Imagine for a minute that you’re listening to your favorite song, and I ask you to just single out two consecutive pitches out of the entire song. Maybe the first two notes of “Here Comes the Bride.” The distance between those two notes is what we call an interval. One song could be made up of hundreds or thousands intervals, which can make identifying them seem pretty daunting. To make it easier, we’re going to start with the smallest interval we have, a half step.
What is a Half Step?
Half steps are the smallest measurement of distance between two musical notes (at least in Western Music). In future lessons, I’ll also refer to half steps as “minor seconds.”On a piano, you can see it very easily as going from a white key to a black key adjacent to it (either up or down from the white key). I’ll use the piano keyboard to visualize examples. On a guitar, one half step is the equivalent of moving up or down one fret from the note you’re on. Half steps are what all the other intervals of Western music are based off of. They can be combined to form different patterns, or “scales”, and are used to build chords. We’ll talk about chords and scales in a separate lesson.
In the musical alphabet, the “white key” letters run from A to G and then start over again at A. Every 8 white keys on the piano, (for example A-G plus the following A) is called an “octave”. An octave can start on any “white-key” note of the musical alphabet or on one of the black keys. Inside of an octave, there are several other note relationships that we call “intervals”. I will go into more detail about the rest of the intervals later.
This may leave you wondering, “What are all the black keys for?” The black keys are the notes that go between the white notes. They all have names too. We call them “sharps” or “flats”. If we start on a white key and move up to an adjacent black key, we call it a sharp. If we start on a white key and move down to the same adjacent black key, we call it a flat. Even if the black key we moved to is the same in both examples, we have different names for it depending on how we got there. For a beginner, it is not extremely important yet that you completely understand sharps and flats. Just that you understand that they exist and we will use them later.
Whole Steps
For this lesson, we will only talk about one more: the whole step. Whole steps, as you might have guessed, are just the distance between notes that are two half steps apart (two halves make a whole). This interval is also called a “major second.”
To move a whole step from almost any white key on the piano, you simply move to the next adjacent white key, skipping the black key in between them. There are two exceptions to this rule, which we’ll discuss more when we talk about scales, but just so you know there is no black key between the “B” and the “C”, as well as the “E” and “F”. Therefore, the distance between these notes is a half step since they are adjacent with no other notes in between.
Let’s do an example. If we start on A, the first note of the musical alphabet, and want to move up a half step we would move up to the first adjacent black key, which would call “A sharp” since we moved up to get to it. To move a full whole step from the original A, we would go past the half step A sharp and move two total half steps to “B”, the next note in the musical alphabet and the next white key on a piano.
Understanding half steps and whole steps is crucial to understanding the rest of the intervals. If you have any questions let me know and I’ll be glad to help!
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