Music Video Lesson: What is a Tritone?

Welcome to virtualsheetmusic.com and livingpianos.com. I am Robert Estrin with a really interesting show today.

What is a tritone? The tritone. The forbidden interval back from the church in hundreds of years ago forbid this interval. What is it? We're gonna cover it today, you'll hear it, understand it, and see how it resolves and how it's used.

The tritone, very simply, is half an octave. That's why there are 12 possible available tones in music, in western music. If you go six-half steps, you will create a tritone, exactly half an octave. So if you went up from C and you went C to C sharp as one, D, D sharp, E, F, F sharp, six-half steps. See that's sharp, there's your tritone. It has a demonic sound to it, doesn't it? And here's the fascinating thing. Since it divides the octave in half, if you invert the tritone and go from F sharp to C, you still have a tritone 1-2-3-4-5-6.

Now, how does a tritone resolve? This is where it gets really interesting because, you can take a tritone and go outwards by half steps or inward by half steps, and it resolves either way. So once again going C to F sharp, resolve to B and G. So now we are in G. Now here is where it gets really interesting. If you resolve inward, once again C the F sharp resolves to C sharp and E sharp. It resolves inward to C sharp which is exactly a tritone away from how it resolved the four outward to G. All kinds of interesting things.

Now, the tritone is the basis for western music, for total music. How can it be so strong? Well, it is so needing resolution that is the basis for establishing a key. In fact, the dominant seventh chord creates a tension because of the tritone that it contains. So for example, if I wanna establish the key of C major, I'll play a 1-4-1-6-4-5-7 that 5-7. Which needs to be resolved because it has the tritone, there's the F-B.

So very interesting things you can discover with the tritone. The other thing is...the diminished seventh chord is two tritones. So if you have all minor thirds, you have a tritone on the first and third note, and you also have the second and fourth note are both tritones. That's why the diminished seventh is so deceptive as we covered in a previous video.

Thanks so much for joining, Robert Estrin here at virtualsheetmusic.com and livingpianos.com, see you next time.

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