Another interval

A while ago I did a post on intervals and talked about two intervals: major seconds and major thirds.

Today, another interval, the minor second.

On the ukulele a minor second is the space between any two frets. Finger a note on any fret somewhere on the middle of the neck (meaning about halfway between the top of the neck and the body). Play it and now slip up a fret and play that. That is a minor second.

We already know minor seconds because there are two of them in the scale:

Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do

The interval from Mi to Fa is a minor second and so is the interval from Ti to Do. So, we already know it; meaning we have been singing minor seconds since grade school without knowing it.

And now we want to wrap our minds around it. We want to play and sing them until next Thursday getting a solid feel for this interval. In the G scale the two minor seconds are from B (Mi) to C (Fa) and from F# (Ti) to G (Do). We can also figure out where they are in the F scale, the A scale, and C scale.

There is more on minor seconds from a great teacher named Jim D'Ville here (including that a minor second can apparently also be called an augmented unison). I'm cribbing the idea of a weekly interval from Jim D'Ville only I'm not going in order from smallest to largest as he does and I'm going to pick all my intervals from the G diatonic scale and he uses the C chromatic.