Advanced Music Theory

by Carlos Lichman

 

Hi people!!!

 

I’ll begin my lessons by teaching you some basic music theory.  Why?  You can study scales, fast picking and many other techniques but you need to know what you are doing in order to apply these skills in a musical way!   Well......do you know which mode to play over a chord progression? If not, than studying a little theory can help. Many people ask me “playing in dorian tonality...what does it mean?”

So...take a look here and find the answers.

 

Tonic major chords, tonic minor, supertonic major, and supertonic minor, dominant and fully diminished. Each one of these has several possibilities for scales to go with them. The first five groups mentioned can be said to come from a key, while the last (fully diminished) has no allegiance to any key. So I’ll refer to the first five as chord families and the last as just a chord group.

I took the supertonic major family because of this simplicity. The word TONIC as used here refers to the first degree of the major or minor scale and supertonic refers to the second.

 

The supertonic major chord family has the following interval structure:

 

Major 13th, Perfect 11th, Major 9th, Minor 7th, Perfect 5th, Minor 3rd, Root

 

These notes down on octave:

 

Root, Major 2nd, Minor 3rd, Perfect 4th, Perfect 5th, Major 6th, Minor 7th, Root

 

I mentioned to pick this family for its simplicity. For 3 reasons:

1)     There are no alterations

2)     All notes com from the key

3)     There are no 4ths nor added 6ths, the chord is just straight up root, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13.

 

Here you can do these exercises to identify the major key and the name of the chord and the key.

 

1-     Spell and identify the major key

Cm13   Dbm11  G-9  Fmi7   Abm11

 

2-     Identify the name of the chord and the key:

B  D  F#  A  C#          A  C  E  G  B  D  F#         Bb  Db  F  Ab   C  Eb  G

 

B  D  F#  A  C#         E  G  B  D  F#  A  C#

 

People I hope to help you about your guitar lessons and to improve your music theory. If you have any question send me an e-mail:

 

Contact:

Carlos Lichman

e-mail: escese@bol.com.br

Site: www.lichman.hpg.com.br