This lesson is designed as a tutorial to help you learn how notes sound, how intervals come into play, and most importantly, how to aurally remember what they sound like. It goes hand in hand with the One Note Ear Training Exercise at WholeNote, which you can use to hone your ear and your development as a musician. In this exercise linked above, a chord progression is played in the key of C to help you establish the tone of a C note in your head as a reference point, and then a random note is played. It's up to you to figure out what that note is.
If you're not familiar with what an interval is, I highly suggest checking out John Rice's great lesson on intervals or looking at WholeNote's section on intervals in the Guitar Basics section. Simply put, an interval is the relationship between two notes. One easy way to remember a particular interval is how many frets apart they are on the fretboard. For reference, here are the names of notes, the names of the interval it creates with the note C, and how many frets apart they are:
| Note |
Interval Name |
Distance (in frets) |
| C |
Unison |
0 |
| C#/Db |
Minor 2nd |
1 |
| D |
Major 2nd |
2 |
| D#/Eb |
Minor 3rd |
3 |
| E |
Major 3rd |
4 |
| F |
Perfect 4th |
5 |
| F#/Gb |
Augmented 4th/Diminished 5th |
6 |
| G |
Perfect 5th |
7 |
| G#/Ab |
Augmented 5th/Minor 6th |
8 |
| A |
Major 6th |
9 |
| A#/Bb |
Minor 7th |
10 |
| B |
Major 7th |
11 |
| C |
Octave |
12 |
Note that when you listen to an interval, the notes can either be played together (which is called "harmonically") or one after the other (which is called "melodically"). In the case of the One Note Ear Training Exercise, the notes are, in a sense, being played melodically, because you're establishing the tone of C in your head, and then a random note is played against it (thus creating the interval in your head).
In this lesson, I'm going to simulate this exercise for all the possible notes, describe the interval that the random note creates with the C note in your head, and some known melodies to help you remember them.
