This is me, rehearsing an Allman Brothers song with my stepbrother Kenny for my stepdad’s funeral last summer.
If you are a music theory teacher interested in reaching guitarists, here’s some background on my own music learning that might be illuminating. My journey is a pretty typical one for a rock guitarist, except for the part where I went to music school afterwards.
I started with the Standard Fifteen Chords: A, A7, Am, B7, C, C7, D, D7, Dm, E, E7, Em, F, G, and G7. Just about all non-classical guitarists start here, because these chords involve open strings and are easy to play. I learned the Standard Fifteen in the context of songs: folk, rock, blues, and pop. I mainly learned from chord charts. Sometimes these were chord symbols on top of standard notation, but more often they were chord symbols on lyric sheets, or just lists of chord symbols without any context at all. This meant that I was learning all the rhythmic and melodic aspects by ear.
After learning a lot of songs and writing a few, I could not have told you anything about the individual notes making up the chords. I figured out the difference between major and minor chords quickly enough, but the number “7” in A7 was mysterious. I did notice that chords with 7 in them sounded more complicated. I also had no idea how the chords fit together into keys, beyond observing certain recurring groupings. Few of the songs I was learning stayed within the diatonic keys or used “functional” tonal harmony anyway. For example, I was hearing G7 as a resolved sound at least as often as I was hearing it resolve to C.
The first melodic concept I learned was the E minor/G major pentatonic scale. You play it on guitar using the third frets of the E and B strings, the second frets of the A, D and G strings, and all six open strings. It’s very easy to play, and it sounds great. I learned that this scale goes along with “E chords”, meaning both E minor and E major. I also learned that the scale goes along with G major chords. That combination sounded “prettier” than using it over E major, but also less interesting. Then I learned to include B-flat in between the As and Bs in the scale to make the E blues scale. This I liked very much. I started trying to combine the scale and the chords together.
I also started adding extensions and suspensions to my chords. The affordances of the guitar make this easy. You can replace chord tones with open string notes just by lifting your fingers off the strings. So if you are playing D and you add the open E string, you get Dsus2 or D(add9). If you add the open B string, you get D6. You can also add E minor pentatonic scale notes to your open-string chords. As I did this, I still had no idea what I was doing; this was all a combination of puzzling out chord diagrams and my own trial and error.
At this point I could probably have learned the C major scale, and maybe I even tried to. However, I didn’t pursue it. I wasn’t interested in learning “Hot Cross Buns” or reading notation. I didn’t yet know that learning C major would have given me some cool scales for free, like D Dorian and G Mixolydian. The Standard Fifteen Chords are themselves a disincentive to engaging with C major. The Standard Fifteen include all the chords in the key except Bø7, but the voice leading between them is terrible in open-string positions.
The next step up the mountain was to learn how to play barre chords. In other words, I learned how to plane the major, minor and dominant seventh chords up and down chromatically. This required that I learn the chromatic scale on the low E and A strings, since that is where the chord roots fall. So now suddenly I could play in all twelve keys, which opened up my potential repertoire enormously. I still had no idea what a key was, though.
Shortly after that, I learned how to play the pentatonic and blues scales barred in all twelve keys. I learned the formula that F minor pentatonic goes with F, F7 and Fm; that F-sharp minor pentatonic goes with F#, F#7 and F#m; that G minor pentatonic goes with G, G7 and Gm; and so on. This was all perfectly normal in the world of rock and blues.
Probably around this point, I also learned a different pentatonic formula – the note under your pinkie on the E string could also be a scale root. This was an introduction to the concept of relative minors. But I learned it backwards – in B-flat, you could play the “normal” scale (B-flat minor pentatonic) or the “alternative” scale (B-flat major pentatonic, fingered like G minor pentatonic.)
At this point I was developing a good ear and intuition for parallelism, blues harmony, chromaticism and modal mixture. I still had only a limited idea what a major key was, and I had no concept of voice-leading whatsoever. I was also starting to learn single-note melodies and patterns that didn’t fit into the pentatonics, which meant discovering pieces of the major scale, Mixolydian mode and Dorian mode by filling in gaps between pentatonic notes.
I was also accidentally learning some advanced chord concepts. If you’re playing a barre chord and you lift up all your fingers except your index, you get a nice 7sus4 or m11 voicing. I was playing that a lot, alternating with my major, dominant and minor chords. I was finding out about 7sus4 chords as a modal sound too, probably from the Grateful Dead. I started puzzling out diminished chords, ninth chords, major seventh chords, and other exotica from diagrams in books. I learned them in the context of familiar songs, and once again had no idea what notes they were comprised of.
This is the point where rock guitarists usually top out. But this was the point where I was getting interested in jazz, so I pushed on. I took a few piano lessons and from there, I taught myself how to read notation. I slowly and painfully struggled through some melodies from the Real Book, and I read Marc Sabatella’s wonderful jazz theory primer (it was the first PDF I ever downloaded from the internet!) My senior year of college, I took two semesters of jazz theory and improvisation . It was revelatory, and I ate it up. We blew through diatonic harmony in the first few weeks: “This is the major scale, here is how you make chords from it, here are the functions of those chords, moving on.” This was Berklee-style chord-scale theory, so I emerged with a strong grasp of modal jazz, a less strong grasp of Tin Pan Alley harmony, and a weak grasp of voice leading and melody. (But that was by design, we were told to learn melody by transcribing solos.) We also spent some time with the blues, though there was no effort made to explain it, it was just pointed out as being important.
After college, I spent several years playing rock, jazz, country, funk, musical theater, weird electronic music, and so on. I played some of this music off the page, but most of it by ear. I took some jazz guitar lessons and did a lot of studying on my own. I wrote and arranged a bunch of music for my bands, for some theater productions, and for a couple of zero-budget films. I taught myself electronic music production and drum programming, which put me in touch with concepts of swing and groove. In my thirties, I went to grad school, where I finally did the Western tonal theory sequence. And that about brings us to the present.
An untypical thing about me is that I learned blues harmonica thoroughly and well before I really learned guitar. That gives you a VERY different understanding of harmony than, like, say, the piano. I also learned mandolin and mandola pretty early on in that journey. Those gave me the same concepts I was learning on guitar but with a totally different fretboard layout. Then to really confuse myself, I learned banjo. Harmonica and guitar playing put me into contact with the blue notes, which are microtonal pitches between the piano keys that are very important to blues and related musics. You do not hear about those in music theory class unless your teacher is extremely hip.
It was very strange to sit in a grad school tonal theory classroom after this experience. I had much worse notation skills than the classical music folks, but vastly better aural skills. I had a terrible time with melodic dictation, but I could identify chords effortlessly. I knew nearly all of the substantive material going in, but I was unfamiliar with the notational conventions, not to mention the stylistic conventions. I didn’t know solfege at all. It was a bizarre blend of too basic and too hard, and the myopic focus on Western Europe was infuriating. I spent the whole time thinking, there has to be a better way.