Over the past ten years many talented writers and teachers have supplied Guitar Noise with many great lessons on music theory. They range from basic introductory overviews, such as “The Musical Genome Theory” trilogy of lessons to articles on specific topics, such as extended and altered chords. Let’s approach music theory and how it relates to the guitar with a simple idea: music theory is actually simple and fun. It’s not rocket science.
Music Theory
If you'd like to delve more into the wild and wonderful world of music theory, check out this month's topic "Theory Without Tears."
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Check out some of the great video lessons at Jamplay.com. Fall in love with learning guitar again. An exclusive offer for Guitar Noise readers.More Music Theory Lessons
From Math to Music – (A Mathematical Approach to Learning The Fret Board)
One of the more difficult tasks to learning the guitar is mastering the fretboard. Bruce presents us with one method, which employs simple memorization and your ability to quickly add small integers in your head. The first part of this article will present this method, and the second part will provide additional information to reinforce your learning of the fret board.
Altered States
Tom has a gift of being able to explain complicated material in a very uncomplicated manner. After guiding us through the maze of extended chords in his last article, he returns to explain altered chords and does so in such a simple way that I wish I’d had him explain it to me many, many years ago!
Extended Chords
Getting to the stage of playing advanced chords doesn’t really require learning hundreds of new chord shapes – it only demands that you can relate new chords to old ones in a logical way. By the time you’ve finished reading Tom’s latest article, you’ll be able to form any chord extension that you want!
Untangling Chord Progressions
In this lesson, Tom unravels some of the mysteries of chord progressions. We’ll learn about cadences, the natural harmonic series, chord extensions, secondary dominants and much more.
Hands-on Intervals
First time contributor Oleg gives us a great approach to looking at your guitar in terms of musical intervals. This is a terrific method to use for lead playing as well as sight reading and increasing your ability to take the music that’s in your head and bring it out of your guitar.
Simple Alternate Chord Voicings
Bruce returns to Guitar Noise with his second piece, one on the fascinating topic of chord voicings. This is a great thing for those of you who play with other guitarists to read up on and put to practice.
Basic Music Theory
Bruce was kind enough to write out this concise article, which spells out some of the basics of chord theory. He was even kinder to include all sorts of handy charts and diagrams that should help out any beginner wanting to tackle this subject.
Augmented Diminished Dementia
Just the words augmented and diminished give us pause. Do we need a special degree or extra study to employ one of these chords? Not at all! Let’s examine these chords, how they’re formed and the functions they can serve. If you’re capable of counting to twelve, you’re capable of understanding and using these marvelous chords.
Key Changes
In this article Jimmy Hudson discusses how to know what key you are in and how to stay in key.
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