Major scale construction - C Major

C Major is the most basic and easy to remember scale in the musical dictionary. It is made up from the following notes:

C D E F G A B C

It has a scale spelling. This is where each note in the scale is given a number and this allows you to relate other types of scales to this.

As a major scale it's scale spelling is:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

The scale spelling is a mechanism that can be used so you can identify the notes in each step of the scale. It also can assist in identifying notes in related chords. So for C Major you get

C D E F G A B C
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8