The Guitarist Blog

Topics covered in Theory Worksop One: Half Steps and Whole Steps. The musical alphabet. Sharps and flats and the chromatic scale. Mapping out all the notes on the guitar fretboard. Major scale construction. The circle of fifths. Five major scale patterns on the guitar. Topics covered in Theory Workshop Two: Intervals - Major, minor, diminished, and augmented. Chord construction - Major, minor, diminished, and augmented. Harmonizing the major scale. The Major scale chord formula Adding Sevens to chords - Major Seven, minor seven, half diminished sevens. Topics covered in Theory Workshop Three: This Workshop is all about chord construction.  You will learn how you can use your knowledge of the major scale to construct any chord.  Here are a few of the chords you will learn how to construct. Major Chords - major 6, major 7, major 9 Minor Chords - minor 7, minor 9 Dominant Chords - dominant 7, 9 and 13 Sus chords - Sus 2, Sus 4 Add chords - Ad...

Here is a beautiful intro to Sound of Silence played by Paul Simon during the Simon & Garfunkel Old Friends Tour.  Capo is at the Seventh fret.  I notice that when Paul Simon sings the song as a solo, the capo is at the third or fourth fret.  I'm looking forward to sharing this with all my students.

I wanted to recommend an app that I have been using a lot for my lesson and my personal practice its called GuitarToolkit - Agile Partners  .  Here's a description from the company's web site. GuitarToolkit is a collection of essential guitar tools for your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. An extremely accurate tuner, a precision metronome, more than two million chords, scales and arpeggios -- GuitarToolkit has it all and tons more. It’s so good, Apple inducted GuitarToolkit in the  App Store Hall of Fame .  For theory students, the chords, scales and arpeggio resource is great.  As you learn a new chord you can look up how you can hold that chord all across the fretboard.  If you want to play the G major scale, you can see all possible positions of the G major scale (or any other scale). If you're in my one of my Music Theory Workshops, bring it with you. Very useful app, worth the money.  

Here is a simple way to play The Venture's "Walk Don't Run."  I hope I am playing this slowly enough for everyone to play along.

Here is a quick summary of what is covered in Theory Workshop One. Half Steps and Whole Steps. The musical alphabet. Sharps and flats and the chromatic scale. Mapping out all the notes on the guitar fretboard. Major scale construction. The circle of fifths. Five major scale patterns on the guitar.

Here is a simple way to play the melody to Scarborough Fair.  You can find the chords to this song in my method book " I've Always Wanted to Play Guitar "  If you have my method book, be sure to download all the music.