Intervals

The spaces between the notes

The notes we have been singing have gaps between them. Those gaps are called intervals. Intervals are really, really familiar and really, really weird at the same time. They're familiar becasue we know them.

Try a little experiment. Find a nice comfortable low note and sing it until you've got it. Now starting from that note sing, "Somewhere, over the rainbow."

Here is the cool part, in going from "some" to "where" you jumped an octave. Check it on your chromatic tuner if you want. If you aren't exactly on the octave, you'll be close. If you missed it completely, keep plugging and you'll get it in a short while. The thing is that gap or interval is hard-wired right into your brain. And it was there right from the beginning. When your mother sang you songs in the crib, you heard those intervals. If our mothers had tried to pull a fast one on us by singing Mary Had a Little Lamb to a different melody, we would have spotted the trick right away and stomped our little feet until she did it the right way. We heard and understood that melody before we knew who Mary was or what a Lamb was.

Learning intervals really is mastering the basics. This is something we already know how to do and we are just going to learn how to do it in a more disciplined way.

2 + 2 = 3

All the gaps between the notes we have been singing and playing have names. From Do to Re is a major second. It is also exactly two frets on our ukulele. Re to Mi is also a major second although it's a little harder to see because we jump down to the first string to play it. We can play it on the second string if we want by going up two frets from Re. (In case you are wondering, the gap between notes one fret apart is a minor second but we'll save that for later.)

Okay, here is where it gets a little weird. What happens if we go all the way from Do to Mi. That is two major seconds so it should get us ... well, it gets us to a major third. Huh?

Sometimes you may hear people say that music theory is like mathematics. Well, actually it's much simpler than that: music theory is mathematics. This is easier to grasp if you done advanced math because you will already know that different kinds of mathematics have different rules. Boolean math uses different rules than the arithmetic we learned in Grade 3. The rules that apply in each kind of mathematics are a reflection of what you do with that mathematics.

In music, the theory is all about counting and measuring. We never multiply, divide, do square roots or solve problems in musical math. All we do is count and use that counting to measure so we can all do the right things at the right time. If you remember back to Grade school, you will remember that your teacher started to teach you arithmetic by saying, follow this rule. She didn't say, here is why we have the rule. We just took it for granted that she knew what she was talking about and we followed the rules. That's what we're going to do to learn music theory too. No matter how weird the rules may seem, we're going to spend the first little while just learning them.

So now we know how to count two kinds of intervals: a major second and a major third. Besides just learning to sing them, we want to learn to hear them. A fun thing to do with the ukulele is to just pick a note anywhere on the uke, play it and sing it and then play and sing the one two frets up.

And try playing one an then singing it but making the jump to the next with your voice alone. And then try playing one note and responding by singing the one two frets up. And then we can turn around and do the whole thing going down.

And we can keep doing this until that interval is ingrained in our heads so well that if someone blindfolded us and played any two notes with that interval we would be able to identify it as a major second. And if they tried to fool us by playing two other notes we would be able to say, 'No, that's not a major second.'

More music to play tomorrow.