Tag: music theory

The Best Guitar Theory Teacher

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…



Modes in a Nutshell

Take the major scale as a starting point.

C major gives us the notes C D E F G A B

If you take that same note collection and make it sound like some kind of D scale, you get the D Dorian mode.

If you take that same note collection and make it sound like some…



electric guitar G 2

How to Generate a Chord Progression from a Scale

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…



acoustic guitar F

Scales are Not Keys

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…



Learning Theory, But Don’t Know How to Apply It?

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…