Basic Music Theory

Why do you need to know music theory? Well depending on the person music theory can pretty much help anybody further understand their instrument, it helps with improvisation and writing music.

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Voices

A voice is a single line of music and it can be understood as a melody, and adding another voice would make a harmony. If you play five notes on your guitar on a single string this would be your first voice, playing five notes on another string simultaneously will be adding a second voice. Multiple voices add movement and play a huge part in music structure, the most voices a standard guitar can have is obviously six, hence six strings. The role each voice plays is called the background, middleground and the foreground, similar to how you can think of a band having a bassist, rhythm guitarist and the lead guitarist. The background plays usually bass notes at a slower note duration giving the song general movement, foreground is the decorative notes and style given to make the song interesting, and the middle ground is usually another side of movement most determined by the harmony of the background or the foreground.

The Major Scale

The major scale is a series of eight notes in the order: whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. Remember this order. A whole step is two frets (so 6 to 8 or 1 to 3 on your fretboard) and a half step is 1 fret (1 to 2 or 4 to 5, these are just examples). So the major scale starting on the 1st fret would be 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13. Except that nobody plays a scale on one string.. hopefully. So the scale looks like this.
The numbers on the fret board indicate which finger the note should be fretted, this is in standard tuning and does not apply to other tunings.

Note Durations

The duration of a note is how long a note is held out, it is all relative to the length of a whole note meaning: a quarter note is a quarter of a whole note and so on. Most of you aren't writing your own concertos so it is safe to say that you wont need to know any advanced not durations. But note durations are important in counting out to the song or riff you write.

This is a quarter note
A quarter note is counted like this "1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and...." Every number is a quater note and every number is a note stroked, plucked or played.


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