Why learn music theory? It makes your knowledge of the guitar transportable. Discover a cool sound in one place on the fretboard and quickly figure out how to play it in a different position or key. Instead of just memorizing where to put your fingers, see the underlying patterns. Understanding the logic behind the music you love will make you a better, more versatile guitar player.
Learning to play songs in different keys by actually transposing and understanding the resulting chords and melodies can transform your guitar playing.
In this lesson, you’ll see that you can use familiar three-note chords, or triads, to find smooth and easy ways to play different types of seventh chords.
Using a triadic approach to mapping the fretboard can help you break out of ruts and develop a deeper understanding of the guitar and music in general.
Here are some of the evocative sounds you can create using chord voicings with notes that are close to each other—just a half step or whole step apart.
Here you’ll learn how guitar notation evolved into the sophisticated tool it is today, how it’s prepared for publications like AG, and most important, how you can use it to learn new music, whatever your style.
The whole-tone, natural minor, harmonic minor, and melodic minor scales on acoustic guitar can bring intriguing mystery and bittersweet emotion to your music.
Here are some tips on understanding the power of modes and pentatonic scales (major and minor), and how to fit them into your own playing on acoustic guitar.
The basic concept for seventh chords is simple enough: any number following a chord indicates the note that is to be included in the basic triad to form a more colorful harmony.
"Many guitar players have an aversion to anything that smacks of music theory," Gretchen Menn says, "My aim is to show you that having a basic understanding of the fundamentals will benefit you as a guitarist, a musician, and a creative soul."
In this guitar lesson we study the fundamentals of diatonic harmony to understand the theory, then apply it to the fretboard to build chords and use them in progression.
The scale is known for its ambiguous, dreamlike quality and has been used to great effect by composers such as Claude Debussy and jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk.
