 Guitar and Excel. Pentatonic scale fret 5 intervals. Get ready and don't fret. Remember, the board's totally fretted already, so you need to be the calm one in the relationship. Here we are in Excel. If you don't have access to this workbook, that's okay because we basically built this from a blank worksheet, but did so in prior presentations. So if you want to build this from a blank worksheet, you may want to begin back there. However, you don't necessarily need access to this workbook. If looking at this from a music theory standpoint, because we'll simply use it as a tool to map out the fretboard, give us the notes scale chords that we're focused in on. If you do have access to this workbook, though, there's currently 10 tabs down below. We've got a bunch of these example tabs. We've got the OG Orange tab. We have the Practice tab. The OG Orange tab representing the original worksheet we put together in a prior presentation. It now acting as the starting point going forward, mapping out the entire fretboard, giving us our entire musical alphabet and letters and numbers and combining them together. Having a key that can be adjusted with this green note, which will adjust the key of the worksheets on the right hand side, which provide us the notes in the key, the chord constructions from the notes in the key, and some interval information up top. We then wanted to look at the key of C and think about the chord constructions within the key of C. We started, of course, with the one chord that being the C major chord. We mapped it out first in open position, mapping out the one three five, discussed it in detail. We went to the four chord because that's the other major chord. We mapped it out in open position. We went then to the five chord, the G chord, same thing. Back up to the minor chords. The D chords did the same thing. Then we went to the E minor, did the same thing. Then the six chord, the A minor, same thing. And finally, the diminished. We didn't skip it. We looked at the diminished as well. And then now we're going to the middle of the fretboard, journeying up to the middle. Now that we've got some idea of everything that's going on in open position, not necessarily from a scale standpoint, but rather from the chord constructions, which if you put them all together, which will give you, in essence, the scale, a major scale, which would look something like this. And now we're going to look at the scale starting in the middle of the fretboard, and we're trying to expand out from a scale standpoint in the middle of the fretboard and connect that in to our other learnings in the chord shapes. So last time we discussed the most popular pentatonic scale, which usually often you don't have to play it, by the way, in fret five, but that's probably the most popular place to start to learn the position. One of the beautiful things about the position, just as with the chords, is that they're movable. So we can move them. We'll talk about doing that later. I want to start learning it in the middle of the guitar in fret five, because that's going to link in beautifully to our chords that we learned on the left. And everything that we have learned, then we can tie it together. And when we tie it all together, we're basically putting together the entire map of the fretboard in one key. And then we can, of course, think about how we can shift that whole fretboard thing, because the beauty of the fretboard is it's symmetrical. We have the capacity to do that. This time I want to look more about the intervals. Now, a lot of times when people learn these shapes, they don't talk about the intervals as much because we like to just kind of learn the shape from a natural fingering standpoint, and then we might target particular notes within it. But the intervals are really useful because they actually allow us to see these shapes, not as just kind of nebulous shapes, but as the scale that are in the shape form. The reason it's difficult to see the scale in this kind of shape is because when we visualize a scale, we usually visualize it, say, on like a piano type of layout. Or, if you're looking at the fretboard, we visualize the scale on one string, and we can apply it. I'm going to go to the OG tab. We can apply out this pattern of whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. If you imagine a piano, that's the pattern in the key of C where the black notes are going to be the half step. So if you play just the white notes, then you're going to be in the key of C because this pattern is what is mapped out on a piano that way. Obviously, if you change to any other key, it gets confusing on the piano because now the shapes will be different even though this pattern will be the same. On the guitar, the beauty of the guitar is that the shapes will be the same as you move up the neck. You're not going to have to change the form shapes, and so that symmetry is good, but it also means that sometimes we lose the capacity to visualize the scale pattern just in a linear format, which is easy to do on, say, a piano, or it's pretty easy to do on one string of the guitar. If we map out a scale on one string of the guitar, then it's similar to the piano, and we could start on any note and do the whole steps and the half steps on each of the strings. So then the question is going to be, well, if I'm looking at this pattern, what does it mean to go, say, from the 8 here back to or from this E string on the C to this string for the D? When I'm thinking about it in terms of the distance so that I can kind of see the pattern in this box format rather than simply in a linear type of format across one string. Okay, so that's what I'm going to get into a little bit. Remember that to get into this, we have to understand some of these different numbering conventions and the intervals which aren't confusing in and of themselves. They're only confusing because we tend to mix them all together and we have a lot of terminology that I want to kind of dive into a little bit at this point and a little bit more detail. So for example, we have to name the actual notes themselves. We could do that with letters. We could do that with numbers. We have to name a numbering convention for the notes that are in the scale that we're in, seven notes in the scale. We might use a Roman numeral numbering system in order to give us a level of meaning beyond just the notes in the scale, also providing whether it's going to be a major chord construction or a minor chord construction. We then have the actual name of the notes in a position with relation to the actual chord we're playing, the 135 being names that are tying to the first note in the chord that we're playing. We can go all the way up to 13 here and then we can also think about the actual intervals, the actual distance between notes. That's what these are up top. Now to get an idea for this, let's go back to the OG tab over here and remember our musical alphabet. So our musical alphabet, there's only 12 notes in the musical alphabet, but we have those sharps and flats that make it confusing. So if I try to memorize it, I can't sing the alphabet, right? If I'm going up, I usually use sharps, A, A sharp, B, C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp, back to A. If I'm going back, we would generally use the flats, A flat, G, G flat, F, E, E flat, D, D flat, C, B, B flat, A. And the reason we use the sharps and flats that way, just to keep that in mind, is that we don't want to have two Bs next to each other. So we want to have a different letter and we can do that by alternating in essence the sharps and flats. Also remember that when you're sharpening something or flattening something as a verb, that means sharpening, you're moving it up a step, flatting, you're moving it down a step. Now it's easy for us to use the musical alphabet if we just number the notes. So this is what I'm pushing to do, to number the notes. That's going to help us to think of the intervals. You don't have to do it. You can watch this without doing that. But I still think it would be useful to memorize as long as you memorize all this other stuff. So on A is a 1, the A sharp or B flat is a 2, the B is a 3, the C is a 4, the C sharp or D flat is a 5, the D is a 6, the D sharp or E flat is a 7, the E is an 8, the F is a 9, the E sharp or G flat is a 10, the G is an 11, the G sharp or A flat being 12, only 12 notes. Why is that helpful? Because I can count up, I can count back very easily and I can look at the intervals very easily. Now I want to emphasize this interval thing because we have all these different naming conventions for naming the intervals. So once I go back on over here, we can see that all these different naming conventions are basically naming what a distance is. So I want to try to break that down and it's easier to do that with just the numbers, right? Before we do that though, we also then come up with the creation of the notes in the scale. There's only 7 out of the 12. How do we do that? We use the formula of whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. How do we use that formula? That's beyond the scope of the lecture. We're going to take that as a priori. That's just the formula. So if we apply it then 4 plus 2 is 6, 6 is a D. 6 plus 2 is 8, 8 is an E. 8 plus 1 is 9, 9 is an F. 9 plus 2 is 11, 11 is a G. 11 plus 2 is 12 and then back to 1 because there's only 12 notes in the musical alphabet. We go around it. It's like a circle. You can imagine it like a circle. It just keeps repeating. The snake is eating its own tail or whatever if that analogy works. Then we're back to a 1. 1 plus 2 is 3. A 3 is a B. 3 plus 1 is 4 and 4 is a C and now we're repeated. These are the 7 notes in the alphabet that's making our notes over here. So now we have 7 out of 12 notes over here in our musical alphabet. Now the next thing that might be useful to see is to see the intervals between the strings. So we go from an E to an A to a D to a G to a B to an E. Now if you look this up most people are going to say that that distance, they're going to say that that distance is a fourth or a major fourth. Which is kind of confusing to most people because, again, like when I hear that for a long time I was going like, well what does that mean to be a fourth? Because if I look at this, I'm saying if this is an E to an A to a D to a G to a B to an E, it's like okay, if I started an E, I'm imagining a top string, a low E, and I'm trying to get up to an A, what does a fourth mean? Is there a fraction? Is it like 8 out of 12 or something like that that they're talking about? Or maybe they're trying to say that it's like we only are using the key of C. So there's no sharps and flats and then I'm talking like we're going from an E and then we go up to an E, F, G, so F, G, A, but then that only works if you actually start on the E. So now you're starting on the E, E, F, G, A, and then I get to the A, that kind of works, but that's not really the distance of three notes, you're counting the note that you started on, right? And so I think what's actually happening, and if I try to say, well what's the actual distance? Well if I go to an A and I use my math and A is a 1 and I say, well I went from 8, 8 up to 9, 10, 11, 12, back around the horn to 1, it's 5, there's a distance of 5 actual notes. So what are you talking about that it's a fourth, right? These are the questions that come up with these intervals. So for example if I take 8, if I see E is an 8 and I add 5 to it, I get 13, right? It took 5 steps up, there's only 12 notes in the musical alphabet so I can subtract 12, that gets me to the 1 which is an A. Or you can start it at a 1 and subtract minus the 8, that gets you to 7, there's 12 notes in the musical alphabet so I'm going to say plus 12, it gets you to 5. So the distance between these in terms of absolute notes is going to be 5. So I think what's happening with the fourth convention is they're using this convention over here where you're saying you're numbering based on as though the first item or the first note is the first note in the scale or in your chord. Like you would label a C major chord for example. So we know that the 1 is just going to be the 1 and then which is really no interval because we're looking at the distance from it as a C and then the 3, how far away is the 3? Well if it's a major chord construction, the 3 is going to be 4 notes away. Now that 4 notes away, remember like when I say it's a major third, it means that it's a whole step or a half step or 4 notes away, right? And then if I say it's a fifth, that means that it's 5 notes away. So then the question is what does it mean to be a fourth? Because we skip the fourth, right? We don't use the fourth because we go to the 1, we go to the 3, we go to the 5 because when we construct a chord we use every other note and we went from the 1 to the 3 to the 5, we skip the 4. So why are you using that term? Because I don't get to that 4 until I go around the horn again, right? I'm on the 5 and then I go to the 7 and then I have to go around again which gets me to the 9 and then I go around again to get to the 11. So the 4 seems to me is that it's equivalent to the 11th if you're using that kind of measuring term, right? And the 11th, if you're talking about a major 11th in position 1, here's a 9, an F minus 4, that's 5 notes away. 9 minus 4. So do you see how kind of confusing that is when you're telling most people that if that's the convention we're using, it's a fourth away, most people are not thinking, okay well that must mean that you're talking about the measuring convention of as though I'm building a chord from the first note away and then you're using a fourth which I never actually use because we don't usually build fourths which is equivalent to the 11th which most people don't talk about in the first place which would be the fourth as though I built it off of the fourth, okay? Do you see what I mean on these measuring things? So I'm going to try to use an analogy and I know I'm exaggerating this but this would be kind of like saying I have 10 fingers, right? I have 10 fingers and there's only 12 notes in the musical alphabet. You can think about it the same way that I'm trying to get from one finger to the other finger. I'm trying to go from my pinky up to my pointer finger. How far is that? Well how would you count? It's 1, 2, 3 fingers away. You start here 1, 2, 3 fingers away. That's how far it is. You wouldn't really start saying well you know it's like a whole step and a half step which I can also call like a major you know a minor third distance away, right? Like why do you need to do that? It's only you only have 10 fingers like you could use the same convention of it's one finger away and this is what I kind of want to stress. I'm just all I'm trying to point out here is that any of these measuring conventions that you hear you can break down similar to just basically distances and standard units of one note away. Another analogy just to try to... a ruler, right? A ruler. It has 12 notes on it. It's basically or 12 inches on it. It's basically the same thing as the musical alphabet. Whenever we're using these measuring conventions we're basically using a unit of distance we're naming the original point and then seeing how many points away is it in terms of notes, right? So if we say that one inch for example there's 12 inches in a ruler. If we say that one inch is like one note away, half step, then that's all you really need because there's only 12 of them, right? I mean so this would be like what we have here with the music system would be kind of like similar to some like tenured academic egghead insisting that we can't just use the inches here. We have to come up with other units of measure so they decided to come in and take the 12 inches and come up with a new name for every combination of inches within the 12 inches. And I know I'm being a little unfair here but just I think I'm just trying to hammer the point here home that we're really just talking about 12 inches or 12 steps, right? Like you can imagine them coming in and saying well we need to stop just using inches we need to have what I call a whole step and you're like well what is a whole step? And he's like well that in essence it's like two inches and it's like well why do we need two inches? He's like well we have to have, we can't just use a half step we have to have a whole step and it's like do we really need a whole step? Because I mean it's not like we have a problem of measuring tools not being sufficient like we're trying to measure a football field compared to measure like the distance between galaxies or something in which case we need like yardsticks versus light years or something like there's only 12 inches but then you're like okay whatever he's really insistent he likes his new term his new thing so it's like okay we'll call it I don't get it but whatever we'll call it a whole step and then he's like now we need to have a minor third and you're like well what is a minor third? Well minor third is a combination of a whole step and a half step and you're like well what is that that's just three inches that's just it's like yeah it's three inches but it's a combo of the whole step and a half step and you're like well that's ridiculous but you've already accepted now not just to use inches so you're like okay whatever I guess it can't do much more damage than the other confusion of having a whole step in the first but then he's like now you have to have the compliment if you accept that there's a half step and a whole step you have to have the major third too which is like two whole steps and you're like but that's only four that's four inches do you need to call that a major why don't you just call it four and they're like you have to just like okay I give up and then of course you have a fifth well what does a fifth mean? a fifth means seven inches and it's like okay what does it mean to have to have like a diminished fifth well that means like you had seven inches minus one so that's six inches why don't you just call it six inches and they're like well that doesn't sound as cool as a diminished fifth now does it right and if you had an augmented that's like fifth then it's like seven inches plus that's eight inches you see what I mean so I'm not and I know I'm being overly unfair because there's meaning to saying something is a fifth or seventh because it kind of names the position and it's related chord and stuff and I get that I know I'm being unfair but I'm just kind of drilling the point home here that anytime you see like one of these interval terms that we're talking about the question you want to ask is what is the starting point that you're starting at and give it to me in inches in our case half steps and notes how many notes away is it from that starting point and I think that'll clarify a lot of it'll allow you to see these intervals much more easily and it'll allow you to see what is happening with these naming conventions I mean honestly it's kind of like if you were driving down the basketball court and you threw up a shot towards the hoop and then the basketball magically changed it like an American football and someone caught it in the end zone and you scored a touchdown getting six points instead of two points that you would have gotten in the basketball game why because it's a game changer it's a game changer I mean honestly just one more analogy because this measuring system would be like going to the doctor you go to the doctor and he wants to see how long your foot is he wants to see how long your foot is and he pulls out his magical measuring stick and you're like well that looks like a foot stick doctor and he's like no it's not a ruler it's not a ruler this is a magical medical measuring stick and then he you're like okay I don't presume to know the arts of doctories so I'll take your word for it and he puts the stick next to your foot and he tells you that your foot happens to be like two major thirds, a minor third plus a half step long and you're like wow that's the magic of medicine that's amazing and then a week later you get the nerve to ask the doctor could you give it to me I know I'm a stupid doctor but could you give it to me just in inches and he's like yeah it's about 12 inches and you're like well why don't you tell me my foot isn't 12 that's just an example but you're like why don't you tell me that the first I've been on Google trying to figure out how long my foot is based on it being being you know two major thirds a minor third, a half step long right so you see what I mean it's like if you start mixing these measures up it's like you're not comparing apples to apples anymore you're comparing like apples to boogers right and although there's a lot of similarities you can't put them all in the same basket as if they're the same because there's differences like some people don't even like to taste the apples you know so in any case that's going to be the point my point is that the distance between these two is actually in total terms going to be five units away except for the distance between these two and you can measure that with just your math if you number the notes so you've got the E to the A and if I go from an A to a D we're going to say okay I can go from a six minus the one that's five notes away so that makes sense because you're going to go an A is a one and then two three four five six right okay that makes sense and then I'm going to a D to it to a G so we've got eleven minus six and that's going to be five right so six seven eight nine ten eleven that makes sense here's the weird one though then you're going like from a three minus the eleven gets you to a negative eight whenever I hit a negative I'm going to say plus twelve and I get to four it's only four notes away and that's because you have that that difference between these two strings which results in all the strangeness differences that's the only one you have a difference on though because if I go to three or eight eight minus three then I get back to the five distance between these two so they all are five notes away except for that last one so what does that mean well if I go up to my fret board here if I go like on my guitar and I'm saying well that's an E and I go five strings up one two three four five then I'm out in A and that A is the same A here as we have down here see how that's actually useful so now I'm saying okay that makes sense why does that make sense because this string the second string is five notes up meaning if I count it up this way one two three four five then I have the same position as this string on the nut or if I see the string on the bottom I can count up and go one two three four five and then up one string to get to the same note so that's see how that is actually useful and you can do that of course on this string here we could say okay this is a this is an A to get to the D it's five notes away so if I started on the nut one two three four five so now that's five strings up that's the same as the next note down which is a D or if I was on the D I can go one two three four five notes up and then up one and there's another D so you can see the pattern is there if you saw it as if you got confused with that four thing you're not going to see the pattern because you're not realizing that it's actually five the thing is is five notes away now if you go you can also just to take that idea a little bit further you can also say well if these notes in the musical alphabet are in a circle just like we did the circle of the seven notes in the scale but if we did that for all the notes in the musical alphabet all of these notes in the musical alphabet and we just made a circle out of them not these notes where are my notes these notes over here then you can imagine the circle just infinitely going around in a loop right which means that if you're saying that it's five notes away one way then it's going to be twelve because there's twelve notes minus five or seven notes away the other way if I started in the middle of my fret board and I looked at the E right there if I go five notes up from there this is just starting over so this is the fret board two times over right or like a fret board that was twice as long if I go five notes up one two three four five I get to the A which is the equivalent of the string below and if I went seven notes back then I would get to an A right one two three four five six seven so I get to the seven notes back right because you're seeing it as like a circle and I hope you see how these like intervals actually are useful right that helps you to kind of see you know what is happening here so then I can have it go backwards and if I'm going to the bottom string and I'm going up to the top string you know if it was then it's going to be a seven no distance or so like if I'm going from the E down I'm going down like in pitch to a B then I can take the second one this three right here three minus eight gives me a negative five plus twelve and we get to seven right and then here's the funny interval between these two so I can take the eleven minus three and you get to an eight because that's the fun and if I go to it and this is back to the normal one if I go from eleven to a D I'm going to go from six minus eleven negative five plus twelve gets you to a seven distance here if I take the one minus six plus twelve I get to a seven distance here and then if I go from an eight minus one I get to a seven distance here so if you're going from this string up you have five basically five note distance intervals and if you're going from this string in pitch which is the highest string and going down in pitch then you have the seven intervals why because seven plus five is twelve ok so that's going to be the general idea how does that help us when I'm doing the fingering on this side so now we can start to look at our pentatonic scale and we can say that if we start on the A here you could walk it through as though you're in the key of A minor which is what we've been looking at before or you can try to say I'm going to look at it first in the key of C right so if I take my C let's do that first and I'm right here and let's say we start our shape there then we're going to go from the C to a D so now we're going to go C to a D now usually a C to a D would be a four to a six right that's a whole step or two notes so usually you would think it falls on the same string it would be going up here two strings up but I want to stay in this fingering position so I'm instead going to go down here to this string so now I'm going from a four to a six and so you can so you can see like how does that work well if that was if I went two strings up this way I would end up at a D but I don't want to go that way instead I want to come back down here what's the interval between these two strings it's one two three four five and up one here's a D here's a D so what's happening here is I'm in this four position shape and when I want to go up one more whole step two notes up from a four to a six two notes up I could go up here or I can drop down down one fret and four frets back and you see what you see with that so that's the equivalent of going up another whole step so now that's we're dropping down to the string because of that distance between the strings and then we're going from a six to an eight so a six to an eight is two notes up so that's why boom boom two notes up and then we're going from an eight to I'm skipping the F now I'm skipping this note notice that's a half step that's what we're skipping when we do the pentatonic versus the major in essence there are no half steps in the pentatonic those are the ones that are removed and that's why you only have this space and then or the two spaces the long and the short so we'll see that when we get to the when we get to the major and so then we go back down to the G down here so that interval is going to be eight nine ten eleven right so we got three notes down to the G and I'll analyze that more when we get to the major but if I go to the G G to the A it goes up to twelve around the horn to one so it's two notes away to there and then I'm going from an A to a C so we're going from an A to a C notice that when we go from we're going from an A to a C so I got lost there for a second I'm skipping notice what we're skipping is the B right we're skipping that B which would be right here and one way you can think about that in terms of this shape notice what you do not what you would have in this shape if you pick that B up would be three strings on the pentatonic shape so that's another thing that we're not doing on the pentatonic shape we're not having two notes right next to each other a half step away and we're not just one note away right and we're not having three strings on one fret we only have two two notes on each string generally so then we're going to go down to the C so there's back to the C and you can see that we have repeated now because we started on a C so now we've gone through the scale we've gone all the way through the scale if you play this out it'll sound kind of like you're getting back home to when you go here and then you can run through the scale again in the upper register so now we're going from C to a D so once again that's going to be a whole step a whole step up or two notes up and then we're going from a D to an E so now we're going back to this E down here now this is that funny interval because we're going between these two strings remember these two strings were only four notes away from each other so if I was up at this D here and I'm going to an E it's two notes away so I could go D two notes away would be up here outside the position and that would be and if I did that that would be then my E but instead I'm going from my D down to here now those two notes are both E's so then the question is well how many frets up is it this is one two three four frets up instead of five and up one that's where that difference in the relationship is instead of five frets up it's four frets up so the difference between these two strings when I'm trying to go from here to the string down to go to a whole step notice I'm not starting from my pinky position but instead I'm starting from my ring finger position stopping down to the next string on my pointer finger because of the difference in the intervals basically between those two strings and then we've got the long distances down here going from the E we're skipping the F again because we don't want that half step so the half step has been removed and then we've got the long distance going to the G and then we go from the G to the A so when I go from a G that's going to be a whole step or two notes so if I was here I can go two notes up to here but instead this is the normal just the normal position if I want to go a whole step up I can go from my pinky position and these four frets to the next string down to the floor with my pointer position and that's why that that interval works well and the distances between the strings are basically five notes there so in other words if I took this string up here as a G and I went up to there there's an A and this is an A so what's the distance between those two this A is one, two, three, four, five notes this way and up one same distance between those two so if I'm out here instead of going up to here to get to the next whole step down and four strings back which is perfect hand position to go from my pinky position back to my pointer position down here and then again we've got that long stretch up to the C so I know that was a tedious kind of explanation but a lot of people find it difficult to see the scale on the guitar we learn the shape but we don't even really think about the scale because again we're just learning the shape which is fun to do but for the scale it's easier to see on a piano which is laid out on like one string would be similar to be laying out on one string so but if we learn this interval we can start to say well what does it mean when I'm going from this pinky position down here well usually that means if I'm going pinky to pointer it would be equivalent for me going one whole step up this way so instead of going one whole step up this way I'm going from pinky to pointer except when you're down between these two strings in which case it would be going from ring finger to pointer on the next string that would be a whole step because of the difference between that interval