Theory Thursday: Intervals Part 2

Intervals, part 2

The whole-step and half-step intervals we talked about last week are what I call raw intervals. They can be used to define the space between any two musical tones. If the space is bigger than a whole-step, you can refer to the space in either the number of half-steps, or the number of whole-steps + half-steps.

For example, the space between A and C is either "3 half-steps" or "a step and a half". As a guitarist, I tend to prefer using half-steps because they correspond directly to frets. For example, C is 3 half-steps above A, and likewise C is 3 frets above A.

This is all well and good, but what about intervals like A to F? It starts to get cumbersome to say "8 half-steps above A". We need a way to refer to a relationship between tones that doesn't leave us counting frets all day long.

The relationship between tones is still an interval, but we need a different type of interval that makes the relationships between tones more manageable, but still descriptive.

To accomplish this, we need to review the numbers we introduced a few weeks ago:

TONE: A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A etc.
   #: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 etc.

Just as each tone in our A minor scale has a number, these numbers correspond with a different type of interval called a harmonic interval.

Following the numbers of the scale, the harmonic interval from A to B is a 2nd, A to C is a 3rd, A to D is a 4th, A to E is a 5th, A to F is a 6th, and A to G is a 7th. Make sense?

With these harmonic intervals, we're not as explicit about whole and half steps. What we're more focused on are the relationships between members of our scale. So as you may have guessed, these harmonic intervals exist beyond relationships with A.

The following table is a list of the interval relationships between "A" and the rest of the A minor scale: Now here's the twist... Every tone in the scale has these types of interval relationships.

START: A B C D E F G
  2nd: B C D E F G A
  3rd: C D E F G A B
  4th: D E F G A B C
  5th: E F G A B C D
  6th: F G A B C D E
  7th: G A B C D E F

For example, starting from B, B to C is a 2nd, B to D is a 3rd, etc.

Review

• What is the harmonic interval between A and E?
• What is the harmonic interval between C and D?
• What is the harmonic interval between F and B?
• What is the harmonic interval between B and F?

Theory Thursday: Intervals Part 1

Intervals, part 1

Leaping way back to our chromatic scale, it's time to explore another fundamental concept of music: the interval. An interval is the space between two musical tones. We're going to start with the smallest interval, but first, here's the chromatic scale again, but I shrank the tones with two names to make it more readable:

A A#/B♭ B C C#/D♭ D D#/E♭ E F F#/G♭ G G#/A♭ A

The space between any tone and its adjacent neighbor -- either above or below -- is the smallest musical interval -- there's nothing in between. This smallest interval is called either a semitone or half-step.

NOTE: I learned half-step before I learned semitone, so I'll use the term half-step, just out of my own comfort. Just be aware that half-step is the same as semitone.

So now you know that a half-step is the space between each of the tones in the chromatic scale. The half-step is also the interval from each fret on the fretboard to the next higher or lower fret.

For example, on any of the strings, if you start on the 5th fret, the 4th fret would be a half-step LOWER and the 6th fret would be a half-step HIGHER than the 5th fret. Make sense?

So as you may have guessed, if you skip over an adjacent tone, either higher or lower, the resulting interval is a whole-step. Half + half = whole, after all. Also, just as a half-step is also a semitone, a whole-step is also a whole-tone.

So using the same example of starting on the 5th fret, a whole-step higher would be the 7th fret, and a whole-step lower would be the 3rd fret. Got it?

Now let's look both the A minor scale and chromatic scale again. I've underlined and emboldened the tones that make up the A minor scale so you can see how it is a subset of the chromatic scale.

Chromatic: A A#/B♭ B C C#/D♭ D D#/E♭ E F F#/G♭ G G#/A♭ A

A Minor: A B C D E F G A

We've already seen that the interval between EVERY adjacent tone in the chromatic scale is a half-step, but that's not the case at all with the A minor scale. If you look at the bold & underlined tones from the A minor scale, you can see that the A minor scale starts on A, then whole-step to B, half-step to C, whole-step to D, whole-step to E, half-step to F, whole-step to G, then finally another whole-step back to A. Every time you skip over a tone, that's a whole-step.

If we use W for whole-step and H for half-step, the pattern for the A minor scale looks like:

W H W W H W W

Exercise A: Review of A minor scale

Take a look at the A minor scale exercise from a couple weeks ago (listed below), and look how that pattern of whole and half steps from above corresponds to the fret positions of the scale.

Exercise B: Shifting the Minor Scale around

What do you think might happen if you were to take the pattern of fret intervals that you use for the A minor scale, and start on a different fret? For review, here's the A minor scale from a couple weeks ago, in the three tone per string pattern:

What if you were to start on the 8th fret instead of the 5th fret, but play the same pattern, just 3 frets higher?

Without necessarily knowing what tones you were just playing, you just played a C minor scale!

Wait, what?!?

That's right! EVERY minor scale uses the same pattern of intervals:

W H W W H W W

Whichever tone you choose to start from becomes "1" (the tonal center) and the rest of the scale falls into place, solely based on the pattern of intervals.

That's pretty crazy, right?

Well, let's not get too ahead of ourselves. We're going to stay focused on the A minor scale, but I just wanted to give you a quick taste of how relatively easy it will be to apply what you know about the A minor scale to the other minor scales.

Review

• What is an interval?
• What are two common names for the smallest interval?
• What are two common names for the interval you would get if you were to combine two of the intervals from the previous question?
• What is the pattern of intervals for the A minor scale?

Tech Tuesday: Recording Heavy Guitars

Hello Awesome Internet People!

I know this subject has kinda been beaten to death, buried, exhumed, and beaten some more, but today I want to talk a little about recording heavy sounding guitars. This is a topic that is largely like the use of salt in cooking: everyone has their own tastes.

However, regardless of our specific tastes, there are a few techniques we can all use to make our guitars sound just a bit better.

1. Turn down your gain!

When we think of metal, progressive, or even hard rock guitar riffs, we usually think of tube-melting distortion coming from high-gain amplifiers with their volume cranked to 11. This is often the perfect formula for great tone in a live setting. In the studio, the game changes. While in a live setting, our teenage alter ego tells us we want to crush the internal organs of the first 50 rows with devastating volume, in the studio, the goal is a focused, punchy, articulated tone. The best way to increase articulation and focus is to cut your gain down, possibly as low as 50% or even less!

It may sound counter-intuitive, but try it out! I was skeptical until I tried it.

2. Add more midrange!

One of the very common characteristics of heavy guitar music is a crunch guitar sound with the mid-range frequencies (~250-500Hz) cut by 3 - 12dB. It's a very tight, machine-gun-like tone that is perfect for playing brutal metal riffs. The problem is that scooping out the mids means getting rid of the frequency range where the bulk of the guitar's frequency range lies. Lower than 250Hz is the realm of bass guitar, kick drum, and low toms. Higher than 500 Hz is the realm of snare attack, synthesizer pads, cymbals, and wailing guitar solos.

If nothing else, reduce the amount of "scooping" in the mids, and your guitar parts will instantly be more "present" in the mix.

3. Play it again, Sam!

Boosting the mids and cutting the gain can unfortunately have the result of thinning out your tone a bit. An instant "thickener" is to double each of the rhythm guitar parts, and then pan each part to the left and right of the stereo field. I don't like to do a full 100% left & right -- more like a 50-75% left & right so that there's a little bit of overlap in the center.

4. Avoid eviction!

With tube/valve amps, the sweetest tones are produced by an amp that is turned up VERY loud. I have a Marshall amp that is so loud that even with earplugs, I couldn't handle turning it up past 3. If I had gone any louder, I'm betting a SWAT team would have shown up. What to do when you have a home studio? Speaker cabinet emulation!

My Mesa Boogie Mark 5:25 amp comes with a speaker cabinet emulator output built right into the amp itself. There are also a number of third-party devices that can sit between your speaker cabinet and amp head providing the same sort of emulated output. Both Mesa Boogie and Suhr have very well-rated devices. My entire album "Legacy" was recorded using the Mesa Boogie "CabClone" port from my amp, and I've had quite a number of positive comments on my tone.

The emulators enable you to crank up the volume on the amp and not have to worry about microphones, room acoustics/sound-proofing, or trips in the back of a police car.

IMPORTANT: With tube/valve amps, it is essential that your amp have a properly rated speaker cabinet plugged in whenever the amp is powered on. You can severely damage your amp by powering it on without a proper load on the speaker cabinet output. That said, many/most of the cabinet emulators on the market today provide an appropriate load for your amp, so often you don't even need to plug the cabinet in, giving you the option to record in near silence.

Here's a live play-through of my song "The Descent" from my album "Legacy" (available here). This recording uses all of these tips. I played the guitar part three times (left, center, right), and the video features me playing the third time through. Enjoy!

Theory Thursday: Scales & Numbers

Scales & Numbers

You likely decided to become a musician because hearing your favorite songs causes you to uncontrollably tap your foot or wiggle some part of your body to the beat, and even if you're not ready to admit it to others, you know that the right song at the right time has even caused your eyes to well-up with tears or caused your heart to skip a beat.

So the last thing you probably want to hear is that you often have to use numbers when communicating musical ideas. Don't worry though, this focus on numbers isn't about turning an art-form that is rich with emotion into some sort of clinical and calculated science (not that there's anything wrong with science). This is about learning a universal way of putting names to the relationships that musical sounds have with one another.

In music, we use numbers in a lot of different contexts, so it can be challenging to keep things straight. To help you keep these different numeric contexts organized in your mind, I'll try to present these different contexts as clearly as possible. Just remember that a lot of concepts in music theory are a bit of a chicken & egg scenario where foundational concepts can sometimes interdepend upon each other. If you don't understand a concept at first, hang in there and try to work through it. It could be that the following concept provides the clarity you need.

As you learned in the A minor scale exercise from last week, scales repeat their pattern of tones, so the tones A through G of the A minor scale actually look more like:

A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A (etc.)

Not too bad so far, right?

One of the ways musicians make it easier to relate what they know about one minor scale to another is by using numbers. Because our A minor scale starts on the tone A (hence the name "A" minor), "A" gets the number "1". So following that, we get:

TONE: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | A |

   #: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 1 |

So to clarify: using numbers and the A minor scale, the first scale degree (i.e., the tonal center) is "A", the second is "B", third is "C", etc., up to the seventh degree being "G". This type of numbering is the foundation for a lot of future concepts, so it's very important that you start to memorize the tones and their corresponding numbers.

Review

• If you were going up the A minor scale, fill in the 5 tones in this sequence:

A B C D E F _ _ _ _ _

• If you were going down the A minor scale, fill in the 5 tones in this sequence:

C B A G F E _ _ _ _ _

• In the A minor scale, which tone is represented by the number 5?
• In the A minor scale, which number represents the tone C?
• Which number represents the tonal center of the A minor scale?
• What is the corresponding tone?

Theory Thursday: The A minor scale

Chromatic Scale Recap

So you already know from the chromatic scale in the previous chapter, that a scale is just a collection of tones.

The chromatic scale is a bit of an oddball in that is really has no beginning or end; it's just EVERYTHING, and it doesn't even matter which tone you start from. Pick a tone and play every single tone up the neck until you've started repeating.

Review: Chromatic Scale

While we do need to know what the chromatic scale is, you can see it's not terribly musical or useful. Let's just agree right here and now that if you understand that the chromatic scale is all of the 12 tones, you already know enough about the chromatic scale.

Let's move on to something more interesting!

The A Natural Minor Scale

Before you get worried that this course is going to turn into a silly list of useless scales, I want to make it clear that we're going to focus on ONE single scale for quite some time. This new scale is called the A natural minor scale — for now we'll just call it the A minor scale. In time, we'll bring back the "natural", but for now it's not important.

One of the characteristics of the A minor scale that makes it quite different from the chromatic scale is the concept of the tonal center. The tonal center of a scale is the most important tone in the scale. Out of the collection of tones that make up the scale, the tonal center is the tone that our ears want to hear the most.

The tonal center for the A minor scale is "A" — hence the name. If we were to talk about any other scale, for example, D major, F♯ lydian, or G minor, the tonal centers for these scales would be D, F♯, and G, respectively. Scales are named after their tonal centers. The chromatic scale has no tonal center, thus it doesn't have a tone in its name.

Unlike the 12 tones of the chromatic scale, the A minor scale has only 7 tones. If you've ever recited the English alphabet, you already know A minor:

A B C D E F G

That's it! No sharps, no flats, no tones with more than one name, it's just a repeating set of the tones A through G. If you've got a keyboard handy, it's just the white keys.

On the guitar, we're going to learn to play the A minor scale a few different ways. Our long term goal is to be able to play the tones in the A minor scale all over the fretboard of the guitar. But for now, we're going to learn two different ways of playing the A minor scale.

Exercise A: Three tones per string A minor scale starting from 5th position

In the preceding exercise, the A minor scale repeats once, and the tonal center (A) is indicated by accent marks (>) on the note heads.



Exercise B: A minor scale laterally on each string

Exercise B is also the A minor scale, as it falls on each of the 6 strings. The diagonal slash indicates where you should slide positions. I recommend you use your pointer, ring, and pinky fingers for the two groups of 3 tones — and use your pointer finger to guide you as you glide from one position to the next — and use your pointer and ring fingers for the highest to tones on each string. So on each string it will go like: "pointer, ring, pinky — slide — pointer, ring, pinky — slide — pointer, ring".

Lesson Review

• What is a scale?
• What is a tonal center?
• How can you tell what the tonal center is of a given scale?
• What tones are in the A minor scale?

Theory Thursday: Your First Scale!

Recap

From last week, we learned that tones are the most basic unit of musical sound and there are 12 unique tones that are the building blocks for music. We also learned that the "♭" symbol is pronounced flat and it means lower than, and also that the "♯" symbol is pronounced sharp and it means higher than.

Scales

We're still just barely scratching the surface here, but we're going to dive right in to the deep end by learning our first scale. But first, what the heck is a scale?

A scale is a collection of tones.

The first scale we're going to learn is called the chromatic scale. This scale is simply the collection of all 12 tones. You don't need to memorize the individual tones in the chromatic scale (not yet anyway), but I do want you to memorize the term "chromatic scale", and that it means all 12 musical tones.

The following exercise will help you to hear what the chromatic scale sounds like. If you are unfamiliar with tablature notation, please see last week's lesson that explains how to read this notation. After you play this exercise as written, try playing the same thing on each of the strings on your instrument. Even though you're starting from different strings, you should notice that the chromatic scale sounds very similar on every string.

Exercise 1A: Play the chromatic scale (click to enlarge).

Now the reality is that the chromatic scale isn't terribly useful. It's literally the entire set of tones! Normally, a piece of music will use a smaller collection of tones -- anywhere from 5 to 8 tones. We'll start looking at more musical scales starting next week.

Review

• What is a tone?
• How do you pronounce "G♭"?
• How do you pronounce "D♯"?
• How many tones are there in total?
• What is a scale?
• What is the chromatic scale?
• How many tones are in the chromatic scale?
• Play the chromatic scale on your instrument, starting from an open string.