Playing a musical instrument is hard. There’s not a whole lot that is intuitive about most of them, and the guitar might be one of the least intuitive of them all. As I discussed in my last guest post here on Metal Injection, in spite of a lot of the advanced musicianship in metal, there is still a distinct anti-intellectual attitude among many metal musicians who believe that it’s not cool or necessary to understand any higher musical concepts, or that you need to be self-taught for your skill to have value. As editor-in-chief of GearGods.net, I've seen more than my fair share of this shitty attitude.
Well, I’m here to tell you that that is bullshit for sure. Talent exists, but it is extremely rare, and if you weren’t born with it, like most of us, you sure as hell shouldn’t just assume that you’ll never be good at music, and there’s no reason to give up because you can’t shred right away on your own. I know a lot of naturally talented musicians, and none of them care about music as much as the ones I know who have had to work hard and struggle for it, and those are the ones who never stop learning from whatever sources they can – not to mention, they’re usually infinitely more successful than the “talented” ones in the end.
Not everyone has to go the academic route and learn heaps of music theory, but every little thing you learn will make the amount of work you have to do for each new level a lot less. It’s kind of like a hotkey or a macro or a keybinding on a computer – you could do it the longer and more involved way every time, or you could spend a little extra time upfront and save yourself a TON of time and misery in the long run.
So today I’m bringing you a quick lesson on the smallest building blocks of music – intervals. Not to be confused with the band of the same name, an interval is nothing more or less than the musical distance between two notes. The guitar is actually the ideal instrument to see intervals on, because each string is very neatly divided up into half-steps by the frets – and each interval is going to be a fixed number of half-steps.
You can think of these intervals as little Lego pieces. Each one is a certain size and shape, and although on their own they’re not much, you combine them together to create larger and more complex structures, such as chords, scales, and harmonies. They’re the smallest units of music, so they’re a great place to start.
From one note to the next note of the same name (where the musical alphabet repeats itself) is called an octave – if you play an open string on your guitar, and then the 12th fret, it’s the same note as the open string – but an octave higher. Each fret on your guitar is a distance of one half step, so you can see that there are 12 half steps in an octave.
There’s an interval for every amount of half-steps, or frets, you are away from the root note, so that means that we have 12 intervals to worry about. That’s not really that many, and each one has a distinct character, so as you play them, you’ll be able to pick out ones you like and want to use. On the guitar, there are lots of different ways to play any given interval, but we’re just going to look at one for each for now.
Each one of them has a name – don’t feel like you have to know why they’re called what they’re called, it’s not really important, it’s just important to have a name to remember the sound by, just like having names for colors – if you know that purple is called purple, if someone asks you to pass the purple shirt, you’ll be able to see which one they’re looking for and grab it. See? Macro!
Here’s each interval and one way to play each one on the guitar:
- Minor Second – the distance between the two notes is 1 half-step, which on one string is a distance of one fret. In order to be able to play the two notes together, however, I’m going to put all of these on two separate strings for you. This one is super dissonant and gnarly sounding. If you listened to metalcore in the mid-2000s you heard this sound in a lot of songs in between chugs.
2. Major Second – 2 half-steps apart. Also pretty dissonant.
3. Minor Third – 3 half-steps apart. Very dark and sad sounding – play a bunch of these in no particular key or order with tremolo picking to produce instant black metal.
4. Major Third – 4 half-steps apart. Very bright and uplifting sound.
5. Perfect Fourth – 5 half-steps apart. Very common sound on the guitar – Smoke on the Water, Cat Scratch Fever, Burn – all of these riffs are based around fourths.
6. Tritone – 6 half-steps apart. Known as The Devil’s Interval, and if you play it, you’ll know why right away. Dissonant and evil sounding as all hell.
7. Perfect Fifth – 7 half-steps apart. This is the most common interval shape on the guitar, because this is how you form a basic power chord shape, so you probably already know it. Sounds pretty neutral, but powerful as advertised.
8. Minor Sixth – 8 half-steps apart. Also a nice dark sound.
9. Major Sixth – 9 half-steps apart. Like the minor sixth, but more bright and happy.
10. Minor Seventh – 10 half-steps apart. Kind of a bluesy dissonance.
11. Major Seventh – 11 half-steps apart. Very dissonant and evil sounding on its own.
12. Octave – 12 half-steps. Sounds the same as playing one note, but sort of thicker.
The power of these lies in combining them in different ways, building parts and adding rhythms, harmonies, melodies, etc. – but that's a lifetime of creating music, and this is only one post, so I hope you were able to learn a little bit about the nucleotides of musical DNA, the smallest building blocks of musical harmony.
These are just one of the many ways to play each of these on the guitar. If you want to learn all the different ways to play these and the next octave’s worth of even larger, wilder intervals, and really open the guitar up for yourself, I encourage you to take my new course RelationShapes 2: Intervals. It’s only about an hour, and you can learn every way to play every interval all over the neck, which will enable you to go to any note from any other note, at any time – isn’t that the freedom that every musician is looking for?
