In this Blog lesson I will be exploring the basic concept of music note intervals. These are a universal concept of music regardless of what instrument you play. This lessons demonstrates how they come from the major scale, and how they are played on the ukulele.

Major Scale: The Major Scale is a system used to organize music notes into a group. With this “music alphabet” we can use to create melodies, harmonies, and chords. Each group of notes is commonly referred to as a Key. For example, here is the Major Scale for the Key of C.

The Numbers: Sometimes musicians use numbers instead of letters to label the notes of the major scale. Each number refers to the note’s order in the scale. For example, here is the C Major scale with numbers added.

Intervals: A music interval measures the distance between two notes. They’re created when two notes are played at the same time. We can use the scale numbers to describe different intervals. These are the building blocks the most common harmonies and chords.

Here’s how the intervals above are played on the ukulele. In all four examples C (or 1) is the root note. The name of each interval describes how far away the second note is from the root. These examples each contain two notes which combine to make the interval. When each pair of notes are played together, they create Harmony.

The most common interval used to build chords is the Third (3^rd). When multiple intervals are stacked up, they create Chords. The most common ukulele chords contain stacked thirds.