For many students, learning to play guitar is simply about learning new licks and bits of songs. This is fine however most people will, after a while, become frustrated and feel musically trapped due to a simple lack of knowledge about how music really works and in a sense… how to ‘put it all together’. When you understand how to do this it’s going to liberate you and allow much greater freedom in deciding what you want to play. You’ll have a far greater capacity to teach yourself and furthermore you’ll have enough information to be able to compose little tunes of your own should you wish to.
In order to be able to free yourself from the confines of simply being able to play what you’ve learned from someone else you need to increase your musical knowledge. If the subject of music theory sounds scary then it’s probably because in the past its been explained to you in a bad or confusing way. This is often enough to turn most people off theory for life and who could blame them? When you are taught badly and struggle to learn something it’s only natural to be shy about trying it again.
My hope is that Guitar in a Nutshell is going to finally show you that learning to play guitar and understanding topics such as musical keys, scales and theory is actually pretty straight forward when it’s explained to you correctly. The great value is that it empowers students to be more independent and to have a greater capacity to teach themselves in the future.
In a key we have 7 chords and they are labelled in Roman Numerals
I II III IV V VI VII
Now if we simply count up the alphabet we’ll get a complete scale, let’s use C
C D E F G A B
I II III IV V VI VII
Now if we assign the correct chord formula (this is all explained and shown in the video lessons) we get the key of C
C Dm Em F G Am Bdim
I II III IV V VI VII
It’s the combination of these chords in the key with the scale that gives us the two main elements required to make music – harmony and melody. It gives you all you need to make up your own progressions and melodic content secure in the fact that it’s all going to work together perfectly. Through understanding your keys you’ll also be able to appreciate and understand more about the beginner guitar songs you play. You’ll notice things about them you never would have before and in this natural kind of analysis you’ll get a greater enjoyment from song playing.
There are 24 keys in all but actually it’s simpler to think of there just being 12 Major keys with the 12 minor ones contained inside them. This essentially means you have 12 keys possible – for really great demonstrations of all this you can check out the dedicated Music Theory Lessons on the site. For guitar purposes we can most often get away with just knowing 3 – 4 of those keys which would be C, G, D and A. You’ll find that in combination with a Capo, having a working knowledge of these 3 or 4 keys will be more than sufficient to get you confidently through most songs as you learn to play acoustic guitar.
Remember that the process of learning to play guitar is never complete without having that little bit of theory to back it up even in guitar lessons for beginners. It cements everything together into a perfect little system and with this small but powerful bit of knowledge much of the mystery will lift and you’ll find yourself far freer to play guitar as you want without restrictions.
