Sunday 27 February 2011

Basic Music Theory

Hey everyone, decided to post some beginner music theory ideas...too many new guitarists are getting out there who have no clue in hell what they are doing.

There are 7 main notes from A - G (Yes the letters of the alphabet). They all have accidentals except for B and E (or F and C but that's too complicated.) and you could refer to that as SHARPS. The note above A is A# which is read A Sharp. It gets tricky because you can also refer to it starting from the note above but then it is called a FLAT. So the note below B is Ab (the small b stands for flat). To make it simple, here are the 12 notes.

A, A# (Bb) , B, C, C# (Db), D, D# (Eb), E, F, F# (Gb), G, G# (Ab)...Those are the notes including the sharps but in brackets I included what they might be referred to if you take it as a flat.

To find these notes on a guitar is simple. The guitar fretboard moves up one half step every fret. So Open E string is E, the first Fret is F, the second is F#...and so on until you hit the 12th fret and then they just repeat starting from E because that is called an Octave. Now go ahead and learn those notes!


19 comments:

  1. started playing guitar a few weeks ago and havent acctually found any useful information until now!
    Thanks, its really useful!

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  2. great for someone starting out! ive been playing piano for 4 yrs ;)

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  3. Some time ago I started playing the guitar, but I abbandoned it, maybe I'll start again...

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  4. Cool! I'll try and memorise these! xx

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  5. Mmmm didn't know much of this... thanks for sharing ;)

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  6. Been playing a good while, so I'm familiar but I'll follow you for more theory in the future.

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  7. Is there any difference between a sharp and a flat or are they just different names for the same thing?

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  8. Interesting. I've always wanted to play the guitar.

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  9. This might be very useful in my future musical endeavors..Following for more! :D Sweet post.

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  10. Trelin: Not really, they are the same pitch. It just helps when you are referring to scales. Maybe ill post something tomorrow detailing it more.

    Basically you want to keep a scale diatonic (fancy word lol) and you don't want to repeat letters. So if the scale has an "A" already...you don't want an "A#"...you would call it a "Bb" in that case.

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  11. Thanks, it very helpful things!

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  12. im taking music theory now.. the class is actually pretty hard

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  13. Definitely made me want to pick up the old guitar again. Following for more posts like this!

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  14. I like where you are taking this blog! Keep up the good work and I'll be sure to keep checking in.

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