This one is a little different. I’ve been struggling to learn music theory for awhile now and I thought I’d share what little progress I’ve made with you guys.
The ditty itself is just a C major scale along with a few chords that fit that scale.
Scales? Chords? Theory?
Let’s start with notes. There are twelve notes to choose from, which are denoted by the letters A-G and can be either sharp or flat. D sharp is the same as an E flat.
I prefer to think in sharps, seems about half the people out there do. So from here on out it’ll be mostly sharps.
Now if you take A-G and multiply by two you will get fourteen. Why is that? Well honestly it started at seven and then they added more. But it doesn’t matter. What you need to learn is.
No BE sharp!
Meaning there is no B or E sharp which leaves us.
A A# B C C# D D# E F F# G G#
And that brings us to our first scale. The A Chromatic scale.
The chromatic scale encompasses every note. There are twelve of them, one for each note. We call this the A chromatic scale because that is the root (first) note. The chromatic scale isn’t very useful for use musically so lets move on to a major scale.
Now say we were to pick seven notes out of the twelve in a certain order. I’m going to switch over to a root of C for the purposes of this lesson.
C D E F G A B
We’ve chosen seven of the twelve in a particular order. The notes are really not important, the order is. Let’s look at it closely.
C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B C D E F G A B
Notice we skip two notes, two again, then one, two, two and two. Except they don’t notate it that way they instead use a whole step for two and half step for one. Now we have: WWHWWW
We can take that pattern and apply it to any note to get the major scale for that note. For example D major.
D D# E F F# G G# A A# B C C# D E F# G A B C# W W H W W W
We don’t need to learn every scale for every note. We just need to know the pattern of intervals for whatever scale we wish. The minor pattern is: WHWWHW
Lets try using the minor pattern with a root of A to get the A minor scale.
A A# B C C# D D# E F F# G G# A B C D E F G
Notice we have the same exact notes as C major, it just so happens every minor scale has a duplicate major scale with a different root.
In this particular ditty I play the C major (or A minor) scale along with some chords that fit well in it. You can see that every chord has all of it’s notes in the scale.
Here is the guitar tab: Am Em G F C G Am e|-0-3-1-0---------------------------0-----------------------------0-1-3-1-0-3-0- B|-1-------3-1-0---------------------0-----------------------0-1-3-----3-1-1-3-1- G|-2-------------2-0-----------------0-------------------0-2-----------0-2-0-0-2- D|-2-----------------3-2-0-----------2-------------0-2-3---------------0-3-2-0-2- A|-0-----------------------3-2-0-----2-------0-2-3---------------------2-3-3-2-0- E|-------------------------------3-1-0-0-1-3---------------------------3-1---3---
Here is the full scale along the first 12 frets:
Fret 0 3 5 7 10 12
E*|F| |G| |A| |B|C| |D| |E|
B*|C| |D| |E|F| |G| |A| |B|
G*| |A| |B|C| |D| |E|F| |G|
D*| |E|F| |G| |A| |B|C| |D|
A*| |B|C| |D| |E|F| |G| |A|
E*|F| |G| |A| |B|C| |D| |E|