Getting Back To The Guitar – Music Theory Basics Part 1

Honestly, who doesn’t want to be able to melt faces off a 30,000 person crowd with a 10 minute solo so deadly it will make the first nine rows of the stadium cower in terror from the awesome shred? I know I do. I also have this burning desire to express my musical majesty with the world, but I just never knew the proper way how.

I played the guitar for a couple years now, taking some basic lessons getting me started in the right direction, even learning how to play most of my favorite songs on the radio. The thing was, I was mostly just fiddling around here and there without getting down to some serious business with my guitar playing. After breaking my wrist in a freak tragic snowboarding incident, I stopped taking lessons, although I still played guitar once my wrist healed. Over the past 3 or so years, I casually played, jammed a bit with some friends and continued on my wayward path.

I just recently became frustrated with my lack of own personal discipline with my guitar playing and went back to get some more lessons. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing anything wrong, that my technique was right, and just someone to push me to that next level my guitar playing. I went in and asked him to start right off with the very basics. Something I could learn right away so I could immediately go home and start writing some of my own songs. I told my teacher I was especially interested in song writing and composing. This is the first thing he sat down and wrote on my paper, “The Musical Alphabet and Its Spacing.”

Some of you might groan at the thought of something so basic or so boring, or you just might groan because it has to do with simple theory. Ew, not theory, that’s like the fruitcake your Aunt gives you every Christmas of music right? She says you need to have it, but you never want it. Here are the facts, theory may seem boring and hard, but it is vital in creating music, and can be quite fun when understood. I am just going to scratch the surface on basic theory that will help you get up and running immediately with writing music. Theory gets so ridiculously deep, and there are many websites out there I will refer you to if you are interested in diving any deeper into this vast ocean known as theory.

Anyways, on with this musical alphabet business. First, we must understand the term “musical interval.” A musical interval is essentially the difference of pitch between two notes. This interval is defined in two things; tones and semi-tones. A tone is also called a whole step, and actually equals 2 frets on the guitar. A semi-tone (or half step) is equal to 1 fret on the guitar. It’s vital for a new guitarist to learn most, if not all the note names on the low E and A strings (top two strings). This is because from those notes you can develop pretty much every major chord. Go up the fretboard on your low E string fret by fret, and notice the difference between the spacing of one fret and two frets. Every single time you move up a fret, you are going up a semi-tone, and every time you move two frets up, you go up a whole tone. In the next lesson we will take our newfound knowledge and apply it to the C Major scale— the starting point in our musical journey. Looking forward to seeing you soon.