Electronic Musician

Perfect and power fifths

We’ve seen in previous Easy Guides how the distance between the pitch of two notes is known as an interval, and this month I’m spotlighting one of the strongest intervals in Western music theory: we give you, the fifth.

There are three kinds of fifth interval: perfect fifth, diminished (aka the tritone), and augmented, of which the perfect fifth is by far the most commonly used. To train your ears to remember the sound of one, just think of the first two long notes in John Williams’ famous Star Wars theme, or the opening notes of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", which are a perfect fifth apart.

A perfect fifth isn’t called perfect just because

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