Huw Lloyd-Williams Guitarist

Musical intervals are paramount in understanding a variety of musical, and in this instance, guitar orientated subject matters. Understanding these will, in turn, help you to see how guitar chords and scales are built, for example. Read on to find out what’s so important about them.

Let’s define an interval

An interval is simply the distance between two notes or pitches. The easiest way to get to grips with this concept is by visually mapping them out by the frets on the guitar’s neck. One fret equates to a semitone, and two frets equal a tone.

Intervals have a few different qualities, and these can be defined like so;

• Perfect
• Major
• Minor
• Augmented
• Diminished

To establish an augmented interval, you raise a major or perfect tone by a semitone. For diminished intervals, lower the aforementioned note by a semitone.

The chromatic scale has twelve individual semitones. These each have it’s own quality, as well as a shorthand to convey each one;

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Semitones	Quality	Shorthand
0	Perfect Unison	P1
1	Minor 2nd	m2
2	Major 2nd	M2
3	Minor 3rd	m3
4	Major 3rd	M3
5	Perfect 4th	P4
6	Augmented 4th/Diminished 5th	A4/d5
7	Perfect 5th	P5
8	Minor 6th	m6
9	Major 6th	M6
10	Minor 7th	m7
11	Major 7th	M7
12	Octave	P8

Intervals are easily identifiable in a variety of popular music. Whether in the charts or for film and TV, you can hear some examples in this video.

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Intervals on the fretboard

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Don’t forget, that each interval’s quality is not set as above. It’s relative to whatever the root note you are starting from. In the above diagram, we are using an open E as our root note. But what if the root is C? Or D#? Or any note available to you. For the purposes of this article, we’re working in standard tuning (E, A, D, G, B, e), but intervals can be applied to any position on the fretboard and in any tuning.

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Now we’ve taken a look at the individual intervals available to us on guitar, and we understand the individual qualities and distances, we can look at how these are used to build chords and scales. In turn, this should work into the understanding of what scales work with what chords. For now, we’ll look at the Major and Natural Minor scales. This should give us a grounding before we dive in to other scale types in future.

The Major and Minor Scales; What intervals do they use?

To keep things simple, we’ll start with the C Major scale. It uses all natural notes and no sharps or flats. With this in mind, the C Major scale uses the following notes;

C – D – E – F – G – A – B

The intervals between each of these notes are;

P1 – M2 – M3 – P4 – P5 – M6 – M7

You’ll notice that there are no minor intervals in the major scale. So let’s see what the natural minor scale looks like in C.

C – D – Eb – F – G – Ab – Bb

And our intervals;

P1 – M2 – m3 – P4 – P5 – m6 – m7

Both major and natural minor scales share the intervals P1, M2, P4, and P5 but the 3 intervals that have come down a semitone are the M3, M6, and M7. These notes convey the tonal quality associated with the natural minor scale. Let’s take a look at how these two scales look on the fretboard.

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