Intervals

What are Intervals?

Intervals are essentially the musical distance between two notes. With respect to the guitar, intervals can be used to shed greater insight regarding the "compatibility" of notes -- meaning what kind of quality notes that are a given distance apart will produce and thus play a substantial role in understanding chord structure.

Getting Started with Intervals

Calculating intervals and understanding how they are used in music is very simple and straightforward. Only a few basic considerations need to be kept in mind:

• If two notes are one fret apart, they are said to be a half-step apart. For example, the E and F notes are a half step apart. Likewise, F and F# are a half step apart.
  
• The distance between notes can also be determined by counting how many natural notes are between the two notes in question. For example, suppose we are looking to count the distance between the A note the E note. We know that there are three natural notes between them: B, C, and D.
  
• The concept presented in the point above is very vital to music theory -- especially when structuring chords -- when it is built upon. Suppose, for instance, that we are structuring a musical piece in which the A note will be the primary note; it will be the centerpiece around which the music is structured. Because of this, we can call it the root. We can define the root as the first note, and simply count each natural note that follows. For instance, the B becomes the second, the C the third, the D the fourth, the E the fifth, and so on.
  

Intervals in Action

So, how can intervals be used to create musical pieces? Well, all chords are based off a certain structure of intervals -- something we'll delve into in greater detail in the forthcoming articles and lessons. For now, consider power chords, which we examined in a previous lesson. Two-string power chords were defined as playing notes that were seven frets apart on the bass strings and the third string. For instance, playing the first fret/sixth string and the third fret/fifth string would be a power chord.

Based on this fomula, we can see that power chords involve playing a root note and the fifth of that root note. In the example above, for instance, the root note -- first fret/sixth string -- is the F note; the fifth of the F note is the C note, which is the third fret/fifth string. As a result, this is the formula for power chords: root note + 5th. As a result, you will often see power chords written as F5, C5, A5, etc. The alphabetical letter represents the root note; the number represents the distance from that note, which in the case of power chords is the fifth note.

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