RSS
 

Posts Tagged ‘Theory’

Let’s meet the notes

02 Dec

All music, no matter the style of genre, is made up of notes. The basic building block of all Western Tonal Music (which is what I’m going to be teaching) is the “note”. Notes make up all the melody’s you’ve ever heard and when they are stacked on top of each other and played at the same time they make up all of the chords and chord progressions that you have ever heard. They are literally the alphabet that the language of music theory is built upon.

Each note has a letter name assigned to it. And it is those letter names that we have to memorize before we can go any further.  The good news is that there are only twelve notes that you have to be familiar with. The better news is that, if you can read this page, you already know the names of seven of those twelve notes.

Here is a little video that will introduce you to the notes and show you how they are named and ordered:


Fast Tube by Casper

So get to know the names of your notes and be able to find them on your particular instrument. From here on out, it will be assumed that you are thoroughly familiar with them.

For you guitar players out there, see my lesson on how to find the names of your notes on your guitar.

Next up: Half-Steps and Whole-Steps

 
No Comments

Posted in Basic Theory

 

An introduction to Scales and Modes

02 Dec

In Western Tonal music, which is what we’re discussing in the basic and intermediate theory lessons, there are 7 different primary scales or modes that we will be dealing with. If you’ve been exploring music theory for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly run into many different types of scales. You’ve probably heard of the pentatonic scale, which is a five note scale. You might have even heard of some of the more exotic scales, for example the whole tone scale, which is a specific kind of scale that is made up six notes. We’ll be looking at those variant scales and other like them a bit later, but for now we’re going to start with what are known as the Diatonic scales.

Diatonic scales are seven note scales that are made up of a particular arrangement of half-steps and whole-steps. Specifically each of these scales is made up of five whole-steps and two half-steps. The thing that defines each of these scales is “where the half-steps fall”. In tonal music, the half-steps of a scale are what gives them their particular flavor. They are the two most critical notes in any scale because they provide the sense of tension and release that provides the harmonic motion of a scale. We are going to discuss harmonic motion in great detail later when we begin to stack the various notes of the scales into chords, but for now, we simply need to become aware of the names of the seven modes (Scales) that we will be spending much of our time on in this intermediate section of the music theory course.

Here are the seven primary modes (scales) of western tonal music.

  1. Ionian (Major Scale)
  2. Dorian
  3. Phrygian
  4. Lydian
  5. Mixolydian
  6. Aeolian (Minor Scale)
  7. Locrian

There are two things that you need to simply memorize at this point in time. The first is obviously the Names of each of these modes (scales). But just as important is to know the numerical order of these modes. What I mean by this is simply that you need to know that Ionian is the 1st mode. Dorian is the 2nd mode and so on. This is going to be important when I break down how each of these modes are created. And for the guitar lessons, it is the “Key” to understanding how to utilize the Five Boxes in fingering these different scales on the guitar. We’re finally done with all the introductory material and are ready to really move into talking about music theory.

Next up, The Major Scale

 
1 Comment

Posted in Intermediate Theory, Music Theory

 

How the five boxes interlock

10 Nov

So now that we have memorized the five boxes, it’s time to see how they fit together to form a “Master Pattern”. This is the step that will take you the longest to really get down, but I promise the effort will be well worth it. The five boxes are really just a shortcut to help you get your head and fingers around the “Master Pattern”. Its this master pattern that we are going to be moving up and down the neck when we talk about building scales. And it’s this master pattern that you should be striving to see when you look at your guitar neck. Here is a graphic that shows you the five boxes interlocked into the master pattern. Remember, your real goal here is to no longer see five individual boxes, but to see this:

THE BOXES INTERLOCKEDSince this can be confusing at first, here’s a video that will really make this all very clear:


Fast Tube by Casper

I can tell you that when I was first learning these, learning to see the Master Pattern took the longest. I’m seriously talking about months  and months of working them into my fingers. While I was trying to get them burned into my brain, I came up with all sorts of little exercises to help. In the next lesson, I’m going to post some of these exercises. Do spend some time working them as I suggest. It will cut down significantly on the time it takes to get this down.

Again, I promise that all this effort will pay off. Once you have this Master Pattern down, your basically done learning patterns and fingerings. Then we can move on to learning how this one pattern contains all your scales and modes in every key and, more importantly, showing you how to use them to fast track your journey into learning Music Theory.

 
No Comments

Posted in Guitar Playing