All I ever wanted was the feel too, that’s me to a T. But those couple of things are the ones that I wish I had known going in, and maybe had a teacher to reinforce them.
I didn’t lay out a lot of content there to memorize you will notice.
If it’s not too late, may I have a copy, too?
Depending upon what sort of music you want to play there is a large or small overlap with theory. This can be a problem. If you want to improvise you need to have some clue about the underpinning theory or you just end up noodeling away.
The more recent discussion above again starts to get to the points I was trying to address by trying to build a justification for the terminology and underlying ideas based, not upon the existing confusing morass of terminology, but upon looking at how the physical instrument naturally leads to these ideas.
And even then I was forgetting something as simple as the idea that note repeat if you double their frequency. That is a very interesting place to start. But everything should be based upon the idea that there are underpinning simple things like ratios of frequency that the ear hears in specific ways, and that all the notation and confusing terminology is a mix of historical accident, and attempts to regularise a way of talking about those.
So, a unison, ocatave - one can justify these very quickly with a little playing about with a fretted string and a tape measure. Look, - the string halves in length and our ear hears the same note - just higher in pitch. A Fifth is easy after that, and so is a third. You now have the building blocks to explain a huge amount of harmony explainable is a manner that is rooted not in “just learn these terms” but in a manner that has direct visceral meaning, and better, has an underlying explanation that can take you right through all the additional complexity and weirdness of the various notation schemes. Every time you work with a new notation you can see how it works at a fundamental level by looking for how it helps you manage the ratios and patterns of ratios of note frequencies. You can forget about the actual ratios early on, they can be replaced with the intervals, but all the confusion about why the intervals are called what they are, and how this relates to other numbers you will encounter, can and should be explained with their history. It demystifies something if you can explain how the name came to be chosen, and even better, if you can back it up with a story.
Even something as s simple as “the twelve pitches” deserves some explanation, and not be delivered as received truth. If you have some understanding about how those pitches came into being and why it makes a very large part of the the level of theory make sense, and not just be a whole wet of rules. Sadly I suspect a lot of people who are quite fluent with the theory still don’t actually understand the why, only the how. Something that probably still makes life harder than it need be.
Well put, FV. The realization that the octave fret on a guitar makes the string half as long should happen early on … and the realization that the seventh fret makes the string half as long again (and sounds dominantly nice as an interval) should follow soon thereafter.
Agree. Interestingly enough, if you’re learning a brass instrument like a trumpet, you learn these things right away with the overtone series: fundamental, octave, fifth, octave, third, fifth, flat seventh, octave, and so on. The fundamental could actually be any note, frequency wise, though Bb is the most common. Pretty cool stuff actually.
I find it interesting that you’re discussing the chromatic scale at such length.
My studies are so focused on the diatonic scale that I sometimes forget the chromatic is out there.
I’m practicing scales daily for both piano and voice study. I should be doing them on guitar & bass too. But for now, I only have time to focus on two instruments. I’ll shift focus to bass scales after I’ve learned all the piano scales. The teacher I use teaches major and harmonic minor scales. He demonstrated a natural and a melodic minor scale. He said harmonic minor is more common and easier to learn first. We can learn the other two by playing from harmonic minor.
I’ve been trying to follow along with your discussion of intonation. I knew the importance of setting the distance of the bridge on a guitar from the nut. Your discussion is going beyond that.
When I get the energy I may write up a proper description of the issues with intonation. The reason I keep mentioning it in terms of theory is that there is grey zone in a lot of the rules and a mis-match in what the ear hears and what the simple theory says that is intertwined with intonation and temperament.
Really two points.
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Perfect intonation on almost all physical instruments is intrinsically impossible. This is something that theory based around equal temperament just ignores. On most instruments some keys sound worse than others.
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You can (and usually do) tweak (temper) some instruments to favour some keys and (where appropriate) positions. Again, a theory based upon equal temperament glosses over this. A piano is usually tempered explicitly in a well codifed manner to cope, guitarists may develop personal tweaks that “just work” for them, with no rigour.
3*. Equal temperament based theory hides some of the underlying theory which actually makes sense, as opposed to just being a whole bunch of rules.
- nobody expects…
All true - some of that is discussed in Isikoff’s history of developing Equal Temperment, the book called Temperament.
James Taylor is known for using a “sweetened” tuning where he tunes strings a few cents off because it works for his playing. Guitarist Buzz Feiten has a tuning/temperament approach he markets as the Feiten Tuning System.
All of this fudging is a reason that something played in one key sounds different when transposed to another key. The instrument and its tuning / temperament idiosyncrasies impacts the timbre (overall tone profile) of each key.
These past couple of pages makes me ever so thankful that I play bluegrass bass! 
So, do you play in G? Or perhaps you play in G?
(To my knowledge, Bluegrass is often in G because of the rolling licks that guitarists and banjo players can nail in that key.)
And yeah, as a guitarist who plays blues rock on a standard tuned guitar, the keys of E and A figure prominently
Guitar neck could be visualized this way: 6 rows of piano keyboards stacked on the top of each other. (Each one shifted slightly more sideways then a previous one)