Channel: New Secret Guitar Teacher

Category: Music

Tags: music explainedwhy learn to read musicnoteskeysscalesecret guitar teacherread music for guitarmusical keysguitar read musicnick minnionchordsecretguitarteacherstandard notationread guitar musicarpeggioread music

Description: Nick explains briefly how learning standard notation can help you SEE the way that musical elements (chords, scales and arpeggios) fit together to make music. -- Abridged Script: Most guitar players use guitar tablature and chord grids to convey musical ideas in writing. The advantage of these systems is that they are direct graphic representations of the guitar itself. They show you its strings and frets and tell you where to place your fingers to get the notes or chords we want to hear. For beginners, these systems are very simple to learn and easy to use. Ideal when all you want to do is get as quickly as possible to the point where your playing sounds good. By using tab and chord grids, we steer neatly around any need to even know the names of the notes we are playing. We learn by shape and pattern and sequences of fingering. But once we start moving up from beginner to intermediate stage it becomes increasingly difficult to rely on these methods as our only way of writing music. So this is where learning the basics of standard notation can really help accelerate our progress. By ‘standard notation’ we mean the universal language of written music. Notes written on a stave as crotchets, quavers, minims and semibreves or in North America: Whole notes, Half Notes, Quarter Notes, and eighths… So, why go to the trouble of learning another way of reading and writing music? The answer really goes back to the fact that the layout of the guitar fretboard makes the elements of music theory almost invisible when music is written out in tab or chord grids. For example: Here you can see written examples of C minor seventh and D minor seventh arpeggios. The guitar tab shows a couple of random examples of ways these arpeggios might appear in a song. If I follow the instructions in the tab you can immediately hear the musical connection between these two elements – they kind of sound similar …and they kind of go together quite nicely. But looking just at the tab, there are no obvious clues to explain these impressions that our ears pick up. There are no clues in the numbers on the tab nor the pattern these make on the lines representing the strings. So, the very many guitar players who insist on just sticking with tab, may eventually develop an instinctive feel for the intricate way in which musical elements interrelate. But their understanding of music, and ability to learn it much quicker as a result, could be greatly enhanced by investing a little time and trouble into learning to read standard notation as well. Looking at a couple of ways we might find these same elements written in Standard notation, you can immediately see the connections our ears tell us are there. The pitch pattern clearly stands out in both cases you can see the rise and fall of the arpeggios. In line one we have written out each arpeggio relative to the key of the root note – this shows up the formula of the minor 7th arpeggio – 1 b3 5 b7 Understanding how to apply this formula enables us to find hundreds of ways of playing Minor 7th arpeggios in any key …and in any position on the fret board. In line two we see the arpeggios written out as they might be used in the key of Bb major. This view emphasizes the fact that they both belong in the same key – explaining why they sound so nice when played together. By applying a bit of music theory from the higher levels of the pyramid, we would then know that following these two arpeggios with an Am7b5 arpeggio would be one way of leading back to the key chord of Bb maj7. Whether improvising, composing or working out other peoples’ recordings, this knowledge, and the ability to apply it, saves hundreds of hours of trial and error – it is literally the intelligent way to make music. On the Secret Guitar Teacher site, we have a nice, easy to follow series of lessons on Standard notation and you can then follow this by studying other lessons that help you use the ability to read and write in this universal musical language, to help you unlock all the mysteries of playing guitar.