12 Things I Love About You (Music, That Is...) [Beginner]

Alright, now that we've got our gear plugged in and no one has been electrocuted, burned, or otherwise injured, it's time to start playing right? Eh, not so fast. I know, I know...I said in the last post we would get to playing. But I jumped the gun. You're gonna forgive me right? Just this one time, I promise. No more mistakes.



The reason we can't just jump up and say "Let's go everyone, 12-bar blues shuffle in Emaj 1, 2, 3, 4..." is, well, some of you may have no clue in the world what Emaj is. In fact, Emaj sounds like the name of the would-be cousin to Rajesh Koothrapali on the Big Bang Theory, but I digress. Before we jump into playing and techniques, we need to have a system that allows us to communicate musical ideas through text. Luckily for us, we already have not one, but two systems that are accepted worldwide. Today we will be learning about musical notation and guitar tablature.

*If you come out of this lesson with more questions than answers, that is to be expected. Music is beautiful in the way that it all ties together and everything has a purpose, but because it is so encompassing there is no way we can cover -everything- in one lesson. I promise we will make sense of it all before it's said and done with. That being said, if you still just have no idea what went on in this lesson, contact me through e-mail and we can go further in-depth. (Note: There are many different styles/forms of musical notation that is applied in different cultures, but we will only be focusing on the western-culture style notation.) Alright, enough intro, let's get to it. Music in western culture is divided up into twelve notes or tones. The notes in parenthesis are the same notes as the note above it, they are just a different way of expressing the name.

A - A# - B - C - C# - D - D# - E - F - F# - G - G# - A
     (Bb)             (Db)       (Eb)            (Gb)       (Ab)

(#) indicates a sharp note
(b) indicates flat note

I really can't tell you why they decided to put these (#) and (b) in between the letter notes, maybe it's easier to notate with only 7 separate letters than 12 seperate letters. Your guess is as good as mine on that one and maybe one of our readers knows the answer and would like to share in the comments. If so, they are more than welcome. But, it is what it is so we're gonna use it. These are all of the standard, accepted notes and this collection of notes forms what we like to call the chromatic scale.

Chromatic has the root word chroma, which means color. This means that there are 12 different colors, or tones, available for musical expression. The tonal differnce from note-to-note is the same distance. If you pick one string and played a note on each fret from 1 all the way to 24, you would be able to sing every note after the second or third time you do this. You can hear the "distance" between the notes when you do this, and when you play notes of the chromatic scale you are playing in intervals that we like to call half-steps. Meaning, the distance from 'A' to 'A#' is a half step. 'F' to 'F#' is a half step. 'B' to 'C' is a....you guessed it, a half step. "What you talking 'bout Willis?" Where's the B#? If you go back and look at our chromatic scale, you'll see that we never notated a B#. "Technically" it does exist, we just call it a C. The same principle applies to "E#" and F. Once you have half-stepped your way through the whole scale and you arrive at the note that you started on, you have now made it through a full octave.

Quick review: The chromatic scale contains all 12 equally distanced tones, seperated by half-steps. Once we have made it completely through the scale and the letters start to repeat we have made it through an octave.

Now that we know the note names and how they are divided, we need to figure out where they go. Musical notes are placed on what we call a staff, with a given location for each note. (Note: This specific sequence of notes only applies on a treble clef, more on that in a minute.)

The letters of each note stay fixed in their given space, regardless of the length of note and whether there is a # or b along with the letter. In other words, whether the note is F, F#, or Fb, it stays in the first space from the bottom. If the note is an F#, it will be noted as such within the piece, or in the key signature.

Treble Clef

Bass Clef

The musical staff will have one of the preceding symbols which indicate where the notes will placed. The picture shown above the clef symbols shows notes placed on the staff in accordance with the treble clef. You will also notice two "4" placed one above the other. This indicates the time signature of the piece. This time signature (4/4) is the most common time signature used in music, although a number of other signatures are prevalent in music as we know it.

This is all I'm going to present on musical notation at this time (believe me, there is plenty more to fill up other lessons), but this gives us a nice foundation to start building upon. I am not going to go further into details of musical notation right now because, honestly, other than a few theory lessons, we're never going to touch this stuff again. This system was made for pianos, organs and orchestras, not guitar folks like us. I don't have the time, nor the patience to write out musical scores for us when we have a system that is made specifically for guitar and translates better. Knowing this basic musical notation, though, will help us tremendously down the road.

So what is this better system you ask? Guitar tablature. Guitar tab (short for tablature, you'll never see me write out tablature after this time lol) is exponentially better suited for our endeavors on the fretboard. Here is a quick run down of guitar tab basics; there are six lines written in a similar fashion to a musical staff, the difference being the five lines on a staff are used as a guide for the placeholders of notes, and the six lines on a guitar tab represent the six strings of the guitar. When looking at a guitar tab, you approach as if you laid the guitar face up in your lap and are looking at the highest (smallest) string being on top, and the lowest (thickest) string being on bottom. It looks a little bit like this...

--e---------------------------- (smallest/thinnest string)

--B---------------------------

--G----------------------------

--D---------------------------

--A---------------------------

--E---------------------------- (largest/thickest string)

Some tabs have the notes written out for you like that, some don't. You can assume that if no notes are present on the strings, that the guitar tab is being presented in standard tuning (EADGBe).

To indicate a note on a tab, a number is placed on a "string". In this case, we want to play a G note on the low E string. The G note on the low E string is played at the 3rd fret, so this is how we would notate that.

----------------------

---------------------

---------------------

---------------------

---------------------

--------3-----------

If we wanted to play an open note, it is notated with a 0 for the fret. Ex. An A note, played on the A string, in open position.

-----------------------

-----------------------
-----------------------
-----------------------
------------0----------
-----------------------

Tabs really shine through when used to present chords, because transcribing out a full, 6-string chord from the guitar onto a musical staff takes up quite a bit of room as their is quite a distance note-wise from the lowest to highest tone. In the case of this G chord, two octaves are being used! Here is an example of a G chord, written out in tab.

---3------

---0------
---0------
---0------
---2------
---3------

Alright folks, that should be enough content to tide us over for a moment or two. I hope that I've made more sense here than confuse you even further. The best part about all of this is that we've made it through the hardest part. It's equivalent to learning two knew languages, but once we get to where we can communicate to each other, then the fun begins. I know you've got the itch to actually play something, so next lesson, we -will- play something. We're going to jump right into Open/Cowboy Chords next lesson, so stay tuned! Trivia: We learned about the 12 accepted tones and what their names are, but did you know that one of the notes used to go by another name? In the comments section please post your answer and tell us what note that was, along with what the note used to be named.