Intervals

Intervals are the distances between notes, and they are the building blocks of every scale, chord and riff you'll ever play. This chapter teaches guitar intervals two ways at once: as shapes you can see on the fretboard and as sounds you can recognize by ear.

You begin with the most stable pair, the octave and the perfect fifth, and discover that root, fifth and octave together are the power chord. Next come major and minor thirds, the single interval that decides whether a chord sounds happy or sad. The last lesson fills in the rest: the hymn-like fourth, the sweet major sixth, and the two sevenths, from the bluesy flat seventh to the dreamy major seventh, ending with the C major scale harmonized in sixths.

Every tab exercise plays in the browser with a click, so you can play an interval, then sing it back. Once you hear intervals instead of just counting frets, building any chord from a single root becomes easy.