Lesson #005, Octaves

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Lesson #005, Octaves

Hi Everybody and welcome back to the Moose,

I just wanted to touch on a little bit of music theory concerning the term octaves, since I mentioned it in the last lesson. For right now, I want to define an octave as being 12 half-steps away from any starting point or note. I'm going to be talking more about octaves in upcoming lessons but for right now I just want you to think of an octave as being 12 half-steps away from any starting note. I also want to call the distance between each fret a half-step including the distance from the nut to the first fret. An example of octaves is picking the fourth D string open and getting a D note then counting up 12 frets or 12 half-steps and fretting the fourth string at the 12th fret and getting another D note only sounding an octave higher in pitch. They are the same notes only the D string fretted at the 12th fret is higher in pitch than the D string played open. I'd also like to mention that there are only 12 notes in (western) music. You can see the importance of the first 12 frets and the only 12 notes that we have to work with in (western) music.

Thanks everybody and see you next time on the Moose

Sincerely,

David Cavage