Eggleston - Music Theory for Every Guitarist

Music Theory for Every Guitarist

Author: Doug Eggleston

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Doug Eggleston

No matter what instrumentyou play, music theory is the most important part of your arsenal.Think about it; how do professional musicians know what notes toplay? How do they know that a given chord will sound good withanother? How do songwriters create such interesting tunes like theones we hear on the radio? The answer is Music Theory!

Music theory is what makesmusic work. Its how musicians are able to pick up their instrumentand justplay! Nothing about what they play is random; every noteand chord is played for a reason. Thats what music theory is allabout; understanding how musicians create songs that soundawesome!

Guitar has become socommonplace and part of our popular culture that nearly everyhousehold has one at least laying around. Many folks who experimentwith guitar do so by looking up the tabs or chords to theirfavorite songs online. While this is a perfect way to get started,the ultimate downside to this approach is that you basically justend up memorizing where to put your fingers and how to strum thestrings. You can practice those songs and become really good atplaying them, but you arent able to play anything else.

Music theory is thesolution to this approach. Instead of memorizing things, you learnhow songs are created. You understand why a song sounds the way itdoes. You understand the notes that are being played and how theyall work together. You hear a song on the radio and know whatchords and scales they are using. You can figure out how to play asong by ear.

A second problem that musictheory solves is playing in a group with other people. With a goodunderstanding of music theory, you are able to communicate witheach other on a much more efficient level. You can tell your friendHey, I want to improvise in the key of E minor for a few minutes,play a chord progression underneath for me. Your friend will knowhow to do that for you, and you will know what notes to use overhis chord progression. Within literally seconds, you are playingmusic together that sounds just like a professionalband!

Lastly, lets use ananalogy. Music theory is very much like a users manual for playinginstruments. If you were going to build something very complex,like a house, you probably wouldnt just pick up your tools and goto work. Youd study the blueprints first. Similarly, with aguitar, you really want to have the blueprints so that you knowwhat youre doing. Learning the guitar becomes much easier, muchmore rewarding, and you will be able to learn songs and play withothers much more easily than without music theory.

This book has 11 chaptersor lessons which are meant to be learned in order. Readers thatalready have knowledge of the first lesson can skip to the second.Readers that already have knowledge of the second lesson can skipto the third, and so on.

Part I includes the first 4lessons, which are all about scales. Part II includes the next 5lessons, which are all about chords. Part III includes the final 2lessons, which are considered advanced topics and involve bothscale and chord topics.

If you have any questions orwould like more information on any of the topics, pleasevisit . Iwill do my best to answer your request within 24 hours or less.Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy!

LESSON 1 : The Basics of Scales andKeys

First, lets define what a key is. A key isa group or family of seven different music notes. This definitioncan apply to scales as well (though not necessarily 100%). Welldiscuss more about scales in the next lesson, but for now, justkeep that key/scale similarity in your back pocket.

K eys are very important because they are the basic structure foreverything in music. As I said, the seven notes in a key can bereferred to as a "family." This means that all of the notes in anyparticular key are related in certain ways and are basicallyguaranteed to work well together (which, regarding my "family"analogy, may or may not be true in real life).

Keys are separated intotwo main categories: major keys and minor keys. Major keys will tend to produce a happier, upbeattone, whereas minor keys will tend to produce a sad, darktone.

To get us started, lets take a look at thesimplest major key, C major, shown in Figure 1.1:

Figure 1.1 shows us theseven notes that are in the key of C major. The nice thing aboutthe key of C major (and the reason that I called it the simplestmajor key) is that it is made up of all the natural notes . Any other major keywill have what are called accidentals .

There are a total of 12different notes in music. As mentioned before, seven of those notesare called the natural notes; namely, A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. Theother five notes exist in-between pairs of the natural notes.Figure 1.2 shows the natural notes in red and the in-between orsharp/flat notes in blue .

We need to notice of a couple of thingshere:

1. Notice that the notes withaccidentals each have two names. For example, A# andB b are both thesame note, C # andD b are both thesame note, etc. Its just two different names for the samenote.

2. Notice that there is no sharp/flat notebetween B and C or between E and F.

From here, lets take alook at the fingerboard of the guitar and see how these 12 uniquenotes are laid out. Guitars have frets, and each fret on eachstring plays one particular note. Figure 1.3 is a diagram of theguitar neck, and shows us what notes are on what frets and strings.The natural notes are circled, and the sharp/flat notes are not.Each string is labeled (1 st = thin e string,6 th =large E string) and each fret is labeled as well.