Online Music Theory Course for Guitar



Transposition between keys exists with the same principal in mind. TheGuitarLesson.com, created by Tom Fontana, is dedicated to bringing the highest quality guitar tutorials to beginner guitarists. Through creating fun and engaging guitar lessons, we aim to spread our love of the guitar to as many new players as possible. A power chord is not a real chord, it's actually a diad, which is 2 notes played together. Guitar power chords are very versatile, since the shape can be moved all over the fretboard.

A set of quaver triplets, for example, would tell you to play three equally spaced notes within the rhythmic period that would normally be filled by two normal quavers. Technically, tempo and metre are encompassed by rhythm, but rhythm also has its own distinctive action. For example, a semibreve rhythm implies that its note should be a held for four beats. You should familiarise yourself with these terms as well as semiquaver, minim and crotchet, as they all give length to notes. The ideas of tonality and harmony often overlap as harmony is created from notes that exist within a tonality.

Plus, it’s important to understand intervals as they are a foundational concept of music theory. You can think of the guitar fretboard as one big connected grid. It stands to reason that if the notes on the fretboard follow a given pattern, so too do the scales that are derived from these notes. This is important to understand because once you learn to recognize the patterns that make up a given scale, it gives you the freedom to play across the entire fretboard. Using what we already know about scales, the concept of tonality is something rather easy to grasp. While a scale is a selection of notes organised into a specific order, a key is just those notes in their unorganised form.

We have just seen that the C major chord is composed of the root, the major third and the perfect fifth . For now, you only have to know that a chord in root position has the root note at the bottom and that note gives the name to the chord. The analogy he uses is that people know colors, but if someone asked you about the color “blue,” you wouldn’t know how to describe it unless you had it in your palette. The vocabulary and concepts of music theory are your palettes in this case.

On the 4th string the patterns change a bit more to compensate for the tuning of the 3rd string. Still, you should see the similarities between these patterns and the previous. Another way to easily visualize this, is to look at a piano keyboard. Within an octave on the piano, you'll notice that there are two spots that have two white keys right next to each other.

And yet, we all know guitarists that have the best rig in the world and still have a bad tone. The fact is that regarding tone, the player comes before the instrument. Click here to see how you can get a great guitar tone by spending nothing and only changing the way you play and approach the instrument. A real idea of what aspects of music theory are the most useful things for you to Guitar learn right now and in your guitar playing future. Now that the pattern begins on a G, you’ll get a G major scale. Notice that although the pattern remains the same, the notes have changed.

Chord theory is the study of how chords are built and how different chords relate to one another. This includes knowing basic chord structure, the difference between major and minor, the use of added chord tones and extensions, and the concept of voice leading. Guitarists make use of fragmented chord shapes, chord inversions, and chord voicings, and it all stems from their knowledge of chord construction. One of the best ways to learn how chords are formed on the fretboard is to study the guitar-specific CAGED system.

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