The idea
You told Greg you know a lot of theory but you do not read, and that you think in shapes. "I'll just, I think pattern based almost. So like I'll know that that's what I'm playing. I don't necessarily have to stop and think like okay, that's actually what like an F sharp, F minor pentatonic scale."
That works on guitar because the fretboard repeats. It fails on a piano and on paper. A shape you cannot name is a shape you cannot move, invert, hand to another instrument, or write down, and everything in Module 4 (motives, goal notes, development) runs on naming.
The unit is not the note. It is the interval. The source course puts it flatly: "The interval is the atom of music. Not the individual pitch. A single pitch in isolation has no musical meaning." Two notes make a direction, and a direction is the smallest thing music can be made of.
Watch
Basics of Music Theory (Greg Spero, Weekly Piano)
- The major scale as an interval formula, whole-whole-half-whole-whole-whole-half, transferable to every key [15:00]. Learn it as a formula, not as white keys. You will build all twelve from it in A8.
- Triads major, minor, and diminished, with diminished appearing only on the seventh degree [10:04]. A6 is the whole lesson; just hear it here.
- Why V goes to I, shown on the keys at [16:01]: the two notes in G7 that lead to the C chord are its 3 and its 7, each moving a half step into the 1 and 3 of C. He has already said what is at stake at [14:05]: "That's music. That's like throughout all of music history after basically after Gregorian chant, you get the five to the one."
- The four cadences: authentic V-I, plagal IV-I, half I-V, deceptive V to minor vi [22:48], [23:51]. In the deceptive one the same tritone resolves, the bass goes elsewhere, and the mood changes completely.
The Basis of All Music: The Tritone
- Every major scale contains exactly one tritone, between the 4 and the 7 [04:05]. He calls it the most dissonant interval you can have other than a minor second, and names it for the three whole steps it spans [04:16]. Find it before you name it.
- Its resolution: the 4 falls to the 3, the 7 rises to the 1, and what lands is a consonant minor sixth [04:44].
- Delay it. Land on the F in C major, then play eight other notes, then resolve to E. "Your ear still took the F and was like, okay, this is unresolved" [06:30].
- Bach is the model for the long version [08:26], Keith Jarrett for the improvised version [09:25]. Same device, three hundred years apart.
Understanding Tritones (55 minutes; split it across two days)
- Watch the first fifteen minutes now; the rest lands better after A8. The tritone is tension that moves, against the minor second which does not [01:50].
- The shape of every musical idea in one sentence: "You have a tension point and then you diverge. You either go to its release, which is boring, or you diverge further and then go back to the release" [04:06].
- Miles Davis as the other option: play all the tension points and stop [04:47]. This answers the "everything sounds the same" problem in your old writing.
At the piano
The keyboard as a map. Black keys come in groups of two and three, and that is the only landmark you need. C is immediately left of any group of two. F is immediately left of any group of three. Everything else counts up from those two facts, and you should stop counting within a week.
The staff. Treble clef circles G above middle C. Bass clef's two dots straddle F below middle C. Middle C sits on a ledger line between the staves, one below the treble and one above the bass, which is why it looks like it belongs to both. It does.
Interval number. Count letter names inclusive from bottom to top. C up to G is C-D-E-F-G, five letters, a fifth. Adding a sharp or flat never changes the number, because the letters do not change.
Interval quality. Unisons, fourths, fifths, and octaves are perfect, augmented, or diminished. Seconds, thirds, sixths, and sevenths are major, minor, augmented, or diminished. Half steps settle it:
| Half steps | Name | Sound to attach to it |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | unison | identity |
| 1 | minor 2nd | maximum tension at minimum distance |
| 2 | major 2nd | the step of the scale, the neutral case |
| 3 | minor 3rd | the minor mode, and the blue third |
| 4 | major 3rd | brightness, stability |
| 5 | perfect 4th | open, a horn call, frames space without filling it |
| 6 | tritone | the octave cut exactly in half, the engine of dominant function |
| 7 | perfect 5th | maximum stability, and harmonically empty on its own |
| 8 | minor 6th | brightness complicated by distance |
| 9 | major 6th | warmth, pastoral, the added-sixth chord |
| 10 | minor 7th | the dominant seventh's unresolved pull |
| 11 | major 7th | a near miss to the octave, a shimmer with an edge |
| 12 | octave | identity displaced into another register |
The character descriptions come from the source course, Lesson 2. They are not fixed properties. Register, dynamic, and context change all of them, which is the point of Exercise 3 below.
Exercises
1. Name the keyboard
Do. Have someone call a letter name with an accidental. Find every instance of it across all eighty-eight keys, low to high, saying the octave register aloud. Twenty calls a day.
Done when: Twenty out of twenty are found in under a second each, with no visible counting from a black-key group.
2. Read a note, play a note
Do. Write out twenty random notes on treble staff and twenty on bass, using ledger lines up to three above and below. Play them. Then reverse it: play a random key and write it on the correct staff. Ten minutes daily.
Done when: Forty notes read and forty written with no errors, twice in a row, without the "every good boy" mnemonic.
3. The interval survey (source course, Exercise 2.1)
Do. From one starting note, play each of the twelve intervals ascending and descending, in the lowest register you can reach and the highest, loud and soft, short and sustained. Sing each after you play it. Two minutes per interval, no rushing. Then play each as a simultaneity rather than a melody.
Done when: All twelve are done and sung, and you can say in one sentence what changed for at least four of them in the bass.
4. The interval profile (source course, Exercise 2.2)
Do. Take one track from Cloud Speak. Sing its main line slowly and write down the interval between each successive note, by number and quality. Do the same with a Radiohead vocal line. Compare: which intervals dominate, which never appear, does the line step or leap, and when it leaps does it step back the other way.
Done when: You have two written lists and can name your own three most-used intervals. Those three are your melodic signature.
5. Find the tritone in all twelve keys
Do. In each major scale, locate the 4 and the 7. Play them together, with the 4 on the bottom. Resolve the 4 down to the 3 and the 7 up to the 1, which lands on the minor sixth Greg names at [04:44]. Name both notes and both targets aloud before you play.
Done when: All twelve are instant, named before played, with no counting.
6. Delay the resolution
Do. In C, improvise with the right hand, land on F, then play at least eight notes elsewhere before resolving to E. Repeat with the 7 resolving up to the 1, stretching the delay further each time. Record it.
Done when: You can hold an unresolved 7 across a whole phrase and the landing still sounds like an arrival on playback.
Checkpoint
- Any named key found anywhere on the keyboard in under a second.
- Forty staff notes read and forty written, clean, on the first pass.
- Any interval named by number and quality when played, and any named interval played from any starting note in either direction.
- The tritone of all twelve major keys named and resolved without counting.
- One written interval profile of your own music, with your three signature intervals named.
Read
- Source course, Lesson 2, "The Interval as Expressive Force." Read it whole. The twelve-interval survey there is the vocabulary this lesson installs, and Wolpe's fish-tank image ("Fish don't hit into one another. They slide past one another. They make wonderful trajectories") is the picture to keep for voice-leading in A8b.
- Elaine Gould, Behind Bars, Chapter 1. General conventions on note placement, stems, and accidentals only. The rest waits for A17 and Sibelius. Reading it now means what you write by hand is already correct.