Posts Tagged ‘theory’

Songwriter Guitar Chords in D

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Here’s  another set of chords, this time focusing on a Dsus2 shape that makes a great songwriting home base. Try adding different bass notes for the Bm11 and Gsus2. Other bass notes will work for walk downs and other keys.

About that Bm11: chords on guitar often need to drop a note to make room for others. The first or second note to go is usually the V, I think because we hear it even when it isn’t there. This Bm11 doesn’t have an F# – the notes are BDADE – so it won’t show up in most chord dictionaries.

Once again, the graphic is linked to a much larger version.

Guitar Chords in D

Guitar Chords in D

Guitar: Triads

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

This is a step up in difficulty, and something I wish I knew how to find earlier. The following fretboard again uses the key of G, but this time the overlay shows the most common chords for the key of G (G, Am, C, D, Em) as triads on the three treble strings.  I found it difficult to get the hang of using triads because, as you can see, they are tightly packed.  What helps me is to see where they fall in the pentatonic positions that I had mastered (mastered in the sense that I could move easily between them).
Guitar Triads

Guitar: The Major Scale

Monday, January 19th, 2009

I’m a big fan of using graphics to understand music.  My primary goal for the following “hi-res” guitar scale is  to allow selective attention, meaning that the user can easily concentrate on what they want to see.  So, if you want to focus on the positions – the scale starting from different notes on the bass string – you can. But if, for example, you want to find a way to play a lick further up the neck, you can easily ignore the position outlines.

The scale is the same top and bottom, with a few helpful postions lightly outlined.  I could outline a scale position for each of the seven starting bass notes, but it quickly becomes more than one can filter through easily.

Guitar - Major Scale, click for large version