Here’s how it works. There can be little doubt that understanding how music works can help you to make better music; or, at the very least, make things easier when you’re at the composing stage of ...

Andy Wood's debut column for Guitar World is an essential study for players looking to have a greater knowledge of the ...

The ultimate guide to the circle of fifths and how it can help you make better music When naming musical intervals, there are two things to consider: quality and distance. Quality refers to the type ...

Japanese music emphasises different intervals, too, and understanding the formulas of these more unusual sounding scales is a rewarding area for us musicians. Well-known players that have ...

The key to any scale is how the notes are spaced and their intervals. A music interval can be perfect, minor, major, augmented, or diminished, and as you would expect those intervals matter to the ...

What is a tritone? A tritone is an interval made up of three tones, or six semitones. In each diatonic scale (or the most basic scale of a key) there is only one tritone, and it occurs between the ...

The intervals between the notes is the key to understanding why we typically use just 12 notes in Western music. Certain intervals typically sound more harmonious to the human ear than others.

The acoustic qualities of instruments may have influenced variations in musical scales and preferred harmonies.