updated – Page 4 – Guitarator

Suspended Chords

I covered major and minor chords in a previous lesson. A suspended chord is what you get when you take a major or minor chord and replace the interval of the third with another interval.

To review, here are the interval formulas for major and minor chords.

Major	Minor
root, major third, perfect fifth	root, minor third, perfect fifth

(You can refer back to my intervals lesson if you don’t remember what the interval names mean.)

You’ll notice that the two chord formulas only differ in the second note added, which is an interval of either a major third or a minor third. So if you take that out there is nothing to distinguish a major chord from a minor chord. In fact Continue reading Suspended Chords

Pentatonic scales

This will be a fun lesson. Pentatonic scales are easy to learn, easy to play, and they sound like rock ‘n’ roll. If you want to start improvising or creating solos on guitar, chances are you’ll want to learn at least one or two pentatonic scale shapes. Most blues guitar parts are based around the pentatonic minor scale, or a close variation of it.

The best part about pentatonic scales is that if you know the major scale, you already know how to play the pentatonic major scale and the pentatonic minor scale. (If you don’t, don’t worry. I’ll teach you here, or you can read about major scales.)

Seventh Chords

Previously, I talked about the basic three-note chord types, the triads. To review, there are four basic types that are commonly used. Here they are with their interval formulas:

Major	Minor	Augmented	Diminished
root, major third, perfect fifth	root, minor third, perfect fifth	root, major third, augmented fifth	root, minor third, diminished fifth

To each of these chord types, we can add more notes to create more complicated chords. There is no limit to what we can add, but the most common type of note to add is a seventh, either a minor seventh, major seventh, or diminished seventh. As you can imagine, when combined with the four chord types we have to start with, this leads to, like, a million different chords (ok, actually 12, but you get the idea). Fortunately, some are used more frequently than others, and some are almost never used, so I’ll present the most common ones first.

Why do they call it a “capo?”

Most of the words surrounding guitars seem like they come from analogies to the real world. “Head,” “neck,” and “body” are obvious. “Bridge” is a bit of a stretch, but still makes sense. But the word capo is a strange one. It has no parallel in the real world, so I went to find out where it comes from. Off to the Online Etymology Dictionary!

Turns out “capo,” like a lot of other musical terms, comes from Italian. The Italian word capo literally means “head.” They say capo tasto to refer to a capo, meaning approximately “head of the fingerboard.” So there you have it. I guess since “head” was already taken, we had to come up with something new.

Pythagoras and Me

As someone who is interested in both music and science, I find myself fascinated with the concept of scales. Why are they the way they are? If music is so mathematical, why does it seem so arbitrary. There are 12 notes in an octave, but what’s so special about this number 12? Then the major scale is formed from seven of those notes, which is strange. If the major scale is so nice and melodious and all that, why aren’t the notes evenly spaced? Well, I set out to find some answers. I spent hours scouring the internet, visiting the library, reading books, scratching figures in a notebook. You don’t have to do that, because here’s what I found out, all nicely summarized.