2

Intervals

In This Chapter

◆Changing pitches with sharps and flats

◆Understanding half steps and whole steps

◆Counting the intervals between notes

◆Using major, minor, perfect, diminished, and augmented intervals

Lesson 2, Track 11

In the previous chapter you learned all about musical pitches: how they’re
named and how they’re presented on a staff. In this chapter we’ll go beyond
that by looking at how pitches can be raised and lowered, and how you can
describe the differences between pitches in terms of intervals.

To make things as simple as possible, we’ll discuss these pitches and intervals in
terms of the C Major scale—that is, the notes between one C on the piano key-
board and the next C above that. The basic concepts can be applied to any
scale, as you’ll see; it’s just that sticking to a single scale makes it all a little eas-
ier to grasp. (And, at least on the piano, the C Major scale is the easiest scale to
work with—it’s all white keys!)

Be Sharp—or Be Flat

As you learned in Chapter 1, the lines and spaces on a music staff correspond
exactly to the white keys on a piano. But what about those black keys? Where
are they on the staff?

When we say there are 7 main pitches in a Western musical scale (A through
G), that’s a bit of an oversimplification: There actually are 12 possible notes in
an octave, with some of them falling between the 7 main pitches.

Just count the keys between middle C and next C on the piano—including the
black keys, but without counting the second C. If you counted correctly, you
counted 12 keys, which represent 12 pitches; each pitch/key is the same interval
away from the previous pitch/key.

Chapter