Let’s talk about intervals

In my last post, I talked about removing the fingerings from all of the scale, arpeggio and pentatonic shapes throughout The Efficient Guitarist. The fingerings either fall into one of two categories—you either can figure them out for yourself, or you’re the kind of guitarist who does their own thing for fingerings. The intervals have always been the most important thing to me as an educator, but they’re only going to matter to you if understand their power. Take a look at this example of the minor pentatonic scale with intervals:

Very few players are aware of every single interval they play, in every key, in every scale, anywhere on the neck. While it’s an impressive feat to be able to do so, it’s simply not practical for most players to learn it because few see the value in it and it feels more like math than music.

The only reason to learn the intervals is to make new musical sounds from what you’ve already learned.

The Efficient Guitarist book one is all about setting up the primary musical sounds: major and minor. I do so by teaching the pentatonic, arpeggio and full scale for both the major and minor tonalities. Learning the entirety of book one wouldn’t give you a complete set of tools—there’s still a lot to learn about modes and other arpeggios in order to play comfortably in every musical scenario. I’m going to teach you about everything as a derivative of major and minor. In order for that to be successful, you have to really understand your intervals, but you don’t need to memorize them all over the neck as long as you can reference them in the book as you go. If you do learn them as you go along, more power to you. 

For example, what’s easier: learning an entirely need set of scale diagrams for the phrygian mode, or taking every 2nd note (or second interval) in your minor scale and lowering it by one fret? I hope you said that lowering all the 2nd notes was easier, because it was much easier for me. The only way that I’ve really been able to learn the guitar is by deriving new things from things I already knew. I learned major and minor early on and then derived the rest as I went along. When I’ve talked to great players and educators, there’s an amazing consensus that learning the guitar this way is the way to go, especially because guitar is such a visual/shape-based instrument. 

I’ll give you one last anecdote before I go. When I was younger, I had a book of 25,000 chords for the guitar. I tried several times to be a disciplined student and make a goal to learn one new chord voicing a week, no matter what it was. After about a month, I realized that I was learning chords that I didn’t really understand, nor did I know when and where I could use them. I abandoned the idea until a few years later. Once I was in college and I learned about music theory, I realized that I needed to apply the theory to the fingerboard in order for it to mean something to me. I stopped thinking about minor chords as a different set of fingerings to learn and started thinking about minor chords as major chords with a lowered 3rd. In order to really make that work, I needed to know where my 3rds were… You get the rest. There were a finite number of derivations from major, and I didn’t really have to learn more than a handful of things about theory to be dangerous on the guitar. It clearly made it easier for me, but it wasn’t free. The brunt of the cost was upfront in learning the intervals to the shapes I already knew, but in the end, it made everything easier, and since the intervals were musically universal to all instruments, I was able to study from other teachers besides guitar teachers because I had a common language to use.

I’m pretty sure that everyone reading this has opened a book of scales and chords and was blown away at the possibilities. “How will I ever learn this many different forms?” you may ask, and I’m here to tell you that you won’t need to. There’s a better way, and I’m so excited to show it to you through The Efficient Guitarist.