So I am a self taught guitar player. When I started playing I was a youngster (long about 1960) and getting any kind of lessons was monetarily out of the question. Consequently, I learned through trial and error, hitting random notes until I found the right ones, figured out that the appropriate chords would contain those notes and between that and books (there was no tab system then) I became an “adequate” player. I probably have more bad habits than Amy Winehouse, but my repertoire is pretty big if I stay in the 50s and 60s. I’ve got the down neck cowboy chords down great.
But - and it’s a big but - I can’t read music, and I have no knowledge of any theory whatsoever. The Nashville Number system is like Chinese to me. I have an enormous mental block about it. What makes a 7th chord? I don’t have a clue. A minor? I only know them by the haunting sound.
I find this strange because in all other areas, I need to understand WHY I’m doing what I’m doing in order to learn it. Except music. Now that I have the internet, I’ve tried looking this stuff up, but my eyes just glaze over and and I can’t absorb any of it.
I’m retired now, and finally have the time to play as much music as I want. But the only thing that I seem to be able to learn new stuff from is youtube tutorials. By watching their hands. And I’ve learned a lot this way (Thank you Justin Sandercoe!) but my lack of understanding things like sus chords frustrates me.
I’ve always told myself that people learn to talk without knowing how to read, and music is the same and so it doesn’t really matter, and to an extent that is true. I just don’t understand why I have such a mental block about this. I could actually afford lessons now, but I’m afraid of them. I’m afraid lessons would take something that is a pleasure now and turn it into some kind of drudgery. But I know this block holds me back.
I used to play a lot of guitar, and I deal with mental blocks.
It is a weird thing. To make an artistic gift of it, try to ‘write’ (I assume you compose) toward the mental block. Keep track of the swerves. There ya go. Eventually you may seize the root of your mental block- you will have a feeling of success and accomplishment, but it will also be the end of an era. So don’t waste too much energy on anguish. Focus on the cool angle.
You mentioned 7th chords. There’s two kinds. Dominant and major 7.
All that means is whether you flatten the 7th note a half step. Take a G7. You play it on the 1st String, 1st Fret. The F note. A Gmaj7 is 1st String, 2nd Fret. The F# note.
A major 7th uses a major interval. Dominant 7th uses a minor interval. In other wards, you flatten the note a half step.
Look at the chords you know. D7 will play the C# on the B string. Dmaj7 plays the C on the B string.
That pattern works for all the 7th chords. We learned these chords by people showing us the shapes and finger position. The theory behind those shapes is very straight forward.
Look at A and A minor. The third note is flattened a half step. Thats because a minor chord uses a minor 3rd interval. Its just like a minor 7th.
The books will fully explain intervals and triads.
I can read music, and I play both piano and guitar, but I far prefer to play be ear. It’s much faster and more accurate too. Written music for guitar is far too scary-looking to be useful. Plus a lot of pop music is syncopated (comes in on the “and” beat) and so looks like two notes when it’s written even though it’s only one. If you know your scale (do re mi) then you know most of what you’ll need to play major, minor and other scales, how to figure out chords using root, third and fifth, how to figure out intervals, and with a couple basic hand shapes, you can play anything by Chuck Berry. In fact, I think of guitar as a study of shapes more than anything else. Good luck!
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To understand chords, you have to learn your keys. Key of D has two sharps. F# and C#. That’s why you play a F# in a D chord. The key requires it.
A major chord is 1,3,5. D,F#,A. First you figure out the notes, then apply any sharps in the key.
D minor is D,F,A because you flatten the third a half step. I always look at the major chord first and then work out the minor chord.
Whatever chord, look at the key of the root note. The key will tell you the sharp or flat notes in the major chord. Then you can work out the minor chord.
Sorry for the multiple posts. Theory gets my juices going. I love it.
aceplace, dude, knock it off - that’s the stuff that’s confusing! You sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher to me and I suspect the OP.
**pohjonen ** - nothing’s wrong with you. I can’t read music and my grasp of theory is primitive at best, but I play complex chords when they fit into riffs I am noodling through. But I couldn’t break them down theory-wise in detail.
It’s like speaking another language: if you want to do it, you have to immerse yourself in it because you see real value in learning that language. In the meantime, you learn enough to find the bathroom and order una cerveza ;).
I simply never felt the value. I mean, yes, conceptually, reading music is better, period, and I think it would be great to know. But my #1 Rule is Whatever Keeps You Playing, and slogging through reading drills wasn’t going to keep me playing. I decided to accept the truth of that and simply play.
I have found that playing has kept me engaged, so I have no complaints. When I look at next-step stuff I am working on to continue to grow as a player, learning to read remains a hand-wavey “maybe later” objective. I’d much rather expand my fingerstyle work and explore my funk grooves a bit more.
I did get a bit too deep into theory. Hope I didn’t confuse anybody. I was just trying to make the point an experienced musician can learn theory from the practical, hands on experience they already have. That’s how I learned it.
The online class from Berklee is a great place to start. Or someone can study from books like I linked earlier.
Learning some theory can improve your playing. Theory is very important in ear training.
A lot of great musicians don’t study much of it. It depends on how curious you are are to look under the hood and see the nuts and bolts.
pohjonen, I just sent you an email to the address in your profile. It has a document I wrote years ago to help my guitar students understand enough theory to use Nashville notation and Roman numeral notation. It also explains how to build chords. It may make no more sense to you than anything else you’ve tried. Some of my students have found it helpful.
Not only one, but several. As someone who learned solfege and who is used to notes being called Do Re Mi Fa Sol La and Si (or in English Ti), that other system with the letters will always be confusing. If the OP is trying to learn stuff from several different systems of music theory simultaneously, or if the people he’s trying to learn from mix several systems, it may be like arriving to Germany practicing your guten morgens and finding yourself greeted with bonjour.
Reading music is simple. Theory rudiments are also simple. But they’re not always easy to teach. The world is full of mediocre pedagogy wrt this stuff, and you’re much much more likely to have success (and a better time) with a good, reliable teacher than scouring the internet for clues, or getting that buddy of yours who plays but isn’t a teacher to just show you some “easy” stuff.
Solfege is great for understanding the relationship between notes of a scale or key. Knowing chord names by letter (like D or A7) is very useful on guitar and even piano. But you really need to have your chord shapes down and be able to switch between them quickly to make headway on the guitar. The understanding will follow. Tabs are okay but are based on numbers and don’t help guitar players learn the note names for the frets very quickly. I find a good song can be the biggest motivator. When I was starting out, that song was Day Tripper.
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I suffer from the same problem as the OP. I’ve played trombone for almost 30 years and while I understand how to read music (my music in front of me) and have a high skill when it comes to physically playing, that’s about as far as I can go. A lot of the time I’m not even reading the music, I’m reading it as positions/fingerings. I can’t transpose, I can’t pull a scale out of the air, I can’t play an improv solo to save my life. I play baritone one day a year for a Christmas event and play the treble clef music instead of the bass clef music (which is what one plays as a trombone player) just because it’s easier for me to just write the fingerings in than to interpret the notes.
I tried pretty hard in college to make it make sense but I just couldn’t get it. I loved to play through college but after that I just pretty much gave up being serious about music because I wasn’t progressing. I was still having fun though, and joined a community band for a bit but then gave that up too.
For me I decided I just didn’t have the mathematical mind to make it happen. My best friend is a trumpet player and a computer programmer and knows theory like a pro. My business partner is a piano player and a computer programmer and the same way, even better than my best friend. I’m in “the computer programming field” but I am way more “arts” oriented than both of them and they are actual real programmers while, once again, I’m fakin’ it til I make it.
Good luck to the OP. You might just not have the right “type of mind” for music theory. Doesn’t mean you have to stop playing. Just don’t take a solo
I dropped out of three different music theory classes, hopelessly lost, before I gave up for good. I’m a singer, and managed to learn solfege late in life, but solfege is ear training, not theory. I can read music well enough to sight sing, sort of, but with singing anyway, there are sight singers and musical memory singers, and I am the latter.
However, I have dyscalculia (a disability which encompasses the whole “math” part of your brain, including all numeric relationships), so maybe that is my excuse. I can barely add and subtract, and I was 10 or 11 before I could understand an analog clock.
Music theory in theory will help you as a musician, but uncounted thousands if not millions of people enjoy making music without it.
Well, I signed up for the class. It’s free and online. So what the heck.
I’m interested in the ear training.
Berklee publishes a book that offers similar material. I compared the book’s topics and the syllabus for the online course. The book will be a useful resource for the class.
