intervals

The keyboard offers a nice way of visualizing intervals (and many other relationships) which is helpful if you're ever having any trouble trying to remember and internalize what they are.

In the following I've taken the basic keyboard, rotated it 90° counter-clockwise (thanks to Photoshop) so that now "up" in pitch is now "up" vertically. What we're going to do is look at all of the intervals of a C major scale as they relate to C. One cool feature of this is that if we look at the intervals ascending from C they are all either perfect or major. If we measure descending from C all of the intervals are either perfect or minor. On the keyboard I've colored blue the reference C. Since we're measuring always from C I've just indicated to the right of the note name the interval. Go ahead, click on the image...it'll enlarge.


So let's see how the keyboard can make the intervals easy to "see" by examining the minor and major 2nds. The minor 2nd is the least amount of distance you can travel on the keyboard without remaining on the same note: there are no keys in between the 2 in question (here in our example C and B). In the major 2nd there is one key in between the notes (C and D). If you know any Latin you'll recall that minor and major are comparative adjectives: they mean "smaller" and "bigger" respectively. And we can easily see why the major 2nd is the "bigger" interval: it takes up more space in terms of keys. On a guitar it will take up more frets. And acoustically the note of the major 2nd will always be a bigger number (in Hertz -- i.e. it will vibrate more times a second) than a minor 2nd related to the same reference note.

One last thing: If you examine and really absorb all of the above intervals you'll notice that almost all of the possible number of keys are covered. E.g. from C up to B is a major 7th, which is 11 keys away from C; from C down to D is a minor 7th, 10 keys. From C up to E is a major 3rd (4 keys distant) and from C down to A is a minor 3rd (3 keys distant). On our chart there is no interval that corresponds to being 6 keys away from C. This is actually a famous interval, and will complete all of the intervals within an octave, and it has several names. If you are thinking about C to F# it is called an Augmented 4th (sometimes +4 or #4) ; C up to Gb is called a Diminished 5th (sometimes b5). It is also known as a tritone because it is made up of 3 (tri) whole steps (tones). Just using the white keys of the piano this interval is found in F - B (because six keys is exactly half of the octave's 12 it is symmetric: from F up or down you'll land on a B if you travel six keys).