Scales and modes

Scales allow you to more easily dial in a musical flavor or mood for your chords and melodies. Your Woovebox supports many scales, from well known scales to more exotic scales.

Different musical scales can create different emotions or feelings in the listener. For example, a major scale is generally considered to be happy or cheerful, while a minor scale is often described as sad or serious. This is because the major scale has a specific pattern of whole and half steps, which creates a sense of resolution and stability, while the minor scale has a slightly different pattern, which creates a sense of tension and dissonance. Other scales, such as the pentatonic scale, which only uses five notes, can create a simpler, more primal feeling, while modes like Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian and Locrian can give music a specific cultural or ethnic character.

It's important to note that these are generalizations and that the emotional impact of a piece of music depends on many factors, including the melody, harmony, rhythm, and instrumentation. Also, different cultures have different scales and modes which can have different emotional impact.

Modes, scales and tonalities

A fantastic video by David Bennett on his David Bennett Piano Channel, explains an easy to understand concept of "brightness" of a scale or mode. Please consider subscribing to David's channel for more super helpful and accessible nuggets of music theory.

In summary, modes and scales are closely related, with modes being a specific type of scale, and tonality is the overall feeling and organization of a piece of music, which can be determined by the mode or scale used in the piece.

Setting a scale

You can set the scale of your song, by changing the "Scal" parameter under the 3/Ld key on the first page of Song mode.

The following scales/modes are available;

• "Maj" Major ("Happy")
  
• "nMin" Natural minor
• "HMin" Harmonic minor ("Latin", "Spanish", "Arabic")
  
• "MMin" Melodic minor (Jazz, Film scoring)
  
• "MaPE" Major pentatonic
• "MiPE" Minor pentatonic
• "hirA" Hirajoshi
• "Miya" In scale / Miyako-bushi
• Insen
• Iwato
• Yo
• Dorian
• Phrygian
• Lydian
• Mixolidyan
• Locrian
• Flamenco
• Gypsy
• Half diminished
• Persian
• Ukrainian
• "TE.PO" Pocket Operator scale
• Chromatic

You may set the "free chord" ('FrE.C' under 4/Ar) to enable free chord root note selection and playback on the Cd track outside of the selected scale. If set to 'no', any chord root note may be selected, but will be forced to conform to the selected scale.