The Efficient Guitarist

Let's talk about intervals

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:07:17 -0500

Let’s talk about intervals

In my last post, I talked about removing the fingerings from all of the scale, arpeggio and pentatonic shapes throughout The Efficient Guitarist. The fingerings either fall into one of two categories—you either can figure them out for yourself, or you’re the kind of guitarist who does their own thing for fingerings. The intervals have always been the most important thing to me as an educator, but they’re only going to matter to you if understand their power. Take a look at this example of the minor pentatonic scale with intervals:

Very few players are aware of every single interval they play, in every key, in every scale, anywhere on the neck. While it’s an impressive feat to be able to do so, it’s simply not practical for most players to learn it because few see the value in it and it feels more like math than music.

The only reason to learn the intervals is to make new musical sounds from what you’ve already learned.

The Efficient Guitarist book one is all about setting up the primary musical sounds: major and minor. I do so by teaching the pentatonic, arpeggio and full scale for both the major and minor tonalities. Learning the entirety of book one wouldn’t give you a complete set of tools—there’s still a lot to learn about modes and other arpeggios in order to play comfortably in every musical scenario. I’m going to teach you about everything as a derivative of major and minor. In order for that to be successful, you have to really understand your intervals, but you don’t need to memorize them all over the neck as long as you can reference them in the book as you go. If you do learn them as you go along, more power to you.

For example, what’s easier: learning an entirely need set of scale diagrams for the phrygian mode, or taking every 2nd note (or second interval) in your minor scale and lowering it by one fret? I hope you said that lowering all the 2nd notes was easier, because it was much easier for me. The only way that I’ve really been able to learn the guitar is by deriving new things from things I already knew. I learned major and minor early on and then derived the rest as I went along. When I’ve talked to great players and educators, there’s an amazing consensus that learning the guitar this way is the way to go, especially because guitar is such a visual/shape-based instrument.

I’ll give you one last anecdote before I go. When I was younger, I had a book of 25,000 chords for the guitar. I tried several times to be a disciplined student and make a goal to learn one new chord voicing a week, no matter what it was. After about a month, I realized that I was learning chords that I didn’t really understand, nor did I know when and where I could use them. I abandoned the idea until a few years later. Once I was in college and I learned about music theory, I realized that I needed to apply the theory to the fingerboard in order for it to mean something to me. I stopped thinking about minor chords as a different set of fingerings to learn and started thinking about minor chords as major chords with a lowered 3rd. In order to really make that work, I needed to know where my 3rds were… You get the rest. There were a finite number of derivations from major, and I didn’t really have to learn more than a handful of things about theory to be dangerous on the guitar. It clearly made it easier for me, but it wasn’t free. The brunt of the cost was upfront in learning the intervals to the shapes I already knew, but in the end, it made everything easier, and since the intervals were musically universal to all instruments, I was able to study from other teachers besides guitar teachers because I had a common language to use.

I’m pretty sure that everyone reading this has opened a book of scales and chords and was blown away at the possibilities. “How will I ever learn this many different forms?” you may ask, and I’m here to tell you that you won’t need to. There’s a better way, and I’m so excited to show it to you through The Efficient Guitarist.

The first thing to go...

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 16:18:58 -0500

The first thing that I’m chopping out of the new edition are scale fingerings. Looking back, I think they take up a lot of space to show both fingerings and intervals. And, honestly, I don’t think you need them. The intervals are much more important to show, if I’m going to show anything in the scale diagrams.

I’ll be discussing the importance of the intervals in the next blog posting.

Here’s a glimpse into the process of writing my new book....

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 01:41:14 -0500

Here’s a glimpse into the process of writing my new book. I always take lots of notes on paper and really think through what I’m trying to accomplish. I ask lots of questions and try to answer those questions as best I can. The ideas are really taking shape, even though I still have a lot to do.

Why a new edition?

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:17:09 -0500

Why would I change a something that’s selling well and is one of my most popular books? One of the goals of The Efficient Guitarist is to be extremely efficient. In the years since I wrote the second edition, I’ve continued to think about the material in the book and whether or not I could improve upon it. I finally feel that I have enough to warrant a new edition.

One of the main principles of the third edition on TEG will be an increased focus. I’m going to focus on a simple goal: teaching you the fingerboard and doing it as simply as humanly possible. I thought about the following questions when revising this book:

How well would you play if you knew every note you were suppose to play?

Imagine a guitar where the frets out of key were removed, how well would you play if you couldn’t hit a wrong note?

How much more creative would you be if you knew the scales and positions equally across the neck and could just focus on making music?

Answering these questions is what I’m going to do in the new edition. Nothing less, nothing more. Once the foundation is fully set, I can finally build the other books in the series.

I’m really looking forward to writing this new edition of my favorite book. I continue to jot down my ideas and thoughts in the Field Notes memo book dedicated to the new edition, and I’m happy with my progress so far.

Beta testing

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:55:00 -0500

As I begin work on the new book, I’m going to need some beta testers to help
give feedback as the book progresses. If you’re interested, contact me on twitter @efficientguitar and I’ll get in touch with you.

New blog, new book

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:53:00 -0500

OK folks, I’ve pulled the trigger. I’ve removed the old site and migrated over to a new one. I’m taking the opportunity to make a fresh start as I embark on The Efficient Guitarist the 3rd edition: Pentatonic Foundations. This is going to be a complete rewrite and I’m very excited to use this new blog as a way to help get things together and have a home for new thoughts. Thanks for your patience…