In Western music we rarely use all the notes of chromatic scale in composition; instead, we use a subset of seven (or less often, five) of those twelve tones. Each of these subsets is itself a scale, and the type of scale we use has a large impact on the overall sound of a melody, and its emotional qualities. The most common subset of seven tones used in Western music is called the major scale, or Ionian mode (reflecting its ancient Greek origins).
