All About Guitar Theory Page 2



However, we can take this to much more complex or wide-ranging angles and bring music down to effectively a science. The following fretboard diagram shows you the notes along the 6th and 5th strings. This tutorial will give you an introductory overview of the different modes of the major scale.

If you’re playing a C major scale, for example, you must play those notes in order. If you play them in whatever order you want, you’re simply playing in the key of C. A pentatonic scale is like any other scale , but it contains just 5 tones, as opposed to the major scale and it's modes, which have 7 notes. Because of this, pentatonic scales are an “economy” version of the bigger major and minor scales. In music, a chord is a group of notes that ring together in harmony. One of the first things that beginning guitarists learn is how to finger a basic chord shape and strum across a group of strings.

Plus, it’s important to understand intervals as they are a foundational concept of music theory. You can think of the guitar fretboard as one big connected grid. It stands to reason that if the notes on the fretboard follow a given pattern, so too do the scales that are derived from these notes. This is important to understand because once you learn to recognize the patterns that make up a given scale, it gives you the freedom to play across the entire fretboard. Using what we already know about scales, the concept of tonality is something rather easy to grasp. While a scale is a selection of notes organised into a specific order, a key is just those Guitar notes in their unorganised form.

We have just seen that the C major chord is composed of the root, the major third and the perfect fifth . For now, you only have to know that a chord in root position has the root note at the bottom and that note gives the name to the chord. The analogy he uses is that people know colors, but if someone asked you about the color “blue,” you wouldn’t know how to describe it unless you had it in your palette. The vocabulary and concepts of music theory are your palettes in this case.

They are put into layman’s terms and have excellent examples to reinforce what they say about each concept. As mentioned before in this article, the way the information is presented is crucial – it must be accessible to people wanting to learn the theory for the first time ever. Will always teach you what you need to know but also show you how these concepts are specifically applied to the fretboard.

In the diagram below, you can see the relation between the notes and intervals of the G major scale. Before we get to the details of the major scale, let’s start with a basic understanding of what a music scale is. If you are doing this exercise using only major and minor triads, you will only complete two rows in the ‘Chord Notes’ section. While tab and notation are the most common types of sheet music found in the West today, they aren’t the only available.

That’s a seven-note scale comprising only natural notes, meaning no sharps and flats. He has a practical, hands-on approach to teaching, with a focus on the guitar fretboard and emphasis on popular songs. Desi honed his craft through decades of teaching, performing, and publishing. Pentatonic scale pattern one, as shown here, is perhaps the most widely known and used scale pattern on guitar.

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