Music Intervals - Spanning the Distance

Learning music intervals is essential to becoming a good musician. An interval simply is the distance between two notes. It's not quite as simple as it sounds though.

We measure these distances in terms of whole steps and half steps, and according to their position in the scale. While this sounds like it would make things harder, what it actually does is trains you to relate notes in a way that can be universally applied to all scales and positions.

Basic Intervals

In this lesson we cover the system of naming music intervals by their position in the scale. We use numbers instead of letters for this so that we can apply these names in all keys and all scales.

Intermediate Intervals

In this lesson, we'll combine the above system of naming intervals by their position in the scale with a system of naming them by their size. An interval's size is its distance from the lower note to the higher note.

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How To Transpose Chords to Play Any Song in Any Key

One trick that is essential for musicians is knowing how to transpose chords. Transposing is the process of changing a section of music to another key. Sometimes this is done to make it more comfortable for the singer, sometimes it is done for ease of playability, and sometimes it is just for personal tone preference. As with a lot of things in music, there is more than one way to do this. The first way is to count the distance from the starting key to the destination key. This is easier than the alternative at first, but it is time consuming and not necessary once you learn the other way. The other way is to convert everything to numbers. While this soundsharder and more time consuming, it is eventually more efficient. We'll start with the counting. Let's say that you are playing a song in C and your friend wants to play it in A. You first pick whether you want to transpose up or down. (Usually one way or the other is easier depending on the instrument and what to

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INTERMEDIATE MUSIC

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