The best theory teacher is all the songs you’ve learned. The best theory practice is to tear those songs apart and see how they’re put together.
In order to do that, you will need to learn to recognize chords, scales and arpeggios in any key all over the fingerboard. If you know the notes on every…
The first step is to figure out what types of chords can be generated from the scale. Learning to harmonize scales in triads and 7th chords is a typical approach to this.
Once you know what types of chords can be generated from the scale, try stringing two or three of them together and see if…
Keys are a concept based on the idea of setting up a specific tone (tonic) as the point of final rest in a piece of music. Once Harmony was introduced and became the most important tool for setting up and supporting a tonic. this idea developed into two keys – major and minor. Within the…
In order to know what you’re doing, you have to analyze what you’re doing.
If you want to learn/analyze a song, the first thing you’re looking at are the types of chords or riffs being used. In order to do that, you have to know how chords and riffs are built. In order to know…
Diminished triad = flat the 3rd and 5th of a major chord, or flat the 5th of a minor chord.
Diminished 7th chord is a little tougher. You have to know a diminished triad, already, and add a diminished 7th to it. One way to get there is to start with a major 7th chord and…
The diminished 7th arpeggio is most commonly associated with the minor key. If you build a chord off the 7th degree of A harmonic minor, you get G# B D F.
In A minor it usually functions as a leading tone chord that resolves one fret higher into the tonic chord (Amin).
Once you understand how it…
Here are some things you can try with Pentatonics:
* Spend more time playing up and down the strings rather than across the strings.
* Pick every note instead of typical hammer pull licks.
* Avoid bends. Use slides instead.
* Avoid triplet patterns. Instead think in groups of 4, 5 and 6
* Think…
The first step is to practice locating and playing the inversions of each triad type up and down each set of three adjacent strings – CEG then EGC then GCE etc. Do the same for minor, diminished and augmented
Work the triads through major scale harmony on each set of 3 adjacent strings using the…
The two E strings are the same. The open strings and the 12th fret are the same. That gives you two points of reference vertically and horizontally.
Octaves from the E and A strings are two strings over and two frets up. Octaves from the D and G strings are two strings over and three frets…
Playing modes over a pedal tone is going to nail the sound of each mode down, but it can also be misleading in that you can wander around aimlessly within the mode and think you’re really “doing it”.
What you need, though, is to develop a sense of the strong and weak notes in each mode,…
