Diatonic vs. Intervallic: Which Makes You a Better Composer?

If you've ever wondered whether traditional music theory is necessary to write great music, the answer lies in understanding two fundamental approaches to composition: diatonic thinking and intervallic thinking. Diatonic thinking organizes music around keys, scales, and chord progressions like I-V-vi-IV or ii-V-I, giving composers a structured grammar rooted in Western harmony. 

Intervallic thinking, on the other hand, focuses on the distances between the notes in chromatic steps, independent of the key or scale. While diatonic thinking provides a clear structure and uses familiar harmonic patterns, intervallic thinking can lead to unpredictable sounds and unique musical results.

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Two Languages for the Same Art

What Is Diatonic Thinking?

Diatonic thinking is the language most of us learned first. It's the foundation of traditional Western harmony.  It's the system you encounter in conservatories, music schools, and most theory textbooks.

At its core, diatonic thinking starts with the scale. You pick a key, and that key tells you which chords belong to the piece, like Cmaj7, G7, Dm9. The musical key is the foundation of everything and decides which notes are "in" and which are "out." 

For example, here's the D Dorian. 

From there, diatonic thinking relies on functional harmony, including very familiar progressions that involve the tonic, subdominant, and dominant. Every chords has its  own job, and usually, it's about creating tension and release. The music moves along a kind of grammatical track, and these are called cadences.

Cadences are a big part of Western music, and you can hear them in almost every song and composition.

The diatonic system focuses more on the vertical approach. Of course, it also deals a lot with melodies, but still, everything has to line up properly vertically. So, once the chords are clear, voice-leading comes into play to connect them horizontally, but the general way to structure the music is from the bottom up.

And the chord progressions tend to follow familiar patterns, like I-V-vi-IV, ii-V-I, and their countless variations. A big plus is that there's comfort in that familiarity, and listeners feel it, and they love it. It's part of why these patterns have been used endless times and lasted centuries. In the end, people like remakes and even rewatch their favorite movies so many times. The same happens with musical structure.

You're working within the notes that are allowed in the key, like the white keys on the piano, if you want to play in the key of C major. And when you're organizing harmony, you're thinking in scale degrees 1 through 7, and the chords are built on each of those scale degrees.

In the same way, melodies tend to be scale-based, like moving stepwise up or down within the key, following the natural flow of the scale. While that is great, compositions can quickly start to feel analytical and rule-heavy ...

1. Avoid parallel fifths
2. Resolve the leading tone
3. Stay within the key
4. Apply voice-leading
5. and so on ...

It can feel like you're filling out a form. Thinking about a lot of rules can quickly slow down your creative flow, because creativity and analysis don’t work well together at the same time. In my experience, composers who learned traditional music theory know the rules and apply them carefully, but they often feel stuck or boxed in. 

However, diatonic thinking is incredibly powerful. The greatest music in Western history was built on it. But it's worth knowing what you're working inside when you're inside it.

What Is Intervallic Thinking?

Intervallic thinking starts somewhere completely different. Instead of beginning with keys or chords, it begins with the relationship between notes, and that is the interval itself. Although the intervals (as we use them in Interval Theory) are only related to themselves, you can use the Harmonic Series to identify their characteristics and nature, but more on that in other materials.

Intervallic thinking doesn't deal with chord labels, like Cmaj7 or G7, but with numbers like 3+3, 2+5, or 6+1. This is what we call the interval formula, and it's the specific distance in chromatic steps between two notes. It helps us form little building blocks that we can reuse in other places of a composition. And sometimes, those structures even form a valid chord, and then you can also label them as such.

This is what gives intervallic writing its characteristic color. It can sound fresh, surprising, and even magical, because it isn't filtering every choice through the permission of a key.

Instead of functional harmony (tonic, subdominant, dominant, and so on) intervallic thinking relies more on movement, color, tension, and shape. The music creates a natural flow, and it has tension that releases into color, and color that builds toward a glow. The emotional logic doesn't follow functional harmony or any theoretical grammar. It feels more like finger-painting, because intervallic thinking follows the natural push and pull of the intervals. (Again, these characteristics can be observed from the Harmonic Series.)

And rather than a vertical approach, like stacking chord tones, it's a more horizontal approach. You're following the lines. Each voice moves where it wants to move, guided by the pull of the intervals. That's a very organic flow that derives from the intervals, rather than rules. To be fair, you want to check the vertical relation afterwards as well, but the order is different compared to the diatonic system.

Vertical combinations, like interval-based progressions, don't follow predetermined patterns. They emerge from the interval motion itself. Take a minor second, for example. It contains energy and wants to resolve to the minor third. That is its nature, independent of the bass note below it. You treat the lines and voices individually, and something almost magical happens. The vertical structures forms itself organically, and maybe it's even a valid chord, but you didn't plan that chord. The intervals created it.

This is what I mean when I say intervallic thinking can take you to unexpected musical places. And please don't confuse this with random choices. It's guided by the nature of the intervals. 

Harmony gets organized by interval formulas, and here are some examples. 3+3 gives you one color, 2+5 gives you another, 4+1 another still. And melodies become interval shapes, not a scale going up, but a gesture. Now, it's energy in motion, and just scale-steps.

So Which Is Better?

After composing with the intervals for over 20 years now, here's my most important point that I take from this whole conversation: these two approaches aren't opposites. They're not competing with each other for the right to be the one true way.

Diatonic thinking gives you grammar. It gives you structure, analytical communication, and the shared vocabulary that lets your music speak to an audience who's very familiar with Western tonal music. And that's a wonderful thing.

On the flip-side, intervallic thinking gives originality and a unique sound. It's like a compass that points you in the right direction, giving you plenty of freedom on how to get there without imposing strict rules. And that's why it can take you to places you wouldn't have found if you'd stayed inside the key.

Composers who use intervallic thinking often say that this is exactly what lets you write music that sounds like you, instead of just creating a collection of familiar patterns that everyone uses.

Sometimes, it's just this healthy portion of permission that was needed for composers to create the type of music they want.

I've written many articles that go into the application of interval theory in the frame of the diatonic system. And if you listen carefully to interval-based musical examples, you can hear the moments where the music breaks out of the cage and follows its own way.

I admit that sometimes, it's a subtle shift, but it's very recognizable for the audience.

The Shift That Changes Everything

What I've found over the years of teaching Interval Theory to other music creators is that the moment a composer makes this shift, something clicks.

It's not that they forget their diatonic training. It's that the diatonic understanding becomes one tool among many, rather than the only lens through which they see music. They start hearing intervals the way a painter sees color: not as a label, but as a sensation with its own character, its own pull, its own logic.

If these feel like theoretical descriptions to you, then you haven't used interval-based composition techniques yet. They're part of the intervals' nature. And once you start hearing music that way, you start writing music that sounds more alive. That's "interval magic." And this is available to every composer who is open-minded and wants to learn something new. 

Want to Go Deeper?

If this way of thinking about music resonates with you, the Music Interval Theory Academy is where I explain this all in great detail. My friend and co-founder Thomas Chase Jones (TC) and I have spent over 10 years developing a method that bridges classical harmonic understanding with the freedom and originality of intervallic thinking, so that you get both the grammar and the compass.