Is Guitar Theory Important

[Rode Strawther]

Musictheory is a super powerful tool for guitar players. It helps you navigate the fretboard, makes it easier to communicate with other musicians and deepens your understanding of music. In short: music theory can make you into a better guitarist and musician.

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Table of Contents IntroductionWhen Should You Learn Music Theory?Guitar theory vs. Music TheoryStep 1The Basic Language of Music TheoryStep 2IntervalsStep 3Chord ConstructionStep 4ScalesStep 5Roman NumeralsConclusionNext Steps

INDEXIntroduction

Compare it with a painter learning the names to colours. When you know about red and yellow, you can understand that orange is actually a mix of those two colours. (Sidenote: click here for a more detailed explanation of what music theory is.)

As we saw earlier, music theory gives names to a whole bunch of things, like chords, scales and rhythms. Now the thing is, it's easier to remember what something's called once more of your senses have been exposed to it. After seeing, smelling, feeling and tasting a dish of food, it's easier to remember its name, than after reading a dictionary definition of it, right?

Now, as a guitar player you should always strive to understand how music theory applies to the fretboard. It ensures you truly understand how the theory works in practice, how it actually sounds, and how you can use it yourself. And being able to use the theory yourself is crucial. As we saw in the last section, music theory is nothing more than a tool that can help us make better music. If it remains something that you read in a book once and vaguely remember, music theory won't help you!

There's a second reason why applying theory to the fretboard straight away is a good idea. I've always found the fretboard an excellent 'cheat sheet' that made theory easier to remember. It functions like a visual aid that makes it easier to memorize things like how certain scales or chords are constructed.

You can play a perfect fifth like this anywhere on the fretboard! There's just one important exception you need to keep track of. When you go up one string from the G to the B string, this isn't the same as going up five frets, but only four frets! So to play a perfect fifth on the G string, would look like this:

Because guitar theory should be practical, we'll check out another quiz from Music Theory from Scratch featuring this Lizz Wright tune. First, take a listen to the guitar. Then use the buttons below the TAB to indicate what 'ingredient' each of the notes is in the chord.

As you see, we can give each of those chords it's own Roman numeral. That tells us what role that chord plays in the harmony of the song. For example, the D chord has Roman numeral IV, which basically tells us 'this is the fourth chord we can create using the scale this song is based on'.

Plus, perhaps most importantly, following the music you love makes your musical journey fun, rewarding and meaningful. I hope you found this roadmap for music and guitar theory useful! If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message.

I've been on a run to get a lot of theory down after realizing how amazing music theory is. As a guitar player going through a intermediate-advanced theory journey, I would like to know where 'Chord-inversion' learning comes in. Is it something that is like a collateral learning? Or does it require an allocated plan/time to get it all down? And what are the applications?

Knowing chord inversions is very important because it will allow you to play any chord in almost any position. This will increase (left-hand) efficiency while playing chord changes, and, more importantly, it will make your changes sound more smoothly due to the more natural voice leading.

You could combine learning chords and their inversions with learning scales and modes. Start with triads and play all triads of a given scale/mode on all possible sets of 3 adjacent strings up and down the neck. You should try to realize that you can see the chords as subsets of the scale patterns, so combining learning chords and scales should feel very natural.

After having figured out all possible triads in this way (and if you're still hungry for more), you could do the same for seventh chords. Here you obviously need combinations of 4 strings. Adjacent strings will give you drop-2 voicings (or the few playable close voicings), and other choices will give you either drop-3 or drop-2-4 voicings.

Contrary to other answers, I would say application for guitar is very important. Inversions will help you identify more comfortable chord voicings. They will also help you create smoother voice-leading between chords in a progression. This is important for soloing, jazz comping, fingerstyle, or if you are a singer-songwriter.

They are very important indeed, particularly for playing chord melodies in jazz, contemporary, and any song where you want to combine the melody and accompaniment. It benefits a player in so many ways to learn four different inversions for maj7, min7, and dom7 chords on four-string groups. To clarify, here's an example of maj7 chords in root, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd inversions (not nec. in that order in the diagram) on string 1234 and 2345:

Learn these! Some are easier than others, but learn all of them, because you can use all of them to alter chords (such as b5 or #4, 9ths, etc.), and some of the hard ones are easy to play when altered as such, and thus very useful and beautiful sounding.

A good player can use these to take many songs and play them with both melody and accompaniment solo style. Also, learning inversions will help you become better acquainted with the fretboard, open your ears to new sounds, and make you a better-rounded musician.

It also helps in that it makes you think of chords in non stereotypical ways. For a great many guitar players power chords, bar chords and open chords are the only ones in existence but it does not need to be like this.

Too often chords are just thought of as background noise to full the air while some sort of lead playing goes on but it needs not be like this. You can easily use the full breadth of chords to give shape and substance to your musical endeavors.

For the guitar, you usually have several chord shapings for what is named the same chord. If some note is shared by two chords in sequence, you tend to play it on the same string. If you do chord changes mainly staying in the same position (if necessary, by judicious application of a capo), you'll tend to pick sequences of inversions that have reasonable voice leading.

Contrast this with chord play using barr chords where you basically use the same shape while shifting positions. That does not really involve noticeable voice leading unless very consciously changing rhythmic picking patterns to keep related notes in a related rhythmic position (even if they are played on a different string).

The usual use of "chord inversions" is for picking out the bass notes to strike in a picking pattern while the melody notes more often than not tend to be whatever shape happens to occur in the upper three notes.

So in a nutshell: there are applications, but they are very much reined in and constrained by the realities of the guitar and its string layout and playing style. The limited degrees of freedom as compared to a keyboard instrument give much less leeway to give theoretical frameworks a nice workout: practical considerations dominate the choices of inversions.

Basically, you get to pick out bass note and alternate bass note for patterned accompaniment. That's actually what happens with accordions as well, and accordions indeed have two button rows for basses, four button rows for chords, and the assemble the chords from the same basic octave of notes, never mind inversions as you cannot change chord shapes anyway.

The guitar, in contrast, has at least a bit of leeway for touching up progressions in the three to four chord strings that don't make musical sense. But overall, the principle "get the bass notes right and put any old inversion on top" holds pretty much for guitar play as well.

You should also know the open chords C, A, G, E, and D. These are the only major chords that can be played on guitar with open strings. Hold onto that little tidbit of information. Its importance will be revealed as you become a CAGED master.

And then a really excellent lesson that goes into even more detail is CAGED System for Guitar at Applied Guitar Theory. This has helpful colored graphics and a cheat sheet that are worth saving and printing.

A lot of people have a thing against memorization. Some of them will tell you \u201Cmemorizing is not learning\u201D or that it gets in the way of real learning. The thing is, rote learning is an important part of building musical understanding.

Learning guitar won\u2019t be the first time in your life you\u2019ve had to memorize something. It\u2019s how you learned your ABCs and multiplication tables. If you\u2019ve ever tried to learn a new language there was definitely a lot of memorization involved there as well. And since we recognize music as a language it only makes sense that some of it is learned by committing things to memory.

When starting out on guitar some things will just have to be learned by heart. Learning the names of the strings from low to high is probably first. After that, how do you know where to put your fingers without remembering chord shapes? When you\u2019re ready to move past basic open chords you\u2019ll have to figure out how to move up and down the neck. What notes are going to work? It\u2019s not at all intuitive. There are concepts you should commit to memory that will serve as a guidebook for all your future traveling around the fretboard. You can\u2019t go through life as a guitar player only knowing to put this finger here and that finger there because you watched someone else do it.

We\u2019re not all going to Berklee to become musical wizards, but we can learn some musical concepts well enough to have a language to use when speaking on guitar. The sooner you take the time to memorize some basic elements of music theory the sooner you\u2019ll have a permanent language to speak with. Techniques are short-lived if you stop using them. But a language committed to memory is something you\u2019ll never have to learn again. Step away for twenty years and I bet you\u2019ll still know how to play your open chords.

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