Learning Intervals

Understanding intervals is crucial for understanding music, especially when learning to play by ear. But for many musicians, learning about intervals is tedious and doesn’t produce results.

The Learning Intervals module provides an effective, fun and above all, modern way to learn about intervals that’s quick and easy.

Learning Intervals will bring you fast improvement by helping you find a method that is fast, fun, modern, easy, relevant, delivers real results, and doesn’t require a large knowledge of musical theory.

Every musician learns in a slightly different way so you’ll be introduced to three methods for mastering intervals, which can be used separately or in tandem for more powerful results:

1. The Reference Songs method
   This is the classic approach but has one big problem: people don’t know the reference songs!

   This new Reference Songs method uses modern songs you’ll have heard on the radio to make the process accessible and easy.

2. Solfege (do re mi)
   A powerful framework for interval recognition and relative pitch. Contains a step-by-step process using examples and exercises.

3. The “Just Do It” Method
   The most flexible approach, and the one you’ll use long-term.

   Combine this with the other two for a truly powerful approach to mastering intervals.

Plus, Advice On:

• How you should listen for intervals
• How to use consonance and dissonance to distinguish intervals
• How interval recognition lets you sing confidently

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Contents

1. Introduction
2. What is an Interval?
3. How to Learn Intervals
4. Interval Reference Songs… That You’ve Actually Heard Of!
5. Learn Intervals with Solfège
6. When Learning Intervals,be Mindful of the Gap
7. Recognize Intervals with Consonance and Dissonance

Lesson Excerpt:

All great musicians rely on their sense of what’s called “relative pitch” to play and understand music.

“Relative pitch” is the ability to accurately hear the distances between notes.

The core skill of relative pitch is therefore “interval recognition”: being able to tell exactly how far apart a pair of notes are.

We give names to the different interval distances which leads to many musicians spending time honing their relative pitch by memorising the distinctive sound of each type of interval. If you want to learn music, practise interval recognition!

• If you want to know how to play songs by ear, or how to transcribe melodies.
• If you get frustrated by music sounding “blurry” and indecipherable however much progress you make on your instrument.
• If you think there’s something nifty about being able to sight-sing from a written score, or identify a doorbell as a major third.

… it’s time to learn your intervals!

There are three popular approaches – but before we dive into those, let’s make sure we have the basics clear.

Here’s a note:

Here’s another one:

Here’s the interval between them:

It can also go downwards:

Or both notes at the same time:

So each interval has three forms (ascending, descending, harmonic). Each form can take a bit of special attention to learn, but the fundamental sound of the interval is present in all three.

Now let’s look at each of the three approaches to learning to recognise these intervals…

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