How Guitars Work

In lesson 4, we looked at the important role that third interval notes play in:  building chords and making them either major or minor creating harmony if you want to play them alongside your melody notes. In this lesson you'll learn how to find third interval notes quickly anywhere on the fretboard. We've already looked at how the guitar is an instrument tuned around intervals of perfect fourths and major thirds. You've also learned that  the perfect fourth interval note is usually directly below your root note.  So, if I play the note G on the E string, I know that the fretted note below it is going to be the perfect fourth interval (the C note): Let’s just check if that's the case and refresh our memories. Well, the fretted note on the fifth string is the note C. So there should be an interval of a perfect fourth between G and C: Tonic is G Flat 2nd is G# Second is A Flat third is A# Major third is B Perfect fourth is C If I know that the strings are tuned in interva

When we’re working out a song, it’s important that we know what key it's in. If you’ve shied away from keys and scales in the past, because you think it means spending hours learning complex theory, don’t worry, I’m going to break this down for you and show you specifically, how to apply this to the guitar. You will learn That there are seven individual notes in any key That you can use these notes to understand which chords to play in a key Chords 1, 4 and 5 in a major key will always be major Chords 2, 3 and 6 in a major key will always be minor Chords 7 in a major key will always be diminished What is a musical key? A key is a family of notes that sound good together. We already know that there are 12 notes in the musical alphabet. You can start on any note (A-G) and work up all 12 notes until you return to the start (this is known as a chromatic scale). When you play in a certain musical key, you identify which 7 of the 12 available notes in the musical alphabet you are goin

In this lesson I’m going to show you how to take a simple three note bassline and, using harmonies, turn it into something that's interesting and beautiful to play or listen to. We’re going to split this session into two parts.  In part a you’re going to learn: The difference between notes, harmonies and chords How chords are built In part b, you’ll use this knowledge to find and play harmony notes. You’re going to need to refer to the PDF sheet you filled in as part of your homework in lesson 3 , so if you haven’t got that to hand, go grab it now. Part a The difference between notes, harmonies, and chords If you play an additional note at the same time as your melody notes, you're playing a harmony. So a harmony is made up of two notes that sound good when played together. If you play an additional two notes at the same time as the melody notes, you're playing a chord: One sound is a note Two notes at the same time is a harmony Three notes or more at the same time is a ch