Guitar Interval Map

What are Intervals?

If you're not sure what an interval is, you will probably want to review how intervals work before continuing with this lesson.

Understanding the Intervals on Guitar

If you want to understand the note relationships on the guitar fretboard, one of the best things you can do is to learn all of the guitar intervals across the neck. A helpful way to do this is to create your own "chart" or "map" to write down all of the intervals you encounter.

There are two different systems for understanding the guitar fretboard: first, that of memorizing the notes and knowing which you intend to play. Second, that of learning about the relationships between notes and knowing which relationships you aim to create.

Most guitar players learn by relationships. It's important to know the notes, but knowing the relationships between them is a logical step to take because of the instrument's layout.

One great way to begin visualizing these relationships is to select a note on the fifth string and study all of the possible intervals in relation to that note as the root.

Consider the following example: the note below, ("C"), is the root of some chord or of some interval. We want to create a "map" to all of the other notes. What interval do we find between the root note and the question mark?

(Answer)

What are the two notes? The root is C. The question mark is G. Since G is the fifth note of the C major scale, we can say G is a fifth above C. When the root is on the A string, a perfect fifth can be found two frets higher on the D string. This is always true.

If you wanted to know what this note was, you could also try finding the same note on the fifth string (the string of the root) and then figuring out what note it is by counting up the scale as before.

Fill in the rest of the notes in the first example by yourself.

Root On The Sixth String

We can also repeat the exercise by moving the root, C, to the sixth string.

Most of these intervals will be the same. Write them out yourself with a pencil, and then cross-check your answers with the answer key.

Exercises

1. First, fill in the intervals that occur in the major scale: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, etc.
2. Fill in the gaps by using the higher tone as a reference. For instance, the tone a half step below the fifth will be a ♭5 or flatted fifth.
3. Using both of the examples above: choose notes at random and attempt to name their interval from the root quickly. Repeat until you've named all of the notes. The goal is to get recall time to be fast, and eventually immediate.

Answer Key

Note: All flatted intervals can be enharmonically spelled; for instance, ♭5 can be spelled as #4.

Key Tasks

1. Study the intervals on the guitar from both positions.
2. Choose from random a starting note on fret V; pick a random interval and locate it.
3. Repeat the random exercise until you can quickly locate all intervals.