The 3 Best Music Theory Books For Guitarists

Between these, come the likes of the most simple and common p (piano- quiet) and f (forte- loud). More middling volumes can be created via mf and mp, while sudden moments of loudness can be achieved through sfz instructions. Dynamics are one of the most simple concepts in music theory as they a have a very distinctive and definitive existence. The Western chromatic scale organises a specific set of pitches within the human hearing range, and allows us to move up through every single note. While we are used to this sound, it’s important to remember that this doesn’t nearly cover every single pitch.

Play your first song on the guitar, start to finish, in an hour. At this point, you’ll have noticed that we’ve used letters to name our notes. These letters are part of something called the Natural Musical Alphabet.

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.

Sharps and Flats, for example, C♯ and D♭ and of the same note value, despite being notated differently. When accidentals are of the same note value in this way they are referred to as enharmonic equivalents. First of all, be sure to have read our tutorial on guitar fretboard notes , it will show how to navigate the fretboard fluently .

Learning to read chord charts is one of the first things you'll need to do as a beginner guitarist. You'll be using them for the rest of your guitar-playing life actually. The Guitar way they try to teach you music theory on the guitar is very often hard to understand and can become overwhelming fast. Knowing that the interval between a C and D is one step, you’ll need to move up two frets from the C to arrive at the D, on the tenth fret. In this diagram, the notes E, F, G, A, B and C have been highlighted.

So if we start on a C note and apply the pattern, we’ll get a C major scale. There are indeed other areas of music theory any guitarist serious about upgrading their skills should learn, from modes to modulations. From understanding chord construction to intervals in the Major Scale, if you play guitar you can't afford not to read this...