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Lesson 1: The guitar and music

Foreword: I'm not going to bother you with a biography on me or who I am but I want to make a few things clear before we start. Some of you may already know everything in this paper but please read it through from the beginning to the end anyway. The reason why I want you to do this is that if you're not 100% sure about these things you are going to have a hard time following the other lessons. Anyway, to most people theory is boring, and in all fairness in the beginning it is. After all you just want to play the guitar right? Why should I care if I play in C major or in G major as long as it sounds good? The answer is that you don't have to. You can be a great musician without knowing any theory at all but in my personal opinion it isn't half as easy and you miss out on alot of things. Even Jimi Hendrix one of the greatest play-by-ear and feeling guitarist of all times has stated that he wished that he knew more theory because it would allow him to create even more music.

I can of course only speak for myself but I think that the main benifit from learning theory is the ability to communicate with other musicians. After all it's alot easier to tell someone to play an A-minor chord instead of showing him the fingering right? Another great thing with learning theory is that you get a completely different view on music. It's something that can't be described but you will know when you've gotten there. It's so much easier to create music when you understand music. Well enough motivational speaking let's start with the lesson shall we?

There are only two things you need for this lesson and those two things are your guitar and a fresh mind. Make sure that you have the guitar with you when you read through this lesson. And most importantly make sure that you are rested and can stay focused when reading through this. If you fall into the habit of reading and not thinking then you're not going to learn anything from this lesson. Only read the following lesson if you're rested and really feel like you want to learn the basics of music theory. Anyway, here we go!

Part 1 - Tones
There are only 12 tones! This is probably the most important thing in this entire lesson. Most of you already know this but I'll say it again just for the heck of it there are only 12 tones. If you want to get technical about it there are more than twelve tones - in fact there exist an infinte number of tones. Anyway, in our western tempered tonal system there exists 12 halftones and these halftones are commonly refered to as the "tones".

The twelve tones are:

As you can see some notes have the same name. That's because they are the same tone. The reason why the have more then one name is somewhat off topic so I won't discuss it here. As long as you know that a C# is the same as a Db you'll be fine. The # is pronounced sharp and the b is pronunced flat. So basicly a C# is a C sharp and a Db is a D flat. It's really simple a Db is a lowered D (the tone directly below D) and a C# is the tone directly above C. By now you're probably saying "but there must be more than twelve tones" well there is but these tones have the same sound as the tone that lies twelve steps below only that it sounds a bit brighter. That's why you have two E-strings on your guitar. The two E-strings are separated by 24 halfsteps.

Great, so how do they relate to my guitar?
You probably know this but stick with me. Most guitars have six strings, right? These six strings are usually tuned E, A, D, G, B, E from the lowest to the highest string. What this means is that your lowest string should be an E. Now the frets of the guitar are constructed so that they divide the neck of the guitar in halftones. That means that if the open E string is tuned to an E the first fret will be a F, subsequently fret 2 will be a F#/Gb and fret 3 will be a G. Well you get the picture. If not check the picture below :D


That's alot of notes in a small picture I know but if you check the first and the last string you will see what I mean.

Part 2 - Intervals
Now this is where it really starts to get interesting. This is your very first step into the complex world of musical harmony. There is a whole lot to learn about harmony but perhaps we should start by defining what harmony is? It's pretty simple, whenever you play more than one note at a time you're playing a harmony. If you're playing two tones at a time you're playing an interval and if you're playing more than two tones at once you're playing a chord.

Let's start with intervals. We know that there are twelve tones on our guitar right? So the most logical thing would be that we had eleven different intervals before we started to repeat ourselves (1-2, 1-3, 1-4, ..., 1-12). That would be logical yes but unfortunately it's not entirely true. There are a whole bunch of intervals. I'm going to cover the first thirteen intervals and in all fairness that's really all you need to know. I'm going to make a small table of the thirteen most important intervals. It's nothing complicated at all the first column contais the interval name, the second column contains the relative distance for example from the 1st note to the 7th note. The third column contains the actual notes for example the 1st and 5th tone starting on E would be E and G#. If you started on C it would be C to E. And that's what the next column contains - the note distance starting on C. This is just to make sure that you get the basic idea behind the intervals.

Interval name: Relative note distance: Note distance starting on E: Note distance starting on C:
Unison (1) 1-1 E-E C-C
Minor second (b2) 1-2 E-F C-C#
Major second (2) 1-3 E-F# C-D
Minor third (b3) 1-4 E-G C-D#
Major third (3) 1-5 E-G# C-E
Perfect fourth (4) 1-6 E-A C-F
Diminished fifth (Tritonus) (b5) 1-7 E-A# C-F#
Perfect fifth (5) 1-8 E-B C-G
Minor sixth (b6) 1-9 E-C C-G#
Major sixth (6) 1-10 E-C# C-A
Minor seventh (b7) 1-11 E-D C-A#
Major seventh (7) 1-12 E-D# C-B
Octave (8) 1-13 E-E C-C

You've probably noticed the symbols inside the ( )'s well that's how you write down the interval name in musical notation. Instead of saying that a Major scale contains a unison, a major second, a major third, a perfect fourth, a perfect fifth, a major sixth and a major seventh. You say that a major scale contains 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Drills: Do these drills so that you are sure that you have understood the concepts behind intervals.
A minor scale contains: 1, 2, b3, 4, 5, b6, b7 - name the intervals in the minor scale and write out the notes for A minor, C minor and E minor.
A minor blues pentatonic contains: 1, b3, 4, b5, 5, b7 - name the intervals and write out the appropriate notes for G, D and B.

Great, now how does that apply to my guitar?
I will take all interval examples with the root (bass) note of A. The A will be the 5th fret of the A string. Anyway, i'm pretty sure that you know at least one of these intervals from before and that's the perfect fifth. The famous rock/metal you name it interval. Anyway I'm sure you've seen it before:

It looks rather familiar doesn't it? Let's see now the 5th fret on the E string that would be a perfect fourth from E. Okay so the 5th fret is an A. The 7th fret on the A string. Let's see that would be a perfect fifth from A which is E. Okay so we've got an A and an E the distance between them is a perfect fifth. The interval is called a perfect fifth.

Do you know how to tune your guitar? The standard approach that is taught to beginners is to tune to a unison interval. If you've ever tuned your A and E string you have probably used this one:

The 5th fret on the E string is an A and an open A string is also an A. What does that mean? It means that we've got a unison interval. Well enough examples, let's take another look at the fretboard diagram.


If you look at the 5th fret of the E string you see that it's an A. But that's the same as the open A string. What happen if we go to the 6th fret on the E string? Well then you hit an A# but what if we move the same amount on the A string, i.e. we move one fret to the 1st fret. Guess what, that's also an A#. This is the key to playing intervals. It's impossible to play intervals on one string only (well duh...) but since the same tones exist on many different strings you can still play them harmonicly (together).

This is basicly everything you need to know about intervals. As you can see this is really not that difficult. The last thing that I'm going to go through here is a list of the positions I usually use for these intervals. Enjoy!

Good luck! /Fredrik