Modern Saint

Having fun with Intervals – Part 1: The minor 2nd (m2)

While everyone wants to learn the greatest lick or the modes of the major scale right out of the starter’s gate, most players fail to recognize and learn the basic fundamentals of music – the Interval.

Simply defined, an Interval (according to Webster’s) is:

1. The distance between things.
2. The difference in pitch between two notes distance between two points.

While it is true that there are more definitions to the word, these are the two that we will be concerned with.

Looking at your guitar, we call the distance between two adjacent frets as a “minor 2nd” or “m2”.

1. Using you first finger, place it on the 5th fret of 5th string and sound the note “D”.
2. Sing the note.

• It doesn’t matter whether you sing well or not. We are learning the fundamentals of aural, verbal and touch. We are using three of our senses to learn this.
• If you can’t verbally sing the pitch, you will have difficulty hearing it your head so this is an absolute must.
• Do not worry if your voice is not that great, you are merely matching pitches. Besides this will help both your inner voice as well as your outer voice.

Game play
Now that you have a firm idea about the minor 2nd interval, how good are you at singing the next pitch.

1. Here are the rules
2. Play the following listed notes.
3. After each note played, sing the note followed by the m2 above the note played. Confirm that the correct tone has been played by playing it on your guitar.
4. Repeat number one.
5. After each note played, sing the note followed by the m2 below the note played. Confirm that the correct tone has been played by playing it on your guitar.

The Bonus Round
Now it is your turn.

1. Choose random notes on the guitar and play.
2. Now sing both the above and below minor 2 internals.
3. Close your eyes and perform number 1 and 2 randomly

Practice about 5 minutes a day so that it becomes second nature.

You are now well on the way!