Month: October 2022

Before in my second blog post, I had discussed how a chord was a triad of notes that essentially skip every other note. Now, this week I hope to talk about intervals on a scale. I would like to note before I proceed with this post is that I apologize to those who may not have any musical knowledge, as some of the concepts are getting very complex to explain without experience with them.

The first interval, a minor 2^nd, is simply a half step above the root of a scale. Hopefully this one is the easiest to understand.

The second interval, a major 2^nd, is a half-step above the minor 2^nd, or a whole step above the root.

A minor third, is then a whole step plus a half step above the root. Then the major third is two whole steps above the root.

Now hopefully this pattern seems obvious up until now. The deviations I must discuss are that of a perfect 4^th, tritone, and a perfect fifth. A perfect 4^th will be 4 notes above the root of the chord, so it must be a whole-whole-half step above the root. THERE IS NO MINOR 4^th.

A tritone is the weirdest of all the intervals and is 3 whole steps above the root of a scale. Tritones are characterized by their very uncomfortable sound and are rarely used anywhere except in horror movies.

Lastly, the perfect 5^th is a whole-whole-whole-half step above the root. Every chord after this follows the same pattern as before, adding a half step at a time to the distance between each note, until a major 7^th, where the following note is once again the root of the scale.

Now, I can discuss a major chord. A major chord is made up of three notes, as discussed in previous blog posts, but the distance between the three notes is specified through intervals. A major chord has the root of the chord, a major third from the root, and then a perfect fifth from the root.

Opposing the major chord is the minor chord, which is like the major chord in that it contains a perfect fifth, but the middle note of the chord is a minor 3^rd.

Then there are diminished chords and augmented chords, but since augmented chords do not occur in major scales, I will not discuss them. A diminished chord is made up of a minor third and a tritone above that. Using these three types of chords, I can assign each to a scale degree in a major scale and then explain the most common patterns utilized in popular music.

Last week I had discussed how chords were the building blocks of most aspects of music, and ware what cause many very different songs to sound eerily similar. Before I can show how some songs are related, I must first discuss the many types of chords, and the four types of chords primarily used in music, and to get to this point, I have to discuss keys and accidental notes.

Every song is made up of a different key which can help it sound unique. For the sake of simplicity, due to MOST popular tunes being written in major keys, I will only discuss the main major keys. For each of the 12 notes, there is a key where that note is the first scale degree of the scale. This means that all these scales will follow the same systematic pattern, but on different notes. It is important to note that three of these 12 keys are identical, so you could name 15 keys when there are only 12. How is this one might ask?

Accidental notes are those that are a little higher in pitch (sharp notes) and a little lower in pitch (flat notes) than the listed note. For example, a C flat (written as Cb) would be a little lower than C (precisely what is called a half step and will be discussed later). A C sharp (written as C#), on the other hand, will be a little higher in pitch than a regular C note. On the piano, most accidentals are signified by the black keys, but in the instances of B, C, E, and F, the sharp notes can be on white keys. Additionally, many sharp notes of sequential notes are the same pitch as a flat note of the following note. Hopefully, the below chart illustrates everything I am referring to.

What this chart lacks, unfortunately, is signifying that a Cb is played on the same not as a B, a B# is played on the same note as a C, and the same logic applies to E and F. It is due to these pitches that have multiple names that there are 12 keys. Each key has a different series of notes that make up the major scale pattern, which follows a pattern of whole and half steps. It may help to visualize consecutive notes a half step apart as the closest note on the upper right part of the key. For example, the the half step up from E would be an F, whereas a half step up from A would be and A#/Bb. A whole note, on the other hand, is two of these half steps.

Using this knowledge, a major scale in any key can be found by picking a note and the notes that are a Whole-Whole-Half-Whole-Whole-Whole-Half step apart from the previous picked note. This will yield the notes of any major key.