Channel: New Secret Guitar Teacher

Category: Music

Description: Find out how to put theory into practice and learn string names and chromatic scales easily, in the second part of the Powering You Way Up the Pyramid mini-series. Catch up with part one here: youtu.be/Y857EfuxCyE Check out the full lessons and courses at secretguitarteacher.com ! Abridged Script: We have said that the Guitar Music Theory Pyramid is a great tool for charting your progress when working through the subject of Music Theory as a Guitar player. But, as well as being thorough in your studying of each level, as mentioned in the last video, it is also vital to put each level into actual practice as you go. But this may not be as easy with some levels of the pyramid as with others. To help give you some examples of what I mean by ‘putting the theory into practice’, let’s zoom in on just the first two levels of the pyramid. To teach the names of the open strings I have always used the mnemonic Elephants And Donkeys Grow Big Ears. It’s great to learn this mnemonic, or any mnemonic that helps you remember the string names, but you want to move on from needing to use any mnemonic as soon as possible. And actually, this only takes a few minutes of concentrated effort. Simply pick each string in random order and call out its note name like this… To begin with you will be using the mnemonic and this will mean that naming each string will take a second or two. But as you persist with this exercise you will begin to know the name of each string directly. Simply continue that until you can name each string instantly. In other words, you have used the mnemonic as a stepping stone. With the Chromatic scale, first learn to understand it and then use the chanting exercise - you can find a video on that in the Exercise section of the SGT site – to learn it by heart. You will then know the scale fluently forwards using sharp names …and backwards using flat names. Then write down a random list of notes in a column like this... A, F#, D, Gb, E etc… and then next to these write random numbers from 1 to 6. Now see how fast you can find those notes on the fretboard using a combination of your knowledge of open string names and the chromatic scale. This is the first of many approaches that will eventually lead to you instantly knowing the name of any note on the fret board. In the next video in this series we’ll look at some ways to put the next couple of levels to good use. But meanwhile, do follow the advice in this video, because the more time you spend using these first two levels – the quicker and easier the next levels are going to be to understand and put to use – it’s a very cumulative process.