Why learn music theory?
“Why learn music theory? I don’t want to be restricted…” To the uninitiated, music theory is often thought of as being a set of rules that must be obeyed. This is not what music theory is about Music theory is a well-organised system of naming and describing music and how it works. Learning music theory brings meaning to […]
Learning the guitar fretboard
How well do you really know the guitar fretboard? With the exception of classical guitarists, most guitarists start by learning open chords. These are learned as shapes with fairly meaningless names such as C, Am, G7, etc (see ‘Why learn music theory?‘ for more on this). There is no immediate reason to set about fully learning […]
Do guitarists need to learn to read music?
A common quote about reading music “…and do you know, [insert name] can’t even read music? Isn’t that amazing?” We’ve all heard this line or something very similar to it. To someone that dabbled in learning classical piano or violin back when they were at school, it might seem that the ability to read music is […]
The ultimate guide to rhythm guitar playing
Chords are the backbone of popular music. Guitarists spend lots of time learning chord shapes so that they can strum through well-known songs they like, or their own compositions; aka ‘rhythm guitar playing’. What about making more of these chords though? How can we improve our rhythm guitar playing from an adequate performance to an excellent one? Approaches to […]