Scale (music) scale is often used. In jazz, many different modes and scales are used, often within the same piece of music. Chromatic scales are common, especially in modern jazz. In Western music, scale notes are often separated by Equal temperament tones or semitones, creating 12 intervals per octave each separating two tones where the higher tone has a oscillation frequency of a fixed ratio (by a factor equal to the twelfth root of two, or approximately 1.059463) higher than the frequency of the lower one. A scale uses a subset consisting typically of 7 of these 12 as scale steps. Other
Jazz scale Jazz scale A jazz scale is any musical scale used in jazz. Many "jazz scales" are common scales drawn from Western European classical music, including the diatonic, whole-tone, octatonic (or diminished), and the modes of the ascending melodic minor. All of these scales were commonly used by late nineteenth and early twentieth-century composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky, often in ways that directly anticipate jazz practice. Some jazz scales, such as the bebop scales, add additional chromatic passing tones to the familiar diatonic scales. One important feature of jazz is what theorists call "the principles of chord-scale compatibility":