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Print your own practicing scales

This page presents a small program that generates sheets of musical scales that everyone loves practicing so much. Unlike real pieces of music, they require no creativity and are therefore an easy task for something as dumb as a computer.

The program is written in the interpreted language Perl and uses the abcm2ps program to generate printed music notation. The program itself only outputs the ABC music notation, and some of its arguments also use that notation.

Before things get too theoretical or too complicated, let's have a simple example. The command

printscales.pl -r _B,-e\' G

The option -r gives the tonal range to include in the scale, usually the range your instrument can play. The low and high end of the range are given in ABC notation, separated by a hyphen. printscales.pl conforms to the ABC pitch notation which differs by two octaves from the traditional Helmholtz notation. _B, is the B flat below the ledger lines, and e' is the E above them. The backslash before the apostrophe only tells the command shell that it does not delimit a quoted string.

Finally, the single G at the end of the command says to generate a G scale. The generated document contains only one line of music notation:

Printing ordinary scales is not all you can do, however. With the -s option, you can give a list of interval steps between successive notes. The thing to keep in mind is that printscales.pl counts steps as in a programming language, not as musical nomenclature, so a second is denoted by 1, a third by 2 and so on. Here is an example in A minor:

printscales.pl -r _B,-e\' -s 2,-1 Am

The scale always contains the full range given by -r, so A minor generates the same scale as C major would. More root notes can be added to print multiple scales in the same document. -s options may be interspersed between them to change the type of the following scales.

Download printscales.pl here

Remember that you need Perl and abcm2ps to run it. Depending on your installation, you have to install it to a standard location, add its path to the PATH environment variable, or call it as ./printscales.pl or perl printscales.pl. If you give the -h option, it will print a description of its command-line syntax. The PostScript files it generates can be viewed with gv (Ghostview) or converted to PDF with ps2pdf, which comes with Ghostscript.


TOS / Impressum