I hear it all the time from my friends in the rock world, and see it all the time in internet discussions: guitarists are struggling with their music theory, or they’ve given up on it completely. This is not their fault! Music theory is taught pretty badly for the most part, and it rarely addresses the music that rock musicians are playing.
I’ve been working on rectifying that situation. If you play guitar, or any other rock-adjacent instrument, I hope that these posts are useful to you:
- Music theory for beginner guitarists
- How the heck do you know what scale you’re supposed to use for lead guitar?
- The pentatonic box
- Meet the major scale
- Intro to minor keys
- Scales, keys and modes on the circle of fifths
- Blues basics
- The blues scale
- Make your chord progressions less boring with secondary dominants
- Scales and emotions
- How do you know what key you’re in?
- Why can’t you tune your guitar?
- What’s missing from music theory class?
- All of my music theory posts
If you have questions, or there’s something you want to know that you can’t find here, let me know!
I hope there’s a book in the makings here…
I’d write it in a heartbeat. Know any agents or publishers?