Loosing Track
Motivation - Learning Approach - About this Series
So here you can see what everyone has to learn: The major scale. This scale includes all the information for playing any harmony on guitar. It is like my dream and problem I always pondered when learning guitar came true afterwards:
One pattern explains everything!?
Yes but why didn’t they tell us? I mean sure everyone learns Do Re Mi Fa ……But I remember only one guy who clearly began teaching Harmony head on. It’s a good choice if you want to understand music and have fun with your instrument. But let’s talk about Motivaton first.
How To Create A Song - where to start?
It may be a feeling while listening to music or watching someone perform music or a parent, teacher, friend who lends us an instrument or lets us take music lessons. I was lucky as my mother let me take violin lessons and I had a great music teacher in school and I loved music from Vivaldi to Dylan and with 16 I got my first guitar from a friend being a piano teacher. I already got infused without knowing - Its a Feeling . Lets get going baby!
Open up your ears: Can you hear suspension and resolve here? It is the leading note B wanna go to C : they have a great bond. B the unstable Leading Note and it’s resolve to the Tonic C. Harmony is about learning and using these connections.
I always asked myself this: Is there a Formula, a Pattern for Harmony you can learn, shift around and then play everything and stop learning music theory and start playing?
Yes there is but you got to step inside before you see - music is experience not a pattern.
Use Triads to unleash harmony on your guitar an get to know about Modes
-
You got to get the naming right. We are talking about musical sounds defined basically by pitch and length. The pitches are responsible for harmony so naming, learning and understanding them is important. We have the first seven letters of the alphabet
A B C D E F G
and five in between pitches we can reach using sharps:
A# C# D# F# G#
Note that there are corresponding musically equivalent pitches with double\half frequency. So in the end all western musical pitches boil down to 12 notes. Practise these in Chromatic Scale
-
A scale has a root note where it starts and ends and follows a combination of whole and half tones. You only need to learn and understand this one scale to master your guitar. You may think thats bullshit - but its true. In the end everything boils down to something simple and that is a good thing. So here is our theory:
C D E F G A B C
Stay tuned and do not let theory stand in your ways it is a helping tool - without you will loose track and motivation.
-
Stacking two thirds on every note gives 7 triads. Searching for and playing these triads “up and down", “in rounds” and with chord progressions will let you learn about the chord connections and the role of the first C chord “where the melody always wants to go to”.
By choosing other starting points you will create modes that have other sound qualities like the sad, dark Minor Sound starting at A or the dreamy Lydian Sound starting at F. This is the one big thing about music: You can express and experience different feelings - its a whole world there to discover with paths and mountains to greater sights. I really love hiking there. You wanna join?