Ive heard and read references to harmonizing the scale – whats all that about?
One way to find which chords a given scale relates to is to harmonize the scale, which means taking each note of the scale, finding the scale note a third higher, then another a third higher again and so on. Identify the chord you’ve built and you have automatically related it to the original scale. Here’s a nice jazz scale – the whole-half diminished (sometimes called WH for short) starting on C: C D Eb F Gb Ab A B C It’s called whole-half because it’s built from notes that are alternately one whole and one half-tone apart. Amongst the embedded chords you can find in C WH are, for example D Gb (or, enharmonically, F#) A C, which is D7, or even D F# A C Eb (D7 b9) and D F# A C F (D7 #9). C Eb F# B gives a rootless D13 b9. In the same way, F7/13/b9/#9, Ab7… and B7… are all in the same scale, so C WH will fit all these chords. Incidentally this works backwards in the sense that, because they share a parent scale, these 4 chords are (within the limits of the melodic line) harmonically
