The chromatic scale is a twelve-tone sequence of half-steps that includes every note within the natural octave. It’s a straight path through all of the white keys and black keys of a piano. Some have compared it to a skeleton key that unlocks all doors.
Major and minor keys are a reduction of these twelve chromatic notes to smaller collections of seven-note diatonic scales.
Songwriters tend to stick with one key signature per song when they’re first learning to play. As they mature in their craft, they might begin adding non-chord tones from outside the major scale or minor scale of their key. This manifests as chromatic passing tones, borrowed chords, and modulated tonal centers.
All of these techniques help to refresh the listener’s ear and bring elements of surprise.
In this article, we’ll start with a brief overview of the chromatic scale’s structure. Then, using interactive examples from Hooktheory’s TheoryTab database, we’ll discuss a few advanced songwriting techniques that can help expand your vocabulary.
For those who want to go deeper, we’ve wrapped up the article with a big-picture overview explaining where our 12-tone system came from. This fascinating story goes back nearly 5,000 years and worked its way through every culture across the globe.
How to play chromatic scales on piano or guitar
The chromatic scale is simple in theory but requires some dexterity in your fingers. All you have to do is choose a root note and ascend by semitones. Let’s ground that concept in a couple of physical instruments like the piano and guitar, so it feels less abstract.
Starting on the C note of a piano keyboard, play an ascending scale on the white notes only, and you’ll have a C major scale. Easy enough!
The C chromatic scale is similar, but you also have to play all of the black notes. There’s no guesswork required to figure out which notes to include or exclude, so it’s easy in that sense. The tough part is figuring out your fingering pattern. Here’s a diagram of what that looks like:
To play the notes of the chromatic scale on a guitar fretboard, you can stay on one string and run up every scale degree, fret by fret. This may be the easiest starting point, but it’s not really an effective way to practice musical scales or prepare for improvisation.
A more effective guitar technique is to play four semitones in a row, go up one string and down one fret, and repeat. You can do this across three strings to cover the full twelve-note sequence.
Chromatic melodies in classical music
Classical music might not seem like the most exciting starting point, but the following examples are some of the most important in history. We’ve added interactive modules so you can listen to each one and hear how the composer uses the chromatic scale to create iconic melodies.
If you’re not interested in chromatic melodies or classical music, skip to the next section, where we’ll discuss chromatic chord progressions. We’ll cover several modern examples from pop music. Otherwise, let’s jump into a personal favorite of mine, “Flight of the Bumblebee.”
Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee“
Here’s what the melody looks like on sheet music. Notice the number of accidentals, or sharps and flats, required in order to spell out the melody. This is an inevitable byproduct of using chromatic scales:
For those who struggle to read sheet music, this TheoryTab embed of “Flight of the Bumblebee” will be much easier. Hooktheory’s use of MIDI notation instead of staff music effectively bypasses the accidentals to focus on the melodic contour, or shape of the melody:
Unlike sheet music, TheoryTabs also provide a shorthand notation for the chord progression under the chromatic melody. The triads are depicted with Roman Numerals and color-coded to make them easy to distinguish from one another.
Rimsky Korsakov was a 19th-century Russian composer and is considered one of the most important figures of the Romantic period. An entire school of composition emerged from his use of chromaticism, leading to the emergence of two other major composers in the chromatic tradition, Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev.
Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun“
Debussy was a French composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who used chromaticism differently from the Russian school. His soft and sensual approach to arrangements showed that chromatic scales could evoke deep emotional states of longing and passion.
His famous composition, “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” can be found below. We’ve embedded the melody with TheoryTab so you can listen and see how it differs from “Flight of the Bumblebee.”
As you can see in the MIDI score above, Debussy opens the iconic melody with a descending chromatic scale that ascends again. This shares something in common with Korsokov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” and perhaps was even an allusion to it. After all, this song is about the mysteries of nature and has a similar flighty, whimsical quality.
The prelude differs in a few important ways. It’s in a major rather than a minor key and generally lacks all of the menacing qualities of the bumblebee motif. As you can see from the Roman numerals, it opens with a borrowed chord to trick the ear immediately. The harmonic language is advanced and the time signature is in the unusual meter of 9/8.
Grieg’s “Hall of the Mountain King“
Let’s look at one more example from the late 19th century. Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” applies the descending chromatic scale in a way we haven’t considered yet. Instead of the melody literally moving up and down by semitones, Grieg takes a three-note melodic cell and moves the whole phrase down chromatically.
Have a listen in the TheoryTab below:
The musical cell begins on a note, descends by a major third interval, and then ascends by a major third again. That shape moves down a half step and repeats. Then, it moves down another semitone and repeats the shape a third time.
Note how the chord progression beneath this motif is not identical with each cell. It moves from C♯7/B to C/B and then Bm. This makes sense because we’re in the Key of B Minor. The C♯7 and C major chords create dynamic tension against the B pedal tone.
If you take anything away from the first three examples in this tutorial, it should be that chromatic melodies are not limited to linear stepwise motion. Sometimes, the semitone movement applies to phrases rather than individual notes.
Chromatic notes in funk and blues scales
We’ll get to pop songwriting and chord progressions in just a moment. But first, let’s examine how 20th-century music started adding chromatic notes and “non-chord tones” to its melodies. This is as relevant to pop melodies today as it was a century ago.
Generally speaking, the blues scale is a minor pentatonic scale with an extra chromatic note sitting between the fourth and fifth scale degree. Relative to the root note, it would be considered a tritone, but it’s important to note that it’s mostly used as a passing tone.
Eric Clapton’s “Sunshine of Your Love” is one of the most common examples of this idea.
The guitar riff descends from the perfect fifth to the perfect fourth via the passing chromatic note. Have a look at the highlighted section of the sheet music below:
There’s a second common variation heard in funk music, where the chromatic passing tone moves from the dominant 7th up to the octave. Herbie Hancock’s famous tune, “Chameleon,” features this technique in the bassline, as shown in the sheet music here:
A third technique that you’ll hear in funk music is the use of a minor third over a dominant 7th chord. In classical music theory, this would be called a “non-chord tone” or modal mixture.
Funk and blues musicians tend to prefer the expression “blue note” to refer to the use of minor third, minor 7th, and flat fifth intervals in major or dominant keys.
Have a look at this example from the James Brown tune, “I Feel Good.”
The blue note in this example is on the word “would.” He hits an F note in the melody despite the fact that the underlying D⁷ chord has an F♯ instead. The third scale degree of a dominant 7th is major, so James Brown hits the blue note to add color and tension to his vocal melody.
Chromatic chord progressions in pop songwriting
Now that we’ve covered chromaticism in classical music, blues, and funk, it’s time to start thinking about how the same concept applies to chord progressions.
The “Andalusian cadence” chord progression
The first example we’ll cover is a chord progression called the Andalusian cadence due to its origins in the Spanish flamenco music of Andalusia. Despite being imported from overseas, it’s a common pattern in American popular music.
These progressions typically begin on a minor i chord and descend by whole steps through a ♭VII chord, ♭VI chord, and arrives at a borrowed V⁷ chord before returning to the minor tonic.
Check out this familiar example from the Beach Boys tune, “Good Vibrations.”
The song’s opening sequence begins with the D♯ minor chord and, in keeping with the technique, descends through C♯ minor, B minor, and A♯7 before returning to D♯ minor.
Artists have been known to play around with this form and introduce variations.
For example, the Green Day song “Brain Stew” is in the Key of C Major instead of a minor key. It descends by a whole step to a borrowed ♭VII chord, then hits the diatonic vi chord, descends chromatically to a ♭VI chord, and then arrives at the V chord.
This technique of pivoting from the natural minor vi chord to a borrowed ♭VI chord is known in classical theory as an altered chord. Let’s have a closer look at that next.
Altered chords: Dropping chords by a half-step
Here’s one of my favorite songwriting tricks of all time. In classical music theory, it’s called an altered chord. That’s not to be confused with the same term “alt chord” used in jazz theory, which refers to the raising or lowering of a 5th or 9th scale degree in a chord.
Altered chords, in the classical sense, refer to a chromatic technique where the minor ii, iii, or vi chords can be dropped by a semitone and turned into a major chord. It’s so awesome, and once you know about it, the “magical” quality of so many of your favorite songs will be suddenly clarified.
In this first example from The Beatles, we find a ♭VI chord under the vocal melody “Say goodbye, I say.” The second time around, the diminished vii chord is dropped down to a ♭VII chord. In both cases, we see the chromatic neighbor below the actual chord turned into a major triad.
This kind of chord substitution trick is a prime example of non-dissonant chromaticism in modern, popular music. Here’s a second example from the psych-rock band The Zombies in their song “A Rose for Emily.”
During the chorus, we find a ♭VII and ♭III chord back to back. This creates the impression of a temporary modulation into a new key, but in reality, it’s just two altered chords separated by a perfect fifth interval. They have a natural affinity for one another and snap back into the tonic via the diminished vii chord.
Chromatic bass movement in unorthodox modes
Sometimes a song will appear to be using altered chords, because of the chromatic relationship of the bass relative to the tonic. Let’s take this song from Radiohead, called “Everything In Its Right Place.”
This song seems to be in the Key of C Major. It starts with that chord and is followed by an ♭II (D♭ major) and ♭III (E♭ major) chord, respectively. If you’ve read the previous sections, you might think that this was an example of the minor ii and minor iii chords dropping by a half step and being flipped to major.
However, if you look closely at the melody, you’ll find that it doesn’t align with the idea of C Major. Instead, we’re in C Phrygian mode with a borrowed major chord replacing the tonic. The ♭II and ♭III chords occur naturally in the Phrygian scale. It’s the C major chord that doesn’t belong.
Chromatic Passing Chords
Sometimes, the easiest thing to do is take a chord shape and simply move it down chromatically, one semitone at a time. Some classic chord progressions do this. You’ll find many examples in early rock music, like the Beatles.
This song, “Do You Want To Know a Secret,” takes the minor iii chord and scoots it down to a flat iii chord without any regard for the key signature. This works because the momentum continues, and they arrive at a minor ii chord. This is what we mean by a chromatic passing chord.
Finding chromatic chord progressions in TheoryTab
By now, we’ve explored some popular ways that chromaticism factors into melodies and chord progressions. There are so many more examples to explore for those of you that are curious.
Here’s a free technique you can use with Hooktheory to discover songs with chromatic chord progressions.
- To get started, navigate to our free TheoryTab Trends database.
- Click on the dropdown menu in the upper left corner, and instead of selecting a specific key like “C,” click on the word “rel” which stands for “relative.” This will allow you to search by chord relationships rather than specific keys.
- Choose a starting chord. It doesn’t matter what kind of chord you pick.
- A web of options will expand out from your initial choice. Click on the dot labeled “other” and look for Roman numerals modified by an accidental. They are usually prefaced by a flat symbol, like “♭ii” or “♭vi.”
- When you search for modified chords like this, you’ll be brought to a playlist where that progression is featured in the song.
This simple workflow in the Trends tool will allow you to browse our collection of over 47,000 songs. You can switch from major to minor key using the dropdown menu next to “rel” if you want to find even more options. Happy hunting!
Origins of the chromatic scale in western music
Western instruments are the global standard today. They’re so prevalent that few of us stop to ask where the underlying 12-note tuning system came from.
Why do pianos and guitars use a chromatic scale instead of some other quantity of notes? Searching for answers to this question will lead you down some fascinating paths of discovery.
Let’s hop in our time machine and rewind a couple of thousand years to see where it all began. Then, we’ll move forward through a very brief history of tuning systems to arrive at the modern system.
Stacking fifths: Pythagoras and the musical tetractys
Academics point to ancient Greece as the cradle of Western civilization. The truth is more complex than that. One of the most famous ancient Greek philosophers, Pythagoras, was an initiate of Mesopotamian mystery schools dating back more than 5,000 years.
In those Egyptian halls of knowledge, Pythagoras learned the core principles of math and music theory, which he later imported to Greece.
You’ll find a visual model called the Tetractys near the center of the Pythagorean system. This triangular shape, resembling a bird’s eye view of 10 bowling pins, carried a secret meaning that has since been unpacked and well documented.
Here’s how it works: Imagine you’re holding a stringed instrument, like a guitar, but it only has one string. This instrument was called a monochord, and it was a tool for exploring the relationship between math and sound.
The ratio of dots between each row represented measured subdivisions of the monochord.
- The first two rows describe a ratio of 1:2 dots. Applied to the monochord, this means that you would take the full length of the string (1) and divide it into two segments (2). This produces the musical interval of an octave, no matter what material or length of string you use. On a guitar, it’s equivalent to putting your finger on the 12th fret.
- The second two rows depict a ratio of 2:3 dots. This means that the monochord would be divided into thirds. Following the guitar analogy, this is like holding down the 7th fret of a guitar. The distance from the head to your finger is 1/3rd and the remaining distance of the string to the bridge is the other 2/3rd. This results in a perfect fifth interval.
- The final two rows depict a ratio of 3:4 dots, following the same logic above. This ratio is equivalent to the 5th fret on a guitar and represents the perfect fourth interval.
These same intervals are present in what’s called the harmonic overtone series. This is an acoustic phenomenon that exists across every naturally produced sound. When you play a fundamental tone, there are less audible tones above it. They stack in an octave, perfect fifth, and perfect fourth. This is where the Tetractys came from.
The perfect fifth interval and the octave formed the basis of the chromatic scale as well as the seven-note diatonic scales that we know today. But how can that be?
The trick is to begin with a low, fundamental note and ascend by the interval of a perfect fifth. If you stack the fifth interval twelve times, you arrive at the original note seven octaves higher. When you select seven notes in the “circle of fifth” sequence and reorder them within a single octave, you arrive at a diatonic major scale.
Circle of fifths: C – G – D – A – E – B – F♯ – C♯ – G♯ – D♯ – A♯ – F – C
G major diatonic Scale: C – G – D – A – E – B – F♯] = [G – A – B – C – D – E – F♯ – G
Chromatic Scale: C – C♯ – D – D♯ – E – F – F♯ – G – G♯ – A – A♯ – B – C
As you can see, the chromatic scale and diatonic scales are simply a linear re-ordering of the notes that emerge naturally when perfect fifths are stacked.
Greek musicians preferred the seven musical modes over the chromatic scale. The impact of their discovery was so important that to this day, the seven musical modes are named after Greek words. They refer to the islands of that period where each scale was most popular.
The Ionian scale was named after Ionia, the Dorian scale after Doria, and so forth.
Ancient Chinese, Indian, and Persian systems
The technique of stacking fifths was popular in cultures beyond the Western world.
An ancient Chinese music theorist Jing Fang (78–37 BCE) used the same process of stacking fifths to justify a 53-note tuning of the octave. He found that stacking fifths 12 times produced an octave that was less perfect than stacking the fifth interval 53 times. So, he opted for that system and collapsed all 53 microtones into a single octave.
Most people would not be able to discern two adjacent notes in that system.
In recent history, anthropologists discovered sets of Chinese bells called bianzhong that date back to the 4th-5th CE. These were cast in 7-note and 12-note scales that closely resemble the 7-note diatonic and 12-note chromatic scales found in Western music today.
A 22-note division of the octave was documented in ancient Indian Sanskrit texts called the Natya Shastra. That script dates between the 2nd century BCE and the 3rd century CE.
These ancient Chinese and Indian scales predate our pianos by more than 1500 years.
During the thirteenth century CE, Arabic, and Persian musicians divided the octave into 17 notes.
By the time we reach the European Renaissance music theory, we find a popular tuning system of 19 equal-width steps. However, this was not the only option available, and two important musicians would push for a 12-note chromatic scale. In the end, they were victorious.
The European Renaissance and Baroque period
In 1584, Vincenzo Galilei, father of the famous astronomer Galileo, proposed a 12-tone chromatic system. To demonstrate this idea in practice, he composed 24 songs, one in each of the major and minor keys.
During the mid-18th century, German composer J.S. Bach reinforced a popular system of twelve-tone equal temperament in his masterwork, the Well-Tempered Klavier. It was comprised of 48 compositions, split up into two books. Each book had 24 pieces of original music, and each composition was written in one of the twelve major and minor keys, just as Galilei had done two centuries prior.
The influence of Bach’s music was far-reaching. Demand for his music inspired other Western instrument builders to abandon competing harpsichord tuning systems and align around Bach’s well-tempered compositions.
A final innovation took place, for better or worse, with the advent of 12-tone equal temperament. It happened because other tunings favored one key over all the others. C Major would sound great, but C♯ Major was completely out of tune. To fix this, instrument builders adopted a logarithmic tuning system that makes everything equally out of tune.
So, the chromatic scale we have today is the result of this effort to make all major and minor keys equally good (or equally bad, depending on who you ask).
The chromatic scale in 20th-century Western music
Despite the Western European world’s adoption of Bach and his preferred 12-tone system, there was a great deal of fear about the unbridled use of the chromatic scale. The dissonance of notes falling outside a diatonic key evoked terror in listeners. Some intervals, like the tritone, were quite literally demonized and earned the name diabolo en musica, or the devil in music.
Bach was already using non-chord tones in his music during his lifetime, but he was very careful to prepare those notes to keep his congregation at peace. He wrote exclusively for the church, and so his melodies needed to bring listeners closer to God.
As music became secularized, during the classical period of Mozart and later through 19th century Romanticism and Impressionism, chromaticism became more and more acceptable.
By the time we hit the 20th century, we find Expressionist composers like Schoenberg inventing techniques that deliberately force the chromatic scale into their music. His technique, called serialism, set up rules that required 12-tone rows to be played in a full sequence.
This deconstruction of Romantic melodic techniques was highly modern and gave way to new musical forms that inspired horror soundtracks in cinema during the second half of the 20th century.
Chromaticism in Jazz music like bebop similarly pushed the envelope, opting for complex melodies over traditional pentatonic, diatonic and blues scales.
By the time we reach pop music in the late 20th century and present day, non-chord tones have become firmly established in our harmonic vocabulary. They still evoke complex emotions, but our species no longer experiences the same visceral terror from chromaticism that we once did.
This concludes our journey through the chromatic scale and its many applications, from classical music to modern popular songwriting.
About the Author
Ezra Sandzer-Bell is a musician and copywriter with a passion for merging music theory with technology. Learn more about his musical journey and the philosophy behind his work here.
