Guitar Lesson Eight - Theory Part II

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Guitar Lesson Eight - Theory

Part II:

I'm sure that you have noticed by now that I place a lot of importance on learning scales. The reason for this is that scales are the foundation for all music. Everything that you hear when listening to a piece of music is based on scales. Therefore, in order to have any sort of understanding of how music is constructed, you must have a firm understanding of scales.

At this point within the lessons, you need to have worked with both the major and minor scales enough that you can play both scales in all twelve keys on any string and be comfortable working with both scales on any two adjacent strings.

The first step in creating music from a scale is melody. All the work you have done with scales so far has been geared toward exploring the melodic possibilities of scales. Now we are going to begin exploring how scales create harmony. Harmony is created whenever two or more notes are played together. Chords are an example of complex harmony. We are going to look at simple harmony.

Harmonizing Scales:

Playing more than one note at a time (harmony) requires that you be able to see a scale on two strings at once.

We'll use the A major scale on the low E and A-strings for our example:

Now, familiarize yourself with the position of each interval on the A-string relative to the root at the 5th fret of the E-string:

With proper hand position, you should find every interval except the 7th and octave within reach of the root at the 5th fret on the E-string.

When playing harmony, each interval is given a designation. The 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 7th are called major intervals, while the 4th and 5th are called perfect intervals. This designation is important, because it is the basis of how chords are named. Also, if you play the A at the 5th fret of the E-string and the open A-string together the interval is called unison. Unison means that two notes of the same pitch are being played together.

Let's take a look at what each interval looks like in standard notation:

Hey!! There's a key signature for you to read!

Familiarize yourself with the sound and location of each interval. You will find that certain intervals sound pleasing to the ear while others sound tense or dissonant. For the sake of being able to hear the 7th and octave intervals, these notes can be moved over to the 6th and 7th fret of the D-string.

Now, we'll do the same thing with the A minor scale.

First, let's see how the scale lines up on both strings:

Now, familiarize yourself with each of the intervals relative to the root note at the fifth fret of the E-string:

Recall that the 3rd, 6th and 7th in there natural position are called major intervals. When you flat a major interval it becomes a minor interval. Minor intervals are usually denoted with a lower case "m" as opposed to a capital "M".

Here's the A minor scale intervals in standard notation:

Are you looking at the key signature? Do you understand how that key signature indicates A minor?

One of the cool things about the guitar is that except for the B-string, the tuning of the strings is uniform. What this means to you and me is that we can move everything over to the A and D-strings without having to learn new relationships between all of our intervals:

Notice that all of the intervals are in the same position relative to the root on the A-string. This will be true for every pair of strings except the G and B-strings. Remember that the B-string is tuned ½-step down from the rest of the strings. This means that all the intervals on the B-string will be one fret higher than you would normally expect.

Now, figure out the major and minor intervals on every pair of strings for all twelve keys. Once you get going with it, you'll find that it isn't hard to do at all.

This lesson is divided into five parts:

Theory Part I

Theory Part II

Technique - Left Hand

Technique - Right Hand

Music

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