String Skipping and Intervals

Part One

You can download a pdf of this lesson by clicking <here>

Intervals

An interval is simply the distance between two notes.
These musical distances are given names with reference to their place in or alteration from the Major scale.
For instance from the root of C on the 1 st fret of the 2 nd string:

A basic summary of the naming protocol is:

Major interval lowered = minor
minor interval lowered = diminished
Major interval raised = augmented
Perfect interval raised = augmented
Perfect interval lowered = diminished

As you can see enharmonically equivalent notes have different interval names e.g. F#/Gb.
I have included only one double flat being Bbb; the diminished 7 th of C. This is because it’s fairly common. It is however possible to create others which are more seldom seen, such as Ebb the diminished 3 rd of C or even E# the augmented 10 th.
However this is getting unnecessarily complicated for the purposes of this lesson!

Applying all this to the Guitar

On the guitar a position is defined as 4 frets +1 in either direction. As guitarists we have access to quite a large range of notes within any one position. Allowing for a one fret shift this means any note within two octaves and a major 3rd is accessible with a bit of a stretch (equivalent to 28 frets in a straight line!).
Nevertheless, the fact is that it’s easy to ignore the larger intervals when improvising.
You can however add variety and the odd surprise to your playing quite easily just by occasionally choosing a wider interval than you normally would have done.
If you intend to include some wider intervallic ideas in your soloing/writing it’s a good idea to start practising ascending and descending scales in 3rds, 4ths, 5ths and 6ths.

Finally here is a short study for practising string skipping (the art of accessing non adjacent strings) and playing wide intervals on the guitar.

I have listed the different intervals that occur in the piece and marked their location with the corresponding number and bracket.

Once you have mastered the Interval Study in G try analysing the intervals you normally play when improvising and then experiment with different ones within the scales that you use. You may find you get a lot of musical mileage out of a simple concept.