wonderful tonight" in G, you would then play the notes in that specific key. Knowing that the key is "G", you would play in a G scale. Wonderful tonight is in a G major, so you would play a G major scale.
When doing the whole and half pattern, we explained a pattern going UP the scale. So if you wanna go DOWN the scale, you simply do it backwards. like so:
R H W W W H W W
This is beneficial because basic music theory is the foundation of all music. If you didn't have a chordbook with you and you wanted to find the chord "E" on your ukulele, with enough music theory you can. In this case, "E" would consist of the 1st 3rd and 5th note of the scale. We're looking for an E major so let's take the major scale and find the 1st 3rd and 5th. E, F#, B would be the notes that we're looking for. Then we assign a string for each note... then BAM! We have ourselves an E chord. This comes in handy when trying to figure out more complex chords such as dimnished, augmented, sus, major 7th, #11, b5, and other friendly sounding chords hahaha.
I promise to explain as we go further down this road of music theory.
It's only part 1 folks hahah.
