Introduction and Notes from the Book
Introduction
As nearly all musicologists and music theory books point out, music is made of three interlocking primary elements: melody, rhythm, and harmony. Music missing one of these sounds incomplete. Making sure that each of these elements is well developed in a piece of music should be a priority for each composer, arranger, and musician involved. There is some debate about which element is the most indispensable out of the three, but what is important at the end of the day is that they are all embodied within one another. Since an arpeggio can be interpreted as a linear melody or as a broken chord, the border between melody and harmony is especially undefined. A single melody can shape the rhythm and imply the underlying harmonic structure. This is a wonderful thing since it naturally unifies all of the parts. This is the basis of “linear harmony”.
The ability to interpret harmony accurately is often the last skill to be developed (if ever) by musicians and listeners alike. Many average pop listeners rely on lyrics to guide them through a piece of music, while some rely on a steady rhythmic pulse that they can move their bodies to, and others appreciate a catchy melody. Simple and repetitive is what works best for most commercial purposes. Too often listeners fail to appreciate the subtleties of advanced harmony. In a sense, harmony was the final frontier in the history of Western music. Certain audacious composers through the ages were fascinated with finding new and innovative methods of putting chords, voicings, and progressions together. Because melody and harmony are so closely related, fresh melodic ideas co-evolved with the new developments in chordal theory. This enthusiasm for harmony continued all the way through the modern jazz era. A deep understanding of the harmonic element of music is a rich source of creative inspiration and listening pleasure for all of those who cultivate it. Studying “chord-scale theory” and “linear harmony” will simultaneously help to develop a well-trained ear and improve general musicianship. Both of these concepts are relatively new spins-offs of traditional music theory.
This book is intended to help guitarists play with an overall sense of harmonic clarity and creative control. I hope to give students a basic foundation on which to build articulate music by providing them with a compilation of useful diagrams that apply theoretical concepts directly to the guitar fretboard. The majority of the material is designed for intermediate and advanced guitar players wishing to expand their horizons. This book is not intended to teach how to read standard notation, TAB, or introductory level playing techniques. Basic music theory is a suggested prerequisite. If you feel that you do not have these fundamentals down and still wish to use this book, please find a suitable teacher or book to assist your studies as needed.
The guitar lends itself to be played with only a fractional knowledge of “fretboard theory”. This can lead to some debilitating misconceptions about music as a whole. Instrumentalists tend to approach music in a variety of ways, and many emphasize the particular aspects that apply strongly to their given roles. For instance, horn and woodwind players often think of melody lines and notation, drummers often think of grooves and measures, while guitarists often think of “chord shapes” and “blues-boxes”. I believe that musicians can transcend the limited vision of their own instrumental roles and think about the bigger picture, recognizing the relationships between the primary elements. Developing this perspective should enable you to compose, arrange, improvise, and perform in a holistic manner. This praxis emphasizes real-time harmonic analysis and improvisation, both of which are useful tools in most forms of contemporary music. It is a theory designed to guide intuition.
Keep in mind that I am a practical person, musician, and teacher. I do not expect all musicians to have perfect pitch, a metronomic sense of complex polyrhythms, and the technical prowess of a virtuoso. Achieving accurate relative pitch, sensible timing, and enough technique to express personal ideas and perform confidently in a group setting are realistic aspirations for most of us. Remember, music is an art, not a sport. There are many “right” ways to solve creative problems in art. Keep an open mind to the various ideas as they are presented, and then decide what you will accept and discard. These decisions will help to shape your personal style.
Practical Uses for this Book
I highly recommend reading this book from cover to cover at least once in order to get a full tour of its contents. It is roughly organized in the following order: fretboard notes and intervals (pages 4-9), diatonic and basic harmonies (pages 10-52), melodic minor, diminished, and whole-tone harmonies (pages 53-64), “linear harmony” (pages 65-76), and selected voicings (pages 77-86). After a full skimming, specific pages can be studied more in depth, or the book can be used as a quick reference for those already familiar with the information. Some of the pages are quite dense with diagrams and fretboard patterns, therefore applying and memorizing some of them may require a great deal of time and practice. Be diligent and try to extract everything that you feel could be useful to your musical understanding and creativity. Memorizing the fretboard patterns, learning the concepts, and applying them alongside rhythmic practice several times throughout the day (15-30 minutes per sitting) will improve your skills greatly. The goal is to get the information into your cognitive and muscle memory so you can access it at will. Work it into your brain and fingers! Every difficult chord or pattern gets easier with practice.
Some Musical Ideas to Keep in Mind
Some Nitpicky Notes
As nearly all musicologists and music theory books point out, music is made of three interlocking primary elements: melody, rhythm, and harmony. Music missing one of these sounds incomplete. Making sure that each of these elements is well developed in a piece of music should be a priority for each composer, arranger, and musician involved. There is some debate about which element is the most indispensable out of the three, but what is important at the end of the day is that they are all embodied within one another. Since an arpeggio can be interpreted as a linear melody or as a broken chord, the border between melody and harmony is especially undefined. A single melody can shape the rhythm and imply the underlying harmonic structure. This is a wonderful thing since it naturally unifies all of the parts. This is the basis of “linear harmony”.
The ability to interpret harmony accurately is often the last skill to be developed (if ever) by musicians and listeners alike. Many average pop listeners rely on lyrics to guide them through a piece of music, while some rely on a steady rhythmic pulse that they can move their bodies to, and others appreciate a catchy melody. Simple and repetitive is what works best for most commercial purposes. Too often listeners fail to appreciate the subtleties of advanced harmony. In a sense, harmony was the final frontier in the history of Western music. Certain audacious composers through the ages were fascinated with finding new and innovative methods of putting chords, voicings, and progressions together. Because melody and harmony are so closely related, fresh melodic ideas co-evolved with the new developments in chordal theory. This enthusiasm for harmony continued all the way through the modern jazz era. A deep understanding of the harmonic element of music is a rich source of creative inspiration and listening pleasure for all of those who cultivate it. Studying “chord-scale theory” and “linear harmony” will simultaneously help to develop a well-trained ear and improve general musicianship. Both of these concepts are relatively new spins-offs of traditional music theory.
This book is intended to help guitarists play with an overall sense of harmonic clarity and creative control. I hope to give students a basic foundation on which to build articulate music by providing them with a compilation of useful diagrams that apply theoretical concepts directly to the guitar fretboard. The majority of the material is designed for intermediate and advanced guitar players wishing to expand their horizons. This book is not intended to teach how to read standard notation, TAB, or introductory level playing techniques. Basic music theory is a suggested prerequisite. If you feel that you do not have these fundamentals down and still wish to use this book, please find a suitable teacher or book to assist your studies as needed.
The guitar lends itself to be played with only a fractional knowledge of “fretboard theory”. This can lead to some debilitating misconceptions about music as a whole. Instrumentalists tend to approach music in a variety of ways, and many emphasize the particular aspects that apply strongly to their given roles. For instance, horn and woodwind players often think of melody lines and notation, drummers often think of grooves and measures, while guitarists often think of “chord shapes” and “blues-boxes”. I believe that musicians can transcend the limited vision of their own instrumental roles and think about the bigger picture, recognizing the relationships between the primary elements. Developing this perspective should enable you to compose, arrange, improvise, and perform in a holistic manner. This praxis emphasizes real-time harmonic analysis and improvisation, both of which are useful tools in most forms of contemporary music. It is a theory designed to guide intuition.
Keep in mind that I am a practical person, musician, and teacher. I do not expect all musicians to have perfect pitch, a metronomic sense of complex polyrhythms, and the technical prowess of a virtuoso. Achieving accurate relative pitch, sensible timing, and enough technique to express personal ideas and perform confidently in a group setting are realistic aspirations for most of us. Remember, music is an art, not a sport. There are many “right” ways to solve creative problems in art. Keep an open mind to the various ideas as they are presented, and then decide what you will accept and discard. These decisions will help to shape your personal style.
Practical Uses for this Book
I highly recommend reading this book from cover to cover at least once in order to get a full tour of its contents. It is roughly organized in the following order: fretboard notes and intervals (pages 4-9), diatonic and basic harmonies (pages 10-52), melodic minor, diminished, and whole-tone harmonies (pages 53-64), “linear harmony” (pages 65-76), and selected voicings (pages 77-86). After a full skimming, specific pages can be studied more in depth, or the book can be used as a quick reference for those already familiar with the information. Some of the pages are quite dense with diagrams and fretboard patterns, therefore applying and memorizing some of them may require a great deal of time and practice. Be diligent and try to extract everything that you feel could be useful to your musical understanding and creativity. Memorizing the fretboard patterns, learning the concepts, and applying them alongside rhythmic practice several times throughout the day (15-30 minutes per sitting) will improve your skills greatly. The goal is to get the information into your cognitive and muscle memory so you can access it at will. Work it into your brain and fingers! Every difficult chord or pattern gets easier with practice.
Some Musical Ideas to Keep in Mind
- Contemporary Western music is based largely around chords and chord progressions. Despite this fact, only a small percentage of it (with the exception of “modal jazz”) was written with actual “chord-scale theory” in mind. Chord-scale theory is a modern tool that can make choosing the “right” notes while improvising much easier (even in music that pre-dates its formal existence). This is especially true on a pattern-based instrument (the guitar fretboard) where, within each position, one can literally “see” the intervals that make up scales, modes, arpeggios, voicings, and how they often overlap into unified forms.
- As a modern compositional tool, chord-scale theory can be a very inspiring approach with which one can create progressions, arrangements, and complete songs. It has no particular sound of its own, yet it can be employed to create (or recreate) the sound of nearly any genre. Though there are many universal aspects in contemporary music from genre to genre, each has an emphasis on certain elements. Most are constructed with what one might call a “limited palette” of acceptable chords and notes. These harmonic/melodic frameworks mixed with characteristic timbres and rhythms are a large part of that which we define as a unique genre.
- The central idea behind chord-scale theory is that each chord is paired with a corresponding scale. The scale is considered the source of the chord, and called the “parent scale”. Jazz musicians coined the term “chord-scale” to unify the two. All of the other musical parts that are played with the chord simultaneously (melodies, harmony lines, riffs, bass-lines, etc.) are based around the same parent scale and tonal hierarchy. Chromatic (non-chord-scale) notes are used as passing tones and melodic embellishments, etc.
- Some simple chords can be built from several scales, therefore it is often important to deduce which parent scale is the exact one at hand before attempting to improvise or compose with it.
- In order to play harmonically specific melodic improvisations over any given chord progression, musicians need to be able to change scales/keys gracefully to match each chord as it passes. How to outline chords using “linear harmony” is covered in this book after the fundamentals of chord-scale theory have been thoroughly explained. It is a fresh look at building melodies that are structured with guide tones, voice leading, various embellishments, and ways of aligning the strong tones of a chord-scale with the strong beats of the meter.
- Knowing intervals is the first step to understanding two of the primary elements of music: melody and harmony. Intervals create fairly complex patterns on the guitar fretboard. Once you have become familiar with these patterns, your knowledge of the fretboard will become your biggest asset as a guitarist. It will unlock your ability to build or analyze any chord-scale on demand.
- It is important to really hear how each interval, chord-scale, and progression sounds. Try to make actual music out of everything you study. You can also enhance your comprehension by finding transcriptions of songs that exemplify the various concepts.
- Guitarists should strive to be as “rhythmically responsible” and in control as possible. Being able to subdivide and accent the pulse in diverse ways while keeping a steady tempo is imperative for all serious musicians. The titles “rhythm guitarist” and “lead guitarist” can delude players about what is expected in these roles. In most cases, lead lines need to be rhythmically articulate and not played in “free time” over the accompaniment music.
Some Nitpicky Notes
- All of the examples in this book are for a right-handed six-string guitar in standard EADGBE tuning.
- Guitar notation sounds one octave lower than it is written.
- The locations of the TAB examples were chosen somewhat arbitrarily. In many cases there are several places to play the same notes on the fretboard. Try them all and you will find that some are easier than others depending on the context.
- There are examples in various keys. Be sure to apply and transpose all of the concepts and patterns to all 12 keys.
- Where enharmonic notes, chords, or other spellings are available, I have chosen to use the most applicable or common.
- The symbols “#” and “b” are used for “sharp” and “flat” in the text and diagrams.
- Half-diminished symbols and “m7b5” (“minor seventh flattened fifth”) chord symbols are used interchangeably.
- This book was not written for historical or scholarly research. It is designed primarily for the self-studying layman. The information presented was pieced together in a homegrown way that will inevitably include some personal interpretations. There are more comprehensive forms of music theory besides the performance-based model that is presented here.
- The functional harmony described in this book is seen primarily from the “jazz theory” viewpoint, and it only focuses on generic patterns found in contemporary Western musical genres (excluding contemporary classical). There are no references to atonal music, serialism, or free jazz. Chord-scale theory is largely about playing “inside”.
- Some musical terms have multiple definitions. Jazz vernacular is used frequently, as distinguished from classical terminology.
- The terms “mode” and “modal” are used very liberally (as in “modal jazz”, or “The Dorian mode is played over the ii chord”, etc). Also the terms “scale”, “mode”, “chord-scale”, and “pitch-collection” are used somewhat interchangeably. For example, “parent-scale” might actually mean “parent-mode” depending on the context. Modes are used as scale patterns in chord-scale theory.
- The term “parent key” refers to the key signature that a given chord-scale drawn from, whereas the term “parent scale” refers to the scale/mode pattern and tonal hierarchy that a given part (chord, voicing, melodic passage, riff, bass-line, etc.) was based around.
- The term “diatonic” refers strictly to the seven unaltered notes that are indigenous to the major scale in this book.