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…
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…
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,…
What make the modes is where the music resolves… comes to rest… feels at home.
If you take a pool of notes – C D E F G A B – and make the C sound like home, you get the major scale or C Ionian mode (at this point think of mode as meaning way…
There are five interlocking patterns that are usually taught for the pentatonic scale. Each of those 5 patterns line up along side each other to cover the entire fingerboard with one scale.
A minor pentatonic = A C D E G
Anywhere you find those notes on the fingerboard, it’s the A minor pentatonic scale. If…
There are many good ways to practice modes.
Start in a major scale position and alter the notes in that position to get the modes:
Lydian – raise the 4th
Ionian – return the 4th to natural
Mixolydian – lower the 7th
Dorian – lower the 3rd and 7th
Aeolian – lower the 3rd, 6th and 7th
Phrygian – loser the…
