Pentatonic Intervals
In this post I’ll take you through an approach to teaching the intervals in the pentatonic scale.
At this stage, students will have build up a solid understanding of the pentatonic scale and be able to sing it confidently up and down.
Follow along if you’d like to develop your aural awareness of the pentatonic scale or if you’d like ideas on how to teach it to your students.
Warming Up
We’re going to warm up first with some pentatonic scales.
Before I sing it, see if you can pull out the pentatonic scale out of your own mind. Here’s a picture of it.
Try singing the pentatonic scale up and down.
Let’s now sing it together
Intervals
And do we know the intervals?
For the internal intervals each of the steps up it’s a major second, and a skip is a minor third.
You can look at the black keys on the piano our steps are within the set of three and two black keys and the skips are where we have to jump across a wider gap
If you look at the white keys, the steps are next door and when we get to a skip we need to skip over a white key.
Let’s sing the pentatonic scale again while describing the intervals.
Understanding Interval Names
It’s a little bit confusing with interval naming because we’re talking about how many steps we’re going up. If we’re going from do to re it’s one step but for naming intervals we need to count do as one and re as two. So from do to re is a second.
From mi to so we skip past a note to get to so. It’s two steps away but because we’re counting the bottom note as one, we count one, two, three to get to so: a third.
Major and Minor Intervals
Then we look at the difference between major and minor.
Minor means small, major means big. So when we have a third from mi to so, if you think about how many black and white keys you step up (semitones), we count three semitones. Another third is do to mi; if we count one from do, we get to three when we reach mi. However, if we look at how many semitones there are, there are four semitones, so do to mi is a major third. Still a third but slightly bigger than a minor third.
Practicing Singing Intervals of a Third
Now let’s sing do to mi as a major third and mi to so as a minor third.
To get from do to mi, let’s sing do re mi, do mi. That’s the easiest way to prepare jumping up a third.
The next step is to repeat this singing re in your head or softly.
This is a useful exercise to do any time you need to jump across a bigger interval in a scale, whether pentatonic or diatonic. Step through all of the notes in between, singing them out loud first, then quietly and in your head and eventually you get the muscle memory of the interval.
So we have do mi major third. What about mi so…
You might be able to sing so mi if you’ve been through the repertoire used in Kodály inspired teaching but can you sing mi to so? Try it first and then listen to the audio clip:
And we have one more minor third: la do. Try it and then have a listen!
Keep Practicing!
Sing through the pentatonic scales and interval naming exercises above at every opportunity and you’ll build a really strong aural memory of the pentatonic scale.
If you’re teaching this, keep doing this exercise with your students. It’s a great warm-up before doing musicianship activities in your lessons!
Want more advice and ideas?
If you found this blog useful. Please comment below if you did or if there is anything you would like to say to me about it. If you’d like to find out more about teaching your students the fa and much more, including over a year’s worth of lesson plans for teaching all the important musical skills with Helen’s clear microsteps, why not try out Doremi Membership for 14 days for just £1?
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