Guitar Therapy

As we have seen in our previous session, which focused on the introduction of tablature, the diagrams differ from those of chord diagram illustrations. The numbers on the horizontal lines indicate the fret number rather than the finger number. You can see this when you keep going above the 5th or 6th fret on the guitar diagrams. To learn something, I believe the best teacher is a practical application itself. Therefore I have devised a fretting exercise, an improvisation from a Steve Vai exercise I came across a long time ago. It is advisable to use a metronome or if you can, maintain a count yourself while doing the exercise. First, we do it in a simple chromatic run starting from 1st fret on the 6th string. Examine the diagram below. It’s a simple chromatic exercise you start with lowest string and chromatically decend. Once you do then you ascend in the oppsite starting with your pink from the highest string. It’s important to have a metronome on or try and count yourself as you do ...

Although we call it guitar tabs nowadays, tablature has been around since the a5th century. It was used to write for lutes, vihuela, ukelele. It was used in Renaissance and Baroque eras; there were many types of tablature for even for organs. Today it is commonly used for guitar and stringed instruments and the like. For us, we will solely focus on guitar tablature. Unlike music notation, tablature indicates the note to be played in numbers rather than musical pitches or notes on music sheets. Guitar tablature allows you to read and write the technical aspect of playing the guitar. Techniques such as hammer-on, vibrato, pull-offs, etc. are all easily demonstratable. Here's an example Add caption Guitar tablature is easily adapted into bass player's tablature as well. The diagram of a tablature as shown above is the view of the guitar if you kept it on your lap frets upward. The top most line is high 6th string and the bottom the lowest E. The numbers are the note you need to fr...

According to the Wikipedia definition it states; "In music, a  barre chord   is a type of  chord  on a  guitar  or other stringed instrument, that the musician plays by using one or more fingers to press down multiple strings across a single fret of the fingerboard (like a  bar  pressing down the strings). In guitar chord diagrams we seen how they are demonstrated in our previous sessions. A bar chord is demonstrated in similarly diagram as shown above. The diagram is interpreted in the guitar tablature manner, where the chord diagram is flipped 90 degrees. If you keep your guitar flat on your lap, that's the view of the diagram in tablature. [A topic which will be covered more extensively in GT sessions later]. The most important factor is knowing what the root note of that barre chords is. Root notes, octaves and more of these will also be covered at GT when I go in-depth with music scales and its applications. The root note on first diagra...

To play music, you need to know its meter, the beat you use when dancing, clapping, or tapping your foot along with a song. When reading music, the meter is presented similar to a fraction, with a top number and a bottom number, we call this the song’s time signature. The top number tells you how many beats to a measure, the space of staff in between each vertical line (called a bar). The bottom number tells you the note value for a single beat, the pulse your foot taps along with while listening. In the example above, the time signature is 4/4, meaning there are 4 beats per bar and that every quarter note gets one beat. Click here to listen to sheet music written in 4/4 time, and try counting along 1,2,3,4 – 1,2,3,4 with the beat numbers above. In the example below, the time signature is 3/4, meaning there are 3 beats per bar and that every quarter note gets one beat. Let’s look again at the above examples, notice that even though the 4/4 time signature in “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Sta...

Now that you know the parts to each note, we’ll take a closer look at those filled and open note heads discussed prior. Whether a note head is filled or open shows us the note’s value, or how long that note should be held. Start with a closed note head with a stem. That’s our quarter note, and it gets one beat. An open note head with a stem is a half note, and it gets two beats. An open note that looks like an “o” without a stem is a whole note, and it gets held for four beats. There are other ways to extend the length of a note. A dot after the note head, for example, adds another half of that note’s duration to it. So, a half note with a dot would equal a half note and a quarter note; a quarter note with a dot equals a quarter plus an eighth note. A tie may also be used to extend a note. Two notes tied together should be held as long as the value of both of those notes together, and ties are commonly used to signify held notes that cross measures or bars. The opposite may also happen...

The Musical Note Notes  on the staff tell us which note  to play on our instrument and how long to play it. There are three parts of each note; is the note Head, the Stem, and the Flag. Every note has a note head, either filled (black) or open (white). Where the note head sits on the staff (either on a line or space) determines which note you will play. Sometimes, note heads will sit above or below the five lines and four spaces of a staff. In that case, a line (known as a ledger line) is drawn through the note, above the note or below the note head, to indicate the note letter to play, as in the B and C notes above. The note stem is a thin line that extends either up or down from the note head. The line extends from the right if pointing upward or from the left if pointing downward. The direction of the line doesn’t affect how you play the note but serves as a way to make the notes easier to read while allowing them to fit neatly on the staff. As a rule, any notes at or above...

I will be covering only the fundamentals of music theory at the Guitar Therapy classes. Nowadays we are blessed as guitar players that we have the guitar tablature, of which I will cover thoroughly during other GT sessions. Guitar tablature allows an advantage for guitar players over other musicians. We are giving the guitar player the ability to read music no matter how complex a piece and play it with ease. But however today, we look at basic classical musical notation symbols and what they mean. Music is made up of a variety of symbols, the most basic of which are the staff, the clefs, and the notes. All music contains these fundamental components, and to learn how to read music, you must first familiarize yourself with these basics. The staff consists of five lines and four spaces. Each of those lines and each of those spaces represents a different letter, which in turn represents a note. Those lines and spaces represent notes named A-G, and the note sequence moves alphabetically u...

What is an open chord? The wiki definition is as follows:  "In music for stringed instruments, especially guitar, an open chord [open-position chord] is a chord that includes one or more strings that are not fingered." Let us deviate for a bit here. The definition is technically correct, and I've had the same problem while developing material for Guitar Therapy Maldives [GTM], using the word "fingering". Now, this has to change, in my opinion, to something more apt, so at GTM, you will use "fretting" instead of "fingering." I've had problem adjusting as well, as we use to call any left-hand exercise fingering exercises, but never realizing it might have a vulgar tinge to it. As I will be teaching a lot of juniors, I feel calling it "fretting" exercises is way better than "fingering." Anyways let's get back to business! I hope the above explanation of a chord diagram makes sense to you and you can decipher them now,...

The hierarchy of competence is sometimes also referred to as the stages of learning. These are the psychological stages of learning or acquiring a new skill. Mr. Noel Burch used it at Gordon Training International in the 1970s' as a training model for its employees. I came across this while reading a book by mental game coach  Dr. Jared Tendler  called  The Mental Game of Poker . I found it very interesting and realized that we could apply this in learning to play the guitar, because technically, what we are really doing is acquiring the new skillset of playing an instrument. As you can see in the diagram, acquiring a new skill is gradual progress that starts from being unconscious incompetent and ends at unconscious competence when mastery is achieved. 1]  Unconscious Incompetence This is the beginner stage. You have just come across the guitar or seen someone play, and you like it! You want to play it, yet you do not where to start though. Bec...