Understanding the Guitar Through Intervals

The usual approach to learning how to play the guitar is to memorize chord and scale shapes until you can put together a song or two. For years, people have been taught to go straight to the chord charts when beginning their journey through guitar playing, and while this may be a good way to quickly master a few basic concepts, to take full advantage of the guitar requires a different approach.

The problem with the usual path that music students of chord based instruments are set on, is that it skips over an essential area of music: intervals. Intervals are the distance between notes. In effect, they are the smallest building blocks of sound. The western music system contains twelve different intervals, of which all chords and scales are made.

The chords and scales that you find on a guitar chart are nothing more than collections of intervals. So why learn chords before understanding the intervals that create them?

For some reason, intervals have been completely ignored by most teachers and students of guitar and piano, the two instruments that require knowledge of them the most. With other instruments, intervals may not be as important.

On a clarinet, for example, there is only one place to play each note, with one or two specific fingerings. This means that knowing the note names and memorizing their fingerings will get you far on the instrument.

The piano, and especially the guitar, are different. These instruments have no fixed fingerings for specific notes, and the notes can be found in many different places. The piano has white and black keys, which means that chord shapes cannot be moved and stay completely the same. On guitar, however, they can.

The guitar is arranged unlike any other instrument, so it needs to be approached unlike any other instrument. The complexities of the guitar fretboard and the mobility of note relationships are what create the need for an understanding of intervals.

What this means is that a chord played on the first fret of the instrument can be moved to the fifth fret and it will be the same type of chord, just in a different key. However, if you move that chord to a higher set of strings, and one of the notes crosses over the G and B string, the fingering will need to change.

The reason for this is the tuning of the guitar. The G and B strings are a third apart, where as the rest of the strings are a fourth apart. Because of this, the amount of chord and scale shapes necessary to play more advanced material on the guitar becomes immense, and this is where the interval approach comes in.

Instead of learning countless different scale patterns for each type of scale in order to be able to play it, learn the intervals and construct whatever type of scale you want. When you can identify the related intervals in any direction on the guitar, you are no longer limited to the chord and scale shapes you have memorized from guitar charts.

So how do you go about learning the intervals on the fretboard? First, start by learning the octaves. Once you can jump between octaves and recognize them across the fretboard, you will have separated the guitar into groups of notes similar to how the piano it set up. This will make it easier to identify and work with the intervals in between the octaves all over the guitar.

After you have a solid grasp for getting from any root note to any other given interval, start putting them together in groups to form different scales and chords. You will only be able to slowly work your way through a scale at first, but this will get quicker with practice until you can burn through any scale you can think of.

Your ear will develop with your fingers under this method, as you will learn to recognize the sounds of the different intervals and automatically move to where you need to go.

The guitar is a more complicated instrument than most people will admit. Though millions of people can pick it up and learn a few songs, it takes a disciplined approach to truly understand it that goes beyond guitar chord charts. In order to unlock your creativity with the instrument, focus on the intervals before you get to chords and scales, and you’ll find that there are no limits to your playing.