Hello everyone this is Chris Liepe from JamPlay.com.
Lesson eight in the beginners lesson series.
We are going to be looking at the basics of intervals within the major scale.
Intervals can be quite confusing they are really reduced though to the distance between two notes.
The most basic intervals are either a whole step or a half step and we've talked about this in other lessons.
A whole step just to review is the distance of two frets.
A half step is the distance of one fret.
As we've learned in previous lessons a major scale is built of a series of whole steps and half steps.
There are other intervals that commonly make up chords, different scales, they're all over music that are present natively in the major scale.
We're going to take a look at those today.
Before we really get into it let's take a look at the scale we're going to be using to look at our intervals.
A few lessons back we looked at a single string G major scale and you'll remember it looks like this.
So the major scale is built up of a series of whole steps and half steps if we play it linearly.
If we look at the intervals between different notes starting from the root which in this case is G.
We are going to get different names for all of these intervals.
Let's talk about the root.
In this case it's G as I just said but the root is always going to be the base note for which the interval is built on.
In this case when we are going through and finding some of these intervals we're always going to use G as our root.
Our root could be any note it's just going to be the lowest note or the note that the interval is built on.
The distance between the first note which is our root and the second note in a G major scale in addition to it being called a whole step.
It is also called a major second.
The distance between the root G and the third note of the major scale is called the major third.
These names can be pretty obvious because we are just simply assigning numbers to the notes we're playing.
Major third.
Now the fourth note is not going to be called a major fourth.
The fourth note is going to be called a perfect fourth.
So from one to four is called a perfect four.
In this case from G to C is a perfect fourth.
We're going from one to the five, that's called a perfect fifth.
From one to six is called a major sixth.
From one to seven is called a major seven.
From one to eight or one to one is called the octave.