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Chapter nine of Judy's harum scarum Hayden tutorial ---------------- Section One ----------------- Since not everyone has a lot of experience with music, I want to introduce some new definitions -- words, ideas and concepts -- in one compact chunk that you can refer to later, so you can gradually make sense out of the ideas as I go over new tunes. I'm putting musical things-to-do in each definition, so you can play around and get the feel as well as the sound of each new concept into your mind -- and if you forget them, you can always come back here and refresh the actual feel and sound, by doing these simple little musical things. In the next group of chapters, I will be revisiting all this stuff in the context of specific tunes, where I'll be working with finding comfortable fingerings and simple left hand accompaniments. I don't want to be making ANY assumptions about what anyone knows, so this will give us common ground -- common concepts, common words -- to work from. I'm going to use "The First Leaves of Spring" and "The Last Snows of Winter" from Chapters 1-5 as examples, so you might want to play through them and get them under your fingers again. ------------------------------------------------------------ Definition of "Interval" Play any two notes together. That's an interval. Intervals are for talking about how far notes are from one another -- a measure of distance. Two notes played together, or near one another, are making some kind of harmony, be it pleasant or unpleasant, and they are at some interval (some distance, small or large) from one another. Intervals are the building blocks of harmony. Some sound nice together, some sound kind of funky, all of the different intervals are used SOMEWHERE in some piece of music or other. Play a bunch of different pairs of notes together, and get a sense for the wide variety of sounds they make, like mixing up paint colors on a palette, or using different foods and spices together when you're cooking. ------------------------------------------------------ The Most Useful Types of Interval There is a small group of especially valuable intervals: unison octave major second minor second major third minor third fourth fifth --------------------------------------------------- Definition of Unison and Octave Unison is the same note played with itself: if you sing a G, and your friend sings the same note, that's a unison. If you sing a song with your friend, both of you singing the same notes, then you are singing "at the unison" or "in unison". If you have a high voice and your friend has a low voice, then you might end up singing the same notes, but an "octave" apart. Here's how those two intervals look on the Hayden. On right side of the Hayden, play a C, and the C above it -- use your button chart to find it. It's two rows up. That's an octave. Now, add another C -- play the low C on the left side. That's an octave from the low C on the right, and two octaves from the high C on the right. This works the same for all the other notes: two notes with the same name are always at an interval of an octave (except when they are a unison.) There's one C unison on all Haydens (that I know of): it's the high C on the left, played with the low C on the right. Play a bunch of different octaves -- G notes; B notes; A notes; notice the particular quality they have of sounding much more alike than notes at intervals that aren't octaves or unisons. Find the unisons on your instrument and play those. They sound even more like each other. ------------------------------------------------------ Definition of "major second" and "major third" Play C and D together, that's a "major second". Play D and E together, that's also a "major second", just like C and D. Now play C and E together, that's a "major third". Play those two different kinds of intervals a bunch of times, and notice how very different they sound: The "major second" is kind of funky-sounding, whether it's spelled CD or DE. The "major third" -- C E -- is, by comparison, quite pleasant. Get familiar with how different they sound, and also how they feel on the instrument: the major second is two adjacent buttons on the same row. The major third is the next button over, on the same row. Now play the first tune from this tutorial, "The First Leaves of Spring" -- remember that I wanted you to notice that it is a "major" sounding tune. Notice the pattern of the intervals -- sometimes the next note is a second away, sometimes a third. Noodle around with the tune and the intervals until you feel like you've got your head around them. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Making the distinction between "major" and "minor" Now let's get out that other first tune, "The Last Snows of Winter" -- which is a "minor tune", and play it. Play the first two notes together: D and E: that's a "major second" (they are next to each other on the row.) Now play the second two notes together: E and F. That interval is the other flavor of second, the "minor second". Play the two different intervals, and compare them. Notice how the "minor second" feels, where the buttons are, across the rows like that. Ok, now play the first and third notes of "The Last Snows..." together, the D and the F on the row above -- THAT is a "minor third" -- it has its own special quality. Compare that "minor third" with the "major third" from "The First Leaves..." which is C and E. Think about that difference, between major and minor: find things out there in the world that help you picture "minor" v.s. "major" -- sad/happy, or spicy/sweet, or lugubrious/manic, or pensive/silly, or whatever seems like good words and images to you. It's the different flavors of intervals that give these two tunes their distinctive sound: Major, v.s. Minor. That's one of the engaging things about music: there's all the these different kinds of intervals, some wildly different, as different as jalapeno and vanilla, salt and sweet, bitter and savory -- while other intervals are just a little bit different, like the difference between sweet peppers and sweet apples, or jalapeno and cayenne pepper. It helps, learning tunes, to have a way of referring to all these bits and pieces that tunes are made out of -- not just the notes themselves, but the relationships between the notes. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Ok, that is ENOUGH for one chapter! Spend some time noodling around with these new concepts, and find them in any other tunes you might be working on. The next chapter will be about the fourths and the fifths, and some stuff about how they work to make music more interesting. And after that I'll get back to exploring tunes and figuring out good fingerings and simple left hand accompaniments.

Chapter ten of Judy's harum scarum Hayden tutorial rats... it edited my title and made it say Intervals Ii instead of Intervals II --- and I don't know how to fix it. ---------------- Section One ----------------- The fourth, and the fifth -- this is about two intervals with notes a little further apart from each other than the seconds and thirds. First, let's find a "fifth" in a familiar tune. Play "The First Leaves of Spring" -- play the tune in your right hand, and the accompaniment in your left hand. Play it a couple times, get it firmly in hand. Now just play the left hand, very slowly. The first two notes -- C to E -- make a major third. The next two notes -- E to F -- make a minor second.... (hmm, what's that doing here? I'll get into that later...) The next two notes -- F to G -- well, there's a major second -- (remembering that a major second is two buttons along a row) and then the next two notes -- G to C -- that big leap there, across the rows, is a "fifth." Get that one into your head: notice things about it, like how it feels on the buttons, and how it has its own sound, different from the major third, different from the minor second and the major second. Especially notice how it can be made up out of several smaller intervals: you could count it out by seconds (both kinds): C D (major second) plus D E (major second) plus E F (minor second) plus F G (major second) a shorthand for that would be C D (M2) D E (M2) E F (m2) F G (M2) and shorthand for the fifth C G (p5) for perfect fifth (there are other kinds...) Here's another way of counting out the perfect fifth: C E (major third) plus E G (minor third) or, in shorthand: C E (M3) E G (m3) (I'm going to use that shorthand a lot in the future.) Noodle around with that for a bit. --------------------------------- Ok, and now for the fourth. Play C and F together. That's a fourth. Compare it with the fifth: how it sounds, how it feels, where it is on the instrument. Add up smaller intervals to get the fourth: C D (M2) D E (M2) E F (m2) or ---- C E (M3) E F (m2) or EVEN, if you want to get really complicated.... subtract a Major Second from a Perfect Fifth, like this: C G (p5) minus G F (M2) = C F Noodle around with that -- find fourths in the tunes you know, and come up with some way of describing their sound to yourself. Fourths and fifths sound a lot alike; in fact, they are very closely related to one another: C up to F is a fourth, but F up to C is a fifth. Hmmmmmm... that could get confusing! The difference is this: how many notes of the scale fall between the notes, so C d e F is a fourth, but F g a b C is a fifth. C d e F F g a b C --------------------------------------------------------- Having mentioned "notes of the scale" -- here's one more chunk of verbiage. C D E F G Those 5 notes are the first five notes of the C Major scale -- as well as all the notes used by both hands playing "The First Leaves of Spring." If I number them, thus: 1 2 3 4 5 C D E F G C D major second C E major third C F perfect fourth C G perfect fifth that gives you another perspective on why these things are named this way. Here's the picture for the first five notes of the D minor scale, which is what "The Last Snows..." is written in: 1 2 3 4 5 D E F G A D E major second D F minor third D G perfect fourth D A perfect fifth Here's some more things to notice and noodle around with: You can make a major third (M3) out of two intervals: C D (M2) D E (M2) C E (M3) and a minor third (m3) out of two intervals: D E (M2) E F (m2) D F (m3) If you're feeling really comfortable with all this and want a bit of a challenge -- notice the location of the minor second in both scales, the C major and the D minor. It's a small interval with a disproportionately large amount of influence. Where it falls in the scale makes the difference between the sound of major and minor -- even though both scales use it, the place they put it is what makes the different sound. That happens to be a favorite topic of mine, I'll bring it up again. ------------------------------------------------------------- There's getting to be a lot of information here, all these different intervals and how they sound; noodle around with it, and if it's feeling like a lot, that's ok. Over time I'll be pointing these out again and again, and they will become more and more comfortable to you. But take some time here with "The First Leaves of Spring" to notice each of the different intervals, and get a strong memory built up of where they show up, in each place in the tune. If you do that, you'll always have this little basic map to come back to. If you're feeling comfortable with this stuff, move it around on the instrument. Play "The First Leaves..." starting on different notes, and notice how very much things stay the same -- the buttons are at the same distance no matter where you start (unless you fall off the edge of the button layout!) --------------------------------------------------------------- What I've done for you, and also for myself, is to give you as small a chunk of music theory-and-terminology as I could, while covering enough ground to have a useful set of common language-about-music. I want to be able to point out features about these tunes that I love, and which I think make them do their thing so especially beautifully; and I want to give you some concepts to make learning the tunes easier -- give you more of that "Oh, I see how that fits together!" and "how that works!" which makes it all a lot more interesting and fun. ------------------ Section Two ------------------------------ One of these days I'll get back to inventing bigger challenges for people who want a stretch; I'm going to try and make the stretches be just past the most basic stuff that I present, so that different people moving at different paces have material to work with that feels comfortable, and comfortably challenging.