Originally Posted by: CSchlegelNow, look at the image I attached. See the difference? My image shows the scale degrees. That is what I focus on when teaching. Learn to see, play & hear the scale degrees & you are really playing, hearing & understanding musical intervals on the guitar. Not just patterns of dots with no explanation as to why the dots form the patterns they form, etc.

Definitely a good point, being able to hear the intervals, or moreso, know the intervals your hearing is essential... something I need to work on myself.

On that note (pun intended!), here is a tool to help learn the intervals. Ive been playing with it for a few months:

http://trainear.com/

No worries, its not something you have to download, you can play with it right from the site.

The program will play two notes, one after another, and you have to guess how many intervals are in-between. What he does to help you understand them is use famous melodies as examples. Like the start of Over the Rainbow, the first two notes are 12 intervals apart, so an octave.

First two notes of the Simpsons theme is 6 intervals apart, sounding of the diminished chord.