No matter what your skill level or preferred style of music, being aware of the intervallic relationships between notes is going to be useful in many different ways.
No matter what your skill level or preferred style of music, being aware of the intervallic relationships between notes is going to be useful in many different ways.
Most of you have heard the term “the one” in regard to the note that represents either the name of the chord you’re playing or a song’s key center. But those other intervallic names—the 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.—may be a bit of a mystery. The concept for intervallic relationships is actually fairly simple and can be easily understood by looking at the major scale.
Most chords are built from triads, which are three-note combinations, and the relationship of the notes tells you what kind of chord it is (major, minor, diminished, etc.). The basic triad consists of the 1 (root note), the 3 (third) and the 5 (fifth); a major triad is built from the 1, major 3 and 5. FIGURE 1 illustrates the notes of a G major triad: G (the 1), B (the 3) and D (the 5). FIGURE 2 depicts the entire G major scale: the notes G, A, B, C, D, E and F# are the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, intervallically speaking (the 2, 3, 6 and 7 often include the prefix “maj,” signifying major intervals). If we only play the 1, 3 and 7, we get the notes G, B and F#, as shown in bar 2 of FIGURE 2.
Let’s use this concept to move up through the G major scale and create a progression of 1-3-7 sounds; in FIGURE 3