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
Diatonic scale six perfect fifths. For instance, the seven natural pitches that form the C-major scale can be obtained from a stack of perfect fifths starting from F: Any sequence of seven successive natural notes, such as C–D–E–F–G–A–B, and any transposition thereof, is a diatonic scale. Modern musical keyboards are designed so that the white notes form a diatonic scale, though transpositions of this diatonic scale require one or more black keys. A diatonic scale can be also described as two tetrachords separated by a whole tone. The term "diatonic" originally referred to the diatonic genus, one of the three genera of