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    Music Theory for Every Guitarist
    Music Theory for Every Guitarist
    Music Theory for Every Guitarist
    Ebook229 pages1 hour

    Music Theory for Every Guitarist

    By Doug Eggleston

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    About this ebook

    eBook features:

    - 11 complete chapters
    - Over 100 figures and diagrams
    - Step-by-step instructions with examples
    - Exercises to apply the theory you are learning
    - Examples from real songs you know
    - Fully backed by the author via email (get a reply within 24 hours)

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDoug Eggleston
    Release dateFeb 8, 2014
    ISBN9781310703409
    Music Theory for Every Guitarist
    Author

    Doug Eggleston

    The best teacher is the one who can teach you how to create your own music with your instrument and not just memorize how to play certain songs. Music theory not only shows you how to create your own music but it will also help you learn how to play any song more easily. You won't have to memorize where to put your fingers and how to strum anymore; you will understand how the song was written and it'll just make sense. Doug Eggleston is a guitar enthusiast with several years of experience teaching lessons to all ages.

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    • 3/5
      I have to downgrade this book after reading only a few pages. It refers to the first note of a scale or key as the “root note” which is incorrect. The root note is the first note of a chord, hence the term “root position”. The correct name for the first note is “tonic”. If we were in the key of C, yes, C is the tonic of that key, and the root note of a C major chord. But G is the dominant note of the that key and the “root note” of a G major chord. “Root” refer to chords, not scales or keys.

    Book preview

    Music Theory for Every Guitarist - Doug Eggleston

    LESSON 1: The Basics of Scales and Keys

    First, let’s define what a key is. A key is a group or family of seven different music notes. This definition can apply to scales as well (though not necessarily 100%). We’ll discuss more about scales in the next lesson, but for now, just keep that key/scale similarity in your back pocket.

    Keys are very important because they are the basic structure for everything in music. As I said, the seven notes in a key can be referred to as a family. This means that all of the notes in any particular key are related in certain ways and are basically guaranteed to work well together (which, regarding my family analogy, may or may not be true in real life).

    Keys are separated into two main categories: major keys and minor keys. Major keys will tend to produce a happier, upbeat tone, whereas minor keys will tend to produce a sad, dark tone.

    To get us started, let’s take a look at the simplest major key, C major, shown in Figure 1.1:

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

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

    We need to notice of a couple of things here:

    Notice that the notes with accidentals each have two names. For example, A# and Bbare both the same note, C#and Dbare both the same note, etc. It’s just two different names for the same note.

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

    From here, let’s take a look at the fingerboard of the guitar and see how these 12 unique notes are laid out. Guitars have frets, and each fret on each string plays one particular note. Figure 1.3 is a diagram of the guitar 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 (1st = thin e string, 6th = large E string) and each fret is labeled as well.

    Allow me draw your attention to the 5th string, which is the note A. Compare figure 1.2 to what you see here. As you climb up the neck one fret at a time, you are traveling through each of the 12 unique notes in alphabetical order, just as figure 1.2 shows us.

    Next, let’s introduce the terms interval, whole step and half step. These terms refer to the distance between two notes in music. On a guitar, they are equal to a specific number of frets.

    Figure 1.4 shows us the 7 natural notes with W’s (whole steps) and H’s (half steps) in between each pair. This tells us that there are 2 frets between A and B, 1 fret between B and C, 2 frets between C and D, and so on. If we refer back to figure 1.3, you’ll see this is true. For example, the 5th string open is A, then the 2nd fret on that string is B, the 3rd fret is C, the 5th fret is D, and so on.

    Let’s circle back to the notes with accidentals (sharp/flat signs). If there are 2 frets between A and B, there must be one fret in between them, right? The 1st fret of the 5th string is A#/Bb – two names for the same note. The difference is simply that a sharp sign raises a note by one fret, and a flat sign lowers a note by one fret.

    Looking at the 5th string again, since B is on the 2nd fret, the note one fret below it can be called Bb. Or, since A is the open string, the note one fret above it can be called A#. You can see that this is true for any pair of natural notes with a whole step in between them.

    Keep in mind that not all pairs natural notes have whole steps between them. B and C, E and F are the only two pairs which only have a half step between them. This means there technically is no B# or Cb; B# would simply be called C, and visa versa. The same is true for E and F.

    Just for a quick comparison, take a look at the key of A major in figure 1.5 which does contain some accidentals. As you can see, the key of A major contains 3 sharp notes: C#, F#, and G#. Remember that C major contains just the natural notes, no accidentals.

    Going a step further, how do we know which notes are in which keys? It turns out we can easily organize all the notes in all the different major and minor keys into simple charts. Take a look at figure 1.6 below. The first chart lists all the major keys and their notes, and the second chart does the same for all the minor keys.

    There is a way to figure out which notes are in which keys, so there’s no need to try and memorize these entire charts. I know they look intimidating at first, but in Lesson 2 we will learn how to build these charts on our own, without memorization. For now, just remember what we said at the beginning of the lesson about how a key is the same thing as a scale: an organized series or family of notes. The notes in any given major scale are all the same as the notes in the same major key.

    One thing I want you to notice from these charts is that the first note "1" of each scale is always the same as the key itself. If the key is A major or A minor, the first note is A. If the key is Bb (remember, we speak this as B flat) major or minor, the first note is Bb. This is always true! This point will come back into play in Lesson 2.

    The first note of a key/scale has a special name. It is known as the root note. The name implies that it is the note the key/scale begins from, like the roots of a tree.

    Let’s now take a look at where all of these notes are located on the neck of the guitar. Each fret of each string plays one particular note. Figure 1.7 shows the full range of notes on a typical guitar, in both standard notation and tablature. Looking at the tablature, notice that several notes can be played in multiple locations on the neck.

    When reading music notes on the staff, we use what are called key signatures to indicate what key a song is in. The key signature is always placed at the beginning of every line of the song, after the clef. The idea behind this is just organization; otherwise, you would need to place an accidental next to each sharp/flat note as required by the key. Key signatures are much neater and efficient way to tell the player which notes must be played sharp or flat.

    For example, recall that the key of A major contains three sharps: C#, F#, and G#. The first line of figure 1.8 shows us the A major scale, but without the proper key signature. Notice a sharp sign is placed next to C#, F#, and G# because of this. The second line has the correct key signature; thus, the accidentals are removed from the notes throughout the song, and are instead placed at the beginning of the line. You know that C, F, G are the affected notes because the sharp signs are placed in the same spaces and lines as those notes.

    At this point, let’s introduce you to a wonderful tool called the circle of fifths, or the cycle of keys. Once we learn how to read it, we can use it to determine which notes are sharp or flat in any major key.

    So, how do we read this thing? As you travel clockwise around the circle, each step you take is a fifth. In other words, the note that you are currently on is the fifth of the note before it. Let’s start at the top of the circle at C. If we take one step clockwise, we will get to G. This tells us that G is the fifth note in the key of C major. You can verify this by looking at figure 1.5.

    The numbers next to all the notes around the circle tell you how many sharps or flats (depending on which side of the circle the key you want is on) there are in each key. For example, C has a 0 next to it, indicating that the key of C major has no sharps or flats. This should make sense after

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