New Post Tomorrow!!
Thinking Out Loud…
In the coming weeks we’re going to begin to move from the theoretical to practical application of the concepts we’ve been learning. I won’t be posting next week due to the Thanksgiving holiday, so now is a good time to review the things that got us to this point. Some assumptions:
You have a guitar to practice with. Not a showstopper if you don’t, but practical application of all we’ve talked about will be much more difficult without one.
You have a guitar instructor that’s teaching at least basic techniques of fretting and strumming with a pick, and some chords to play with simple songs. If you’re not there yet, I can’t stress enough how important this is. I use YouTube for things like how to spackle and texture drywall repairs. YouTube can’t take the place of a real live guitar instructor! (And there are so many different videos on texturing drywall, that’s reached a point of diminishing returns as well.) While we’ll talk in passing about some techniques, this newsletter isn’t about teaching you how to play guitar - in fact it’s the opposite: a place to give context to the “language” you’ll develop with your guitar instructor in learning how to play.
You have a very basic knowledge of music theory: start with a note, create a Major scale using the WWHWWWH formula, and build basic Major triad chords using the M3,m3 structure from each note of the scale.
Since it’s going to be a couple of weeks after tomorrow’s post, I’ll leave you with several things to work with tomorrow, and here’s an example:
For tomorrow, notice a couple of things about this chart:
The Roman numerals across the top as headers.
There are two examples of the key of EMaj and a couple of “different” chords in one of the examples, an “A2” and a “Bsus”. What the heck?
What’s up with those 7 (vii) chords?
All of this and much more tomorrow!!
Bonus Round: Last week I left you with some (strictly voluntary) homework - were you able to figure out some minor chords? Tomorrow I’ll show you my (highly embarrassing) way to figure out triads on the fly.
Bonus Round for tomorrow: I also left a bit of a clue in the subtitle from last week: Who wrote “American Tune”? And why?
Cheers, and keep playing!!
Michael Acoustic