Hey Friend,
Wow, can you believe it’s May 1st already? One third of year 2017 is behind us!
I keep talking about the spaces between notes - the “tones” or “semitones” or “whole step/half steps” - how many frets are between two notes.
Well wouldn’t you know it, each of these “intervals” has a name.
Without going into a bunch of detail today, here are the names of the intervals:
- Perfect Unison - the first note in a scale, coated as the zero (0) fret. I call it the Tonic or 1 note.
- Minor Second - one fret up in pitch from the tonic (a half-step or semitone).
- Major Second - two frets up from the tonic. This is a whole step or tone.
- Minor Third - three frets up in pitch from the tonic.
- Major Third - this is four frets above the tonic.
- Perfect Fourth - we are now five frets up from the tonic. If we were using the open E string to demonstrate, E is the “perfect unison” and A is the perfect fourth.
- Tritone - six frets above the tonic.
- Perfect Fifth - we’re at seven semitones (frets) above the perfect unison (tonic or 1 note).
- Minor Sixth - eight frets higher in pitch from the tonic.
- Major Sixth - nine semitones or frets up from the 1 note.
- Minor Seventh - Ten. Ten frets above the 1 note! (quote from “The Count” from Sesame Street)
- Major Seventh - eleven frets up from the root note (tonic).
- Perfect Octave - the octave rounds out the notes, returning to the starting point, except we’re now at a higher pitch.
There’s a lot going on there, so we’ll continue this discussion tomorrow. Just familiarize yourself with these for now.You can read up more on them here (if you like music geek-speak).
Time to make myself presentable for work. Y’all have a great day!
Peace~
Dave
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