Where do you begin if you want to understand music and how to make it on the guitar? I’m not going to lie to you; unless you are gifted with an extraordinary amount of natural ability, it’s not easy. But this (garbled, work-in-progress) article is intended to try and clear up some confusion for some people.
You can begin by picking up a guitar and trying to make some melodies of your own, or trying to figure out how the hell you play something familiar to you. If you’re lucky, you will be some kind of savant and able to pick it up quickly. Maybe, also if you’re lucky, you’ll have a friend or a good teacher who can show you the ropes, but not everyone is so fortunate.
There is a wealth of great tutorials and tabs on the internet that will help you pick up a neat little trick here and there, a sample of which is available on this site. Try doing a google search for the tab of a song, or searching youtube for videos on tapping, scales, songs, chords, or whatever you wish.
But it’s up to you to string it all together. Again, if you’re lucky, you will be musical enough to do something with all these tidbits of information and play something that pleases you, or again if you’re lucky, someone else.
But to get a grip on music (and I’m not inferring that I actually have, or else perhaps I’d be making a living out of music, instead of IT), requires a deeper understanding of what sounds good and what doesn’t, and more importantly, why. This is inherent in some people blessed with a true gift, and must be learned by others who have an ear for what sounds good but don’t know why.
That was our starter, so let us get to the main course.
Musical scales are based (for some reason currently unknown to me) around a C scale. (Musical notes are named A-G). To confuse things, there are 12 notes but only 7 names for them. On a piano keyboard there are 7 white notes and 5 black ones. Therein lies an important revelation. Starting with the note “C”, all of the white notes (ignore the black ones for just now) when played in order make up a major scale in the key of C.
What has this got to do with the guitar? Well, when looking up the chords for a song, playing with other people, or whatever, it is helpful to know what particular notes and chords are called. Possibly the easiest way to begin learning the notes on a guitar is to understand why these notes are named so, and unfortunately for non-pianists, it is all based around the piano.
The next important little nugget of information is the location of the black notes. A black note is given a name. Or rather, it has two names. It can be called “flat” after the white note above it, or “sharp” after the white note below it. So if we use the all important “C” scale, the location of the black notes is as follows:
W B W B W W B W B W B W
C D E F G A B
OK. That’s one damn important piece of info. The next piece of the jigsaw is as follows. *ANY* major scale is made up of the following notes, ascending relative to the note before it (where a semitone is the distance between two adjacent notes, white or black; and a a tone is, unsurprisingly, two semitones):
T T S T T T S
This illustrated using a C scale is as follows:
-T-T-S-T-T-T-S
C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C
So using our easiest major scale (as far as a pianist is concerned that is… for guitarists, all major scales are equally easy), “C” and starting on the first white note, you simply play all the white notes in succesion. You would have played a C major scale. Again, I’m sure you’re wondering what the hell this has to do with the guitar. Well, if you can learn the major scale, starting with C and learn where the semitones and tones are as above, you can find any major or minor chord incredibly easily.
There are a lot of basic chord shapes and scales that once learned, can be applied to any part of the fret board to find any chord, note or scale. The next important nugget of information is knowing which note in a chord is the “root” note, or the note by which the chord gets it’s name. And here’s a very brief and over-simplified summary; If you are playing an “E” major or major shaped chord or bar chord, the chord gets it’s name from the note produced when playing the 6th (top) string. This is because the 6th string open is an E, and is so when you play an open E chord.
Likewise, if you play an “A” major or minor bar chord on any fret, the chord gets it’s name from the note played when playing the 5th string, as, you may have guessed by now, when playing an open A major shape, the fifth string played open is called “A”.
Crikey. Hopefully you’re not getting confused. I you are, then apologies if I’m not explaining stuff too well.
So, to work out where a particular chord is, we’ll pick a random one and find a few different places it can be played. Let’s start with an easy one, A. Hopefully you’ll know what an “A” chord is, and if you don’t, take a look on my chords section under “tabs”, or pay a visit to ChordBook. So we know how A is played as an open chord, and that gets it’s name from the fifth string, which we also know to be called A. What if we want to play “A” using an “E” shaped bar chord? Well, we refer to our C major scale and the location of the black notes. Find “E” in the scale and work your way up each note, including the black ones, until you get to “A”. This is how many steps up the fretboard you have to go until you reach the correct fret on which to play an A chord using an E shaped bar chord.
You can hopefully see that to get from E to A is one semitone (between E and F) and two two tones, making a total of 5 semitones, or 5 frets. So to play an “A” major chord, you can play an E shaped bar chord on the 5th fret.
This works for any chord. So if you wanted to play a C sharp minor (C#m) using an A minor shaped bar chord, you simply count the semitones (frets) from A, to C sharp. Hopefully you can see that this would include two semitones and one tone, a total of 4 semitones, or 4 frets. So if you wanted to play a C#minor, you could play it using an A minor shaped bar chord on the fourth fret.
Soon to come:
Relative major and minor scales
Modal Scales
The circles of fifths and fourths
Inversions
A scale of chords
What makes music “musical”?
Music through time
So, please visit again, or subscribe to my RSS feed to be kept notified of when I get round to dumping this knowledge on here, free for all of you who wish to read it!
The Guitar Master
Tags: chord, lesson, major, scale, theory
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