Hearing intervals Many people use familiar tunes to help identify basic intervals. This can work, but be careful because always thinking of “here comes the bride” for a fourth only gets you used to so-do fourth, and not the do-fa (or any other) fourth. Here are some I remember, feel free to find your own…

An interval is the distance between two notes. Reading Intervals Let’s start with a scale. Scales are made up of steps, meaning each note is next to each other. Steps are either whole or half. Steps are also called seconds. Whole step = major second. Half step = minor second. The G major scale above…

Solfège is a system of naming musical notes with syllables to indicate their position in a key. It was first used in about the 10th Century to help educate monks who needed to sing, but couldn’t read. This has evolved into about 3 different ways to use similar syllables today. The syllables are do (doh),…

The word clef is originally descended from a word for “key,” because it provides the key to what notes you are looking at on a page. We’re starting today with Bass clef, which is the clef used for low notes, generally speaking. It looks like this: Bass clef is also sometimes called the “F” clef,…