Interval Theory for Guitar

A strange phenomenon of guitar instruction across all stages is the fact that intervals are rarely talked about. Most teachers start their students on the basic chords and scales and hope that the students can understand them, but in order to really understand chords and scales, you have to understand the pieces that make them sound the way they do: intervals.

One of the problems with the usual route of learning the guitar is that chords and scales are memorized simply as shapes on the fretboard. This is the method taught by most online guitar lessons and it reduces the incentive to take the time to understand theory. Even if theory is emphasized while teaching them, it is too easy to just get chords and scales under your fingers and move on.

While this enables many people to make progress at an impressive rate when starting out, the skills they develop are deceiving. Later on, if a player who has only really memorized a lot of chord and scale shapes wants to tackle more complex types of music and harmony, they will find that these memorized shapes just get in their way, and that their lack of theoretical understanding of the guitar fretboard leaves them lost.

In order to prevent this from occurring, an understanding of guitar intervals must be gained while learning other concepts. Instead of focusing on guitar chord and scale shapes, a beginning player should be taught the movable shapes of the twelve different intervals.

To accomplish this, a good exercise is to focus on one type of interval at a time. Start with the octaves and learn all of the possible octave intervals on the guitar. After you have those down focus on both major and minor seconds. Do this for all of the other intervals, making sure to take your time and really get them down well. Once you have gone through all of them it should be easy to see the guitar fretboard almost like a piano, with octave groups of intervals repeating all the way throughout.

After you have all of the intervals memorized, work on putting them together in simple chords and scales. Try not to rely on visual patterns too much, except for the intervals that you can recognize. Come up with as many different shapes for playing these chords and scales as you can. With intervals, you can really start to see how many different options the guitar affords you that you were not taking advantage of before.

Not only will learning the guitar theory by intervals help you understand the instrument, and music in general, better, but it will develop your hearing very effectively as well. Learning those intervals one at a time will get the sound of them in your ear, and this can help later on to make you a better improviser and composer.

If you are a guitar teacher or a player starting on the instrument, or even an experienced player looking for possible problems in your playing, try focusing on guitar interval theory for a while. Breaking the music down into its smallest parts is the key to understanding it, and once you have attained this understanding of intervals, you will have a solid base to work from that will give you limitless possibilities on the guitar.