Music is a language, and just like any language there is an alphabet that can be used to create words, sentences, and phrases that allow you to communicate. Thankfully, music is made up of only 12 notes, and the possibilities within these 12 notes is infinite, however, there are certain concepts within music theory that I believe every musician should have at least a basic understanding of. Thankfully, they aren’t too advanced, so you can learn these and be able to apply these concepts to your playing instantly and when you do, you will see how everything starts to make sense. How scales fit with chords, how chord progressions work, and also how you can learn songs quicker and easier because you can hear what’s going on in your head before you even grab your guitar! It’s a very powerful tool and I promise you won’t regret taking time to learn it.
Intervals are one of most basic yet most important elements in all of music theory in which everything else is built upon. All an interval is, is a distance between two notes. First, let’s take a look at the musical alphabet without any sharps or flats.
A B C D E F G
That’s literally it! These are what we call the “Natural notes” meaning no sharps and flats. So, if we take these notes and start on the note “C” and go in order until we end up back on “C”, we end up getting the “C Major Scale”
C D E F G A B
Our first interval would be from C to D. We would call this an interval of a “2nd”, because D is the second note away from C. So, it’s really that simple! That means that from C to E would be a “3rd”, C to F would be a “4th” and so on. Once you start playing these intervals, you will start to recognize how they sound, for example, “Here Comes the Bride”, is actually an interval of a 4th. Let’s say you now understand how a 4th sounds. Now, when you listen to music and you hear the vocal melody, guitar or bass line hit what sounds like here comes the bride, you can be sure that those two notes are an interval of a 4th. You might not even have a guitar on you, but you know that sound and you are confident it is that interval. The next step is just to find the key or what the first note is. I usually can find it really quick when I finally get to a guitar. If the note happens to be “C”, you just find a 4th from C, which is F, and now you have learned that melody you heard without even having to read a tab or anything! The sound was already in your head, and you could identify it. Now, Imagine learning all the intervals, chords, etc. This becomes so powerful because you can literally learn an entire song in your head by memorizing these intervals within a song before you even pick up your guitar. As a gigging musician, this has been extremely helpful because when you get called for a 4 hour gig playing 30+ songs and you only have a couple days to learn all of it, this really speeds up the process like you wouldn’t believe! It truly is such a powerful thing to understand and this blog post barely even scratched the surface!