1 Critical Scale Every Guitarist Should Know | Music Theory Workshop Part 2

thank you for the music theory workshop with me your host almost got myself steve stein yeah yeah a little do this we should match up this with all of your stuff pretty cool yeah so anyway guys i'm dan dinley founder of guitarzoom.com this is my good friend steve stein who knows who needs no introduction chief guitarist in residence at guitar zoom today we are doing a music theory workshop for you and this is a part two in a series that we're doing is a week-long thing it's gonna be super super cool uh right now it's streaming obviously and thank you for being here and if you have any questions please put them in the comment box music theory fundamentals is really that's what we're talking about the basics of all of what you need to know as a guitar player and music theory if you want to learn that then keep watching and stay right here and tune in for all of the episodes if you want to learn it even faster you can go to guitarzoom.com and you can get yourself music theory masterclass by steve's time which takes all this stuff to an unbelievable level an in-depth level and um it's all step-by-step laid out for you there in that master class believe it or not guys in this seven part series we are really just going to scratch the surface on this uh so if you want to get that resource the master class is available it's called music theory master class very simple titles music theory master class last of it was blues licks blues licks cleverly called blues licks by steve stein also available guitars my glasses by steve stein so you can check that out guys um yeah okay cool so this is the workshop which is the little mini mini master class so to speak uh okay cool so today what are we going to learn with oh by the way before we continue this guys don't worry if you're like uh i'm not sure because part one is going to be on the old youtubes you can go over there and you can check that out and uh it'll be there either on the guitar zoom channel uh just go to youtube and type in guitar zoom it'll come up or go to youtube and type in steve stein and then click on steve's channel it'll be there or on the guitars channel i'm not sure exactly where this is going to show up or if you're watching this off of facebook or some other cool place uh you might be seeing us right now we will put this available for you on youtube we'll create a playlist of all of these for you just walk right through it so don't worry just stay tuned to youtube stay tuned to facebook um again and if you want them if you want to get the master class that's that's the guitarzoom.com okay cool go ahead big guy okay so uh if you missed yesterday's um lesson that we did we were talking about the chromatic scale and so you know if you get a chance i would definitely go back and watch that um but it's not like you are going to be completely lost today what we're going to be doing is taking this this is what we left off with yesterday um we're going to take this chromatic scale we're going to uh slim it down and make it into what we refer to as a diatonic scale commonly we refer to this as the major scale and we need to learn that that's kind of the basic fundamentals of understanding music theory when i started learning how to play as many of you you know i learned pentatonic i learned the pentatonic scale and then when people would say a fourth or a fifth or a seventh i never understood what they were talking about because my scale didn't have enough notes like i i didn't understand the relationship between the pentatonic having five different notes and this diatonic having seven different notes i i didn't understand that so um so it's imperative that we we learn what this is and again i'm gonna make it really straightforward for you and i'm gonna show you how to do it on your guitar so it's not just you know on on the the white board here but it's actually something that you can practice so that's interesting because i actually had the opposite experience really yeah i played piano from the time i was like five and then but i picked up guitar at 13. and so i'm not good at math but i had all me almost a decade of of that stuff and then when i learned the pentatonic i was like pentatonic there's only five notes what's the deal here right you know and i learned the shapes and everything and so for me it was super easy to learn pentatonic because i had already learned all the major minor in the diatonic and the seven notes and the modes and all that stuff and so then pentatonic and going on well then think about how different this is if you're watching this like obviously dan grew up very different than i did in terms of his study and and his approach to music and like you know i didn't have piano lessons i um you know i learned how to play guitar by ear you know other than you know learning something here and there from a relative or a friend or something like that i really had no friggin idea what i was doing i just had a really good sense of being able to listen and and you know i could figure out you know revelation mother earth by ozzie or you know aces high by iron maiden i i could learn all these things by ear but i had no no idea at all what i was doing until i went to college um so college was kind of a nightmare for me at first because i just i i didn't even know the notes on my staff i didn't even know how to read notes and i went to college and so it was it was a trial by fire for sure yeah and that's interesting to speak to that real quick steve uh and it's just because um you know we talked about this last time i just want to reiterate guys don't worry if you're new to all this that's okay that's the whole point uh we're learning we're learning together here don't get freaked out i would also caution you of if you don't get it um if you're not a hundred percent clear on all of this as we walk through it even we're gonna break it down as as as as best we can to explain this to you but you need to have some context and stephen i've been literally been doing this stuff for like 25 years and so uh it's it's very natural to us but let me assure you he and i have had a good laugh about this when we first really started learning this we were in our 20s we were both music majors we were both going to college and we were overwhelmed then all right in a school that's full-time teaching music around other musicians around other professors and we were overwhelmed then so we're really trying to chunk it down that's applicable to guitar and um how you can apply all this stuff but i just want to really encourage you that if you're like um i'm starting to get overwhelmed it's okay it's like drinking from a fire hydrant just get what you can stick with us watch the whole entire thing you can go back and watch more um and of course you know if you want to get the master class that's available at guitarzoom.com if you want to really go deep in this stuff so just want to make sure nobody gets overwhelmed right and also remember too that when i'm approaching this both in these lessons that we're doing and certainly in the guitar uh the music theory master class that dan has mentioned from guitarzoom.com i'm approaching this from a music teacher's standpoint or a guitar teacher's standpoint so all of these things are things i have taught to students throughout the years so again i'm not giving you music theory from the perspective of my professor i'm giving you music theory from the from the perspective of i'm a guitar player showing you music theory and i think that really does make a difference because it's not the same thing right that's right yeah yeah so and again he's right the music theory master class gets gets further out there no doubt about it but we're always applying it to the guitar so just always remember that so anyway really important yeah so we've got the best of the best i'm sorry i was just going to say you're they're they're you guys are getting the very best most applicable theoretical music discussion directly to guitar there's so much stuff that i learned i'm sure you learned to see there's like i don't need to know that yeah this is just stuff it's like just needed and it might be some of those things might be really important somebody else's world they just i mean that's right you know it but but you know again what we're trying to focus on are things that are very practical to you so if we think about yesterday just summarizing we learned that there are seven uh prime notes or primary notes we think about those as being the the white keys on the piano which are a b c d e f and g and then we learned that in between those notes we are either getting a sharp or a flat or we're not okay so again it's a longer discussion if you don't know what i'm talking about i would strongly recommend that you go back but for today what i want you to remember that if we were talking about those seven notes and we're talking in terms of sharps remember that b and e do not get sharps if i show you this example here remember this picture right here shows you that there's no black key in between the e and f and if i was to sk span this out further you'd see that there's no black key between b and c as well if i showed you like this for instance so there are a couple of spots on the piano and again it's okay if you don't play piano i don't either okay but just understanding that there's a couple spots that don't get sharps okay so we need to remember that as we move on to step two today of developing this major scale so i'm gonna erase this good thing you're not paying money to see this [Laughter] we like watching you clean the whiteboard steve actually i'm quite ocd so even right now it's not clean enough but i'm going to leave it because i don't want to go get the spray and it'll be fine i'm going to let it did you get that tattoo all at once on that arm uh yeah you got the whole entire thing at once this whole thing up to here and then i got this it goes all the way around so i got all the rest of that it took three different times but getting all this was one yeah ouch um and that's music theory no i don't know class is over yeah that's right okay so here's the tattoos if we go back to the prime notes if we go back to these a b c d e f and g okay when we start talking about we were we learned that the chromatic scales like the dictionary it gives us all the words but it doesn't give us sentences it just gives us all the words we have to learn how to organize those words into sentences that we can communicate with somebody well the chromatic scale's the same way the chromatic scale doesn't differentiate that one note is more important than another it's just all the notes so what we want to do now is we want to take those prime seven notes and we want to pull them back out of the chromatic scale okay so we have a b c d e f and g okay now don't worry about sharps and flats and all that kind of stuff so with these seven notes what we're going to do is we're going to start trying to figure out how to organize those into what we call the again the diatonic scale or the major scale okay now in order to do that please understand as i write this out like this it looks like a is the most important note because it's the first one i wrote on this board okay and again it's the first note in our alphabet but the truth is if i was trying to figure out all the notes that i wanted to be in the key of b and again we're going to get to key i would write b c d e f g a and then back to b i'll put the a there i'll rewrite this but and we would do the same thing okay if i want to write the key of c i would do the same thing we can start on any note and develop what we're going to learn okay and by the time we're done today you're gonna be able to figure out all kinds of keys okay but to make things easy we need to start by writing it down starting with the note c so i'm using all seven of those notes but i'm writing down c d e f g a b and then the octave would be c again okay and the reason i'm doing that is because this key if you remember our piano if you remember this c d e f g a b are all prime notes they're all white notes so right now we don't have to worry about the the c sharp or the d sharp and all those accidentals we can we can avoid all that right now and again you might not be understanding everything i'm saying but you will in just a few minutes okay so whenever we're trying to figure out a major scale the diatonic doremi fossil lattido i'm sure you've heard that before that's what i'm doing you can't have a c and a c sharp in the same scale you're just going to have c or c sharp but you can't have them both if i have a d you can't have d and d sharp and d flat or you can't you're either going to have one or you're going to have the other okay so there's always going to be a a version of the prime note in every key if you were figuring out the key of g the key of g would have g a b c e e and f now there might be an f sharp or there might be a c sharp or there might be something else but there can't be two of them there could only be total sense does that make sense yes so let me see if i can just repeat what i heard you say i've actually i don't think i've ever thought about this before so guys let's say for example uh you're going to have well let's just use his his scale there the notes those notes have no sharps or flats because i'm just going to say because the key of c i know we haven't talked about keys yet but the qc has no sharper flats and you're going to find out why okay and what he's saying is that uh in every single key that that you will ever encounter ever in your life each one of those notes only gets so you will never have like c c sharp d e f g a and b you're not never going to have that you would or c d flat c there could be a c sharp but there cannot be both i love it now what we have to do is we have to learn the schematic of the major scale so we're using c as our template but by the time we're done you can figure out the key of g you can figure out the key of f you can figure out the key of a you can figure out any key you want okay but we we're going to start with c because it's the easiest one to base this on so c is going to be our catalyst if you will this is this the major scale this is the key that all other keys are built upon is the theory that goes into the key of c so the key of g wants to be like the key of c the key of d wants to be like the key of c so we have to do is figure out what is this okay well if we look at it what we're going to notice is if we look at c to d okay there's a distance between those two notes and we call that in music we call it an interval an interval is just a distance between two notes so whether you say distance or you say interval i could care less okay c to d has a distance d e also has a distance e to f also has a distance and so on okay so they all have intervals and when he says distance it's literally like measuring it's a meter or if it's a ha or a half meter in your brain you're like oh the i know basically what a meter is or yard if you're in the us or whatever or i know what a half meter is it's just a way of measuring something yeah you're just saying distance yeah and you're you're measuring the the distance between any two notes we're going to learn later on we can measure the distance between c and f right we can measure the distance between c and a we can but but right now we just want to measure the distance between each subsequent note okay we're not worried about all of this yet we're not worried about how far c to a is we don't care about that right now we just want to know how far is it from c to d okay well if we think about our our chromatic scale remember we had the note c sharp there was a black key remember so c to c sharp which is a white key right next to a black key the distance between these is what we refer to as a half step a half step is any note on the piano that goes right to the next note of the piano let me show you this okay so c to c sharp if you can see that chart is a half step c sharp to d is a half step d to d sharp is a half step d sharp to e is a half step e to f is a half step because there is no black key in between okay so keep that in mind as we go remember this thing i better write it over here so you can see it in the camera okay remember we learned that in the last class right and if you haven't seen that please go back and watch it b to c is a half step e to f is a half step they're naturally occurring half steps out of all these other sharps and flats and black keys and white keys and everything else these are the the ones we have to remember so if we think about this c to c sharp is a half step c sharp to d is also a half step so the distance from c to d is a whole step it's a whole step okay now if you remember this it's going to make this really easy okay if we look at the distance from d to e you have to ask yourself how far is that well and the easiest way to ask yourself is is there a sharp in between is there a black key in between if there is which there is there's a d sharp so it's d to d sharp as a half d uh d sharp to e excuse me is a half so d to e is a so two half steps make a whole step guys just like two half meters make up one meter you have two half cups makes one cup yeah i mean that's right so uh you can call this two half steps but it's easier to just call it a whole step okay so what we're going to learn here is that a major scale specifically the key of c major which is our catalyst is built on a series of distances we've now learned that the first movement from c to d is a whole step the next one d to e is also a whole step but watch this here it is right here eat f there is no e sharp so this is a half step and guys if you remember from the last class uh we talked about the sixth string open your open sixth string is e and what's the very first fret f so open e well steve i'll show you here in a second i guess but i always think about that that half step is between ef and that sixth string that's the first thing that leaps my mind when i think about that e f movement you got it okay so if we keep going what i want you to do is and of course i'm going to give you the answer but i just want you to think about it would f to g be a half step or a whole step because we're now realizing that all of these are going to be half steps and whole steps they can't be bigger than that they're this is this is what we have they're either going to be a whole step or they're going to be a half step that's a really good point so there's not like an eight step the 16th step that's all there is guys right so what do you got here if you were moving from f to g just think about it what would that be would it be a whole step would it be two frets or would it be a half step would it be one fret right because like dan said this is your first fret right g is your third fret well there's your answer because again remember there'd be an f sharp in between so f to f sharp would be a half step and then f sharp to g would be a half step so this is a whole step so when you're skipping a when you're skipping a fret guys it's a whole step if you're going to the very next yeah because it's you have to have stuff yeah and it's really important it's really important to think logically about it right i mean two half steps like dan said two half steps is a whole step and you want to get used to two to four on the guitar is a whole step six to eight is a whole step one to three is a whole step five to seven is a whole step right or on the piano it's three keys because you have to go from one key to another key and then go from that key to the next key but again in my head i never thought about really any of those i just thought about i'm being completely honest with you when i was in college and i was learning this stuff all i saw were the notes i didn't see my guitar i didn't see a piano i saw the notes i could see f and i could see g and i could see f sharp in the middle when you say you see the notes you could see the keyboard is that what you mean huh i'd see the notes just the notes of my just the notes in my head i'm not seeing i'm not seeing the piano i'm not seeing the guitar and i'm going to show you why in a second i'm going to show you something that my my theory teacher would yell at me and burn into my brain in just a little bit i'm going to show you this okay can't wait to see it yeah so for me f to g i knew there was an f sharp in the center now for dan he's thinking black key right he's thinking there's an f sharp black key i didn't play piano and it wasn't what i thought of i just i just knew because of this i knew that f and g had an f sharp in the center and as a result it was two half steps f f to f sharp and f sharp to g okay so i'm going to let that go because i feel like i'm being redundant here so a to b so we we know g to a as a whole so ask yourself what's a to b so how so if they're asking themselves how would they know the answer to that they got to think if there's something in the center but i mean how would they know that because because we talked about it last week oh that was the whole thing of the chromatic scale is all the white notes everybody gets a sharp except for oh now i'm following you okay a a sharp b or excuse me a b c d e f g everybody gets sharps except for these that's right got to this e this was a half step so guess what's going to happen here so between b and f he's written the word b because he's trying to remind you that that b and e between b and c in between e and f there's a half step is that right steve no no b means there's no sharp b doesn't get a sharp e doesn't r okay now i'm with you okay yeah so b and e remember please and you can watch that if you need to b and e just means those are the two notes that don't get sharps okay we know that we can look at this piano chart we can see the e to f right there it doesn't get a black key okay and if i span that out again and we see b to c i should add a little bit better chart but you can see what i'm talking about there's no there's no black key between b and c either got it so the naturally occurring places where there is no sharp are between b and c and e and f and the easy way to remember that it again i i strongly recommend you to go back because it it sounds like we're getting even more confusing here b and e just spells the word b those two notes don't get sharps so right here if we look at the distance from b to c it's a half step because there is no b sharp so what we wind up here with in the key of c is a whole step a whole step a half step a whole step a whole step a whole step a half step now it used to drive me friggin crazy when i was learning this stuff is that people would go host a post of half step host up host upholstered half step like that's how they thought of it that never made sense in my head i had to simplify this even more in my brain for it to make sense to me because i don't know it just sounded stupid i don't know what the deal was but i couldn't think of it that way so what i did was i just thought just like with the chromatic scale this is the way my brain thinks everybody's a whole step except for three to four and seven to eight or seven to one if you want to think of it that way the third and fourth notes and the seventh and eighth notes and again i'm going to show you why in a minute here okay i don't think we've shown them how to uh number the notes well no well yeah yeah i mean this is the first note second note third no fourth fifth sixth seventh this would be the first note again right but if we were talking about as an octave we could call that an eight and i don't want to go any further than that just this is one this is two this is three this is four this is five this is six this is seven and this is one or eight right so what i'm telling you can kind of see it on the screen there if you remember that there are half steps between three and four and seven and eight and every key you will ever figure out for a major scale there are half steps between the third and fourth and seventh and eighth notes that's what this key of c is telling us i like that it's all whole steps except for the third and fourth and seventh and eighth notes okay that's what we've just learned right here now let me show you this because this is something like that okay so keep that in mind and if you need to remote to you know watch this later you certainly can't i was gonna say rewind but if you need to watch it later you certainly rewind how freaking old are we get your vhs kids what do you call a video when you what do you i guess that's what we call it isn't it well i think it rewind i'm thinking about the old vhs tape i know i don't know i think you i think you'd still call it that on a video though yeah i think you do yeah okay so anyway remember i'm going to simplify this for you write it out here make sure it's on the screen really nice c d e f g a b and then c right well he's writing that out guys if you're just joining us uh in this streaming session here we are in right in the middle of our um of today's session which is uh our music theory workshop and this is the second part you can always go back and watch the first part um so that's what we're doing here if you guys have questions please put them in the box below um if you're interested in the music theory master class that's at guitarzoom.com okay buddy all right so here's our key we have half steps between three and four and seven eight these arrows were the arrows that my music theory teacher burned into my brain and he would dock me if i didn't actually put these arrows on my sheets when i would do my assignment sheets and things like that i don't know if everybody else had to do it or if it was just me but it wound up becoming so important to my learning because i still see this in my head when i when i think about these keys so understand that the key of c again is is the perfect key it's the catalyst it's the perfect key upon all onput upon which all other keys will be measured so all other keys have to have a whole step and a whole step and then this sacred half step and then a whole step whole step whole step and then this half step okay so let's say we wanted to figure out the key of g and i again very much remember doing these quizzes where i would have to write this out and i would do exactly this and again i want to make sure that you can see it here so we have g and he would always make me line these up yes that's that's good professor yep so i could see the first note the second note the third note the fourth note the fifth note sixth seventh and so on right i could see those okay so now we're looking at the key of g but the key of g has to follow the same rules as the key of c it has to have its whole steps and half steps in the same place if the whole steps and half steps are not in the same place it's not going to sound like doremi fasolatido it's going to sound like something else and something else is not the major scale so the half steps and whole steps have got to be in the same place which means and again here's where he would yell at me put in your arrows i like that put in your arrows instead of trying to work left to right and make mistakes you'd go put in those arrows because you have to know where those half steps are okay so i put in my arrows now i can't just start with the arrows i have to start at the very beginning every time and make sure that all of my distances the half steps and the whole steps work out right but this is just reminding me those arrows are reminding me that ultimately i want those spaces to be half steps so g to a i have to ask myself is that a whole step and the answer is yes it is because there is a g sharp so g to g sharp is a half step g sharp to a is a whole step and there we go so that's fine this is good then we have to ask ourselves the next one a to b is that a whole step the answer is yes it is because there's an a sharp so a to a sharp is a half a sharp to b is a half so a to b therefore as a whole like we want it to be mhm look at the next one b to c is that a half step like we want it to be yes because you have your v upside down v above it well not just that because we're going to learn as we keep looking that um it will be wrong sometimes right look here for you dan obviously okay right there yeah so you gotta let me finish this so b to c okay so b to c is that a half step and the answer is yes it is it is a half step well you can't really see the thing there but there it is so b to c right b to c is a naturally occurring half step again if we looked at this e to f is a half step there's no black key in between and so is b although i wish i had a better picture to show you b to c okay so this is fine b to c is fine it is a half step we even see that up here oh i see okay but if we look at the next one c to d is that a whole step like we want it to be it's supposed to be a whole step is it a whole step and the answer is yes because there's a c sharp so c to c sharp is a half c sharp to half is a or excuse me c sharp to d is a half so that's all is that a whole step like we want it to be yes it is because it has a d sharp hopefully you're catching on now watch this e to f is that a whole step like we want it to be and the answer is no it's a half step e to f is only a half step like dan was saying first e is open on the sixth string and then f is at the first fret that's only a half step this has to be a whole step so this is wrong so how do we fix it well watch this if i turn f into f sharp because remember i can't have f and f sharp i can't have them both i can only have one the distance from e to f sharp now e to f if you can see that e that's an arrow e to f is a half step and then f to f sharp is also a half step so e to f sharp is a whole step now what's awesome about this is i have now fixed e to f sharp which now means i've fixed f sharp to g is f sharp to g a half step like we want and the answer is yes now here's the here's the awesome part of this is with this knowledge you could figure out any key and i'm going to do a couple more i don't want this to get way too long but i do want to show you especially one with the flats so you can understand why some keys have flats and why some keys don't but understand the key of g has one sharp and now you know why instead of just assuming like people learn that the key of g has one chart but they have no idea why now you know why the key of g has one sharp because it's trying to be like the key of c it needs its whole steps and half steps in the same place to be doremi fasolatido and to be able to do that it has to fix itself by making that f into an f sharp so now if i go to my guitar and i play g major on the guitar i'm playing g a b c d e f sharp g doh remy fosso latido [Music] if i take that exact same thing that i'm doing right now and again don't worry about learning this right now okay that's that's a whole other topic but understand that i'm playing the major scale but if i was to take that exact same pattern that i'm doing right now and move up to c which we now know because we learned that yesterday right so i know where c is so i move up and play that exact same shape with my fingers [Music] don't worry me fosso latte dough [Music] i'm sorry i was just saying it's this exact same finger pattern that's right that's the cool part about the guitar and actually even on the piano it's the same finger patterns but it looks different because you have big white keys and little black keys on the guitar everything's more symmetrical so you can see it better on the guitar but i mean if you're a good piano player i'm sure you can see it anyway but on the guitar everything is just very very late you know that we don't have big frets and little frets and that sort of thing everything is just symmetrical but that's that's the most important part of learning your major scale is again i don't care that you know where the half steps in wholesale like again that's stupid holster positive half step whole step wholesome that's fine but if you don't know why and you don't know how you can use it and you don't understand how it's working for you what goods are going to do you where now you actually understand oh that's why the key of g gets a sharp because it's it's half steps and whole steps have to be the same as the key of c that formula by the way guys by the way if you're watching this you're just joining us you have comments you have questions please put them in the in the chat box there um we and of course if you're just joining us we're doing this music theory workshop for you which has really turned into an amazing series we're gonna be doing this for a few days here the other videos if you've if you're late to the game go back and watch those we'll put them in a playlist for you on youtube check it out yeah um and this is all related to steve's master class music theory master class which is available at guitarzoom.com if you'd like to enroll in that so i just wanted to point out guys that uh it's i love that i love working with steve for a lot of reasons but one of the things is he approaches things in a much different way than i do and and that's okay um in fact it's great and so you may be looking at this and saying well i kind of like the whole whole half whole whole half thingy it didn't resonate with steve he was thinking of it i've actually never heard of this way he was like that sounded stupid to me i hate i hate to walk around going whole whole half whole whole whole half so i just said everything's whole except for between three and four and seven and eight and the thing is people like shortcuts like this yeah b right people like shortcuts including myself and and again my problem with music theory all along has been i don't care that you can talk about something if you can't use it what difference does it make it might make you feel good and that's wonderful but if you can't use it what good is it doing it's like learning learning three really strange vulgar phrases in spanish and then being dropped in the middle of spain and you need to use the bathroom and buy some spaghetti you know what i mean or whatever it might be it doesn't do you any good unless you understand how you're supposed to use it and so for me that's what i fought with when i was in college was i don't i don't care that you're you're giving me these formulas if i can't figure out like my daughter who's 11 years old and now you know she's working from home doing all of her math and all that kind of stuff um but if she doesn't understand it every time she goes to that same problem again it's a it's a hassle and she's lost and she gets it wrong unless she understands the formula and and the purpose behind the formula it's not going to do her any good and so that's one thing that i've always felt really strongly about with theory now that doesn't mean that dan and i might not get together and talk about theory because we want to talk about theory of course we can and we don't need to play guitar to do that we might just enjoy it but if you're trying to learn theory because you are a guitar player the point would be to learn the theory so you can apply it to your guitar yeah so cool man yeah awesome so anyway so there's that one and then what i'll do just really quick here i don't want to take way too much more time with this but but let me just show you this quick so let's say i did and i'll kind of write it in here hopefully there's enough room so i'm going to do d e f g a b c d and there's my half step and there's my half step so again that reminds me of where those half steps are so i do not make a mistake on my test or dr guaza is going to yell at me okay so i start at the beginning and i'm going to make this kind of quick because we don't have a lot of well we do have time but i don't want to waste too much of your time so d to e is that a whole step and the answer is yes just in case people are just joining us explain to us just tell us your b thing just tell us what that means again so they know how to answer your question you're about to go through your b knee thing you want me to tell it again okay well well just in case you just joined us you don't have to go back and watch the whole thing on the other video well well b b and e don't get b to c and e to f don't get a black key so b to c is a half step and e to f is a half step but again if you're just joining us please go back and watch those other ones because the first the first video that we did is going to help you enormously you know that's a and to be honest with you that's the thing about theory is that if you jump all over you're going to get lost like you need sequence so it it makes logical sense which is why dan and i are doing like these these videos is because you know if you just try and watch lesson five but you don't know anything about the first four it's not going to make any sense to you and i i have to say this because um i one million percent agree with what he just said go back and watch it but also say there is an element of truth to that regardless of what you're learning like forget about theory for a second let's just say you're like i don't care about theory um all i want to do is play well how many guitar players steve have we known throughout the years and i'm sure everybody listing this and watching this will agree it's like who have been playing for years and years and years and still play on a beginner level like been playing for 10 years 15 years 20 years and basically are beginners because they never learned in sequence on how to build all these lessons one upon another they just grabbed like the pentatonic scale in first position they grabbed some power chords they grabbed some bar chords and now they're like totally confused um if that's you youtube is a great place i love youtube guess what we're doing this thing on youtube which is awesome uh but i'll i'll say it is good for what it is but it's not the solution to everything right um and if you want that step by step um take you by the hand and fill in all the gaps that you have in your understanding and in your your playing we have a couple of resources for your guitarzoom.com which actually remind me of of that leap out at me one is your play guitar for life course right play guitar for life was just amazing this is a guitar here's how you hold it here's you know you walk through all that stuff all the way through and it's that kind of foundational thing and then we have the music theory master class which is just an augmented version of what we're talking about here that starts in the very beginning so in case you missed any of this stuff you get the master class you start the beginning and you go all the way through modes and all those other things plus you get some other additional things um all of the both those courses the master class and plagia drive for life are available at guitarzoom.com go ahead steve okay cool so again just to kind of make this quick because i still have one more i have to show you after this but just to kind of reiterate my point so if you were to look at this and just take a quick summary and look and say again because i have these arrows in this is supposed to be a half step and it's not this is supposed to be a half step and it's not so we already see that there's not only one problem but there's at least two problems and that was his point of putting the arrows in is that i never put the half steps in the wrong place i always knew that to put it in between three and four and seven and eight okay so if we look at this d to e winds up being a whole step like we want e to f is supposed to be a whole step but of course it isn't so if we change that f to f sharp we fix that problem because e to f sharp is now a whole step two frets and f sharp to g is now a half step like we want so we fixed both these problems by doing that g to a whole step yes a to b whole step yes b to c is that a whole step like we want it to be it is not but if we change c to c sharp see we're taking the scene we're pushing it that way right so now the distance between b to c becomes b to c sharp it's even further away so b to c is a half step c to c sharp is a half step that fixes this so c sharp to d now is a half step and the key of d gets two sharps and that is why it gets two sharps now as you keep going you're gonna keep getting more sharps there's more problems there's more accidents that you need to fix hence accidental right there's more accidents there's more issues as you keep going so if you figure out the key of a and you figure out the key of e and you figure you just keep going there's more and more problems that need to be fixed that's what those sharps are doing now here was the revelation for me and learning all of this was if i was to go back and do this and then i'll be done with this because you can try all these at your house and i would strongly recommend trying some of these to learn how to do this but let's say i was going to do f so i have f again i'm lining it up f g a just so it looks good and it keeps me from getting confused which i often can do all right so now again my arrow goes in between three and four and seven and eight well if i look here is that a half step like we want no there's a problem e to f is that a half step like we want yes it is now you could shortcut and go oh okay well just change this to a sharp but you'd be wrong this is why you have to start at the beginning and work your way all the way left to right every time if we look at f to g is that a whole step like we want and the answer is yes g to a is that a whole step like we want and the answer is yes there is nothing wrong with g and there is nothing wrong with a is this the half step like we want no it's not it's a whole step the problem isn't the a the problem is the b we can't change the a because g and a is fine and f and g is fine we can't change anything back here so now for the first time we're seeing that the problem wasn't on this side to push it forward the problem is over here we gotta pull that b backward because a to b is too big but if i change that b to b flat now a to b flat is a half step like we want it to be and then b flat to c is now a whole step because b flat to b is a half step and then b to c is also a half step so if we put those together we get a whole step so my point is now you understand why in the first video that we did we talked about enharmonics how f and g flat have there it's one note with two different names well here's the problem is sometimes when you're dealing with certain keys the only way you can fix the problem isn't by pushing something forward and making it a sharp sometimes you have to fix it by pushing something backward and making it into a flat okay now again if you were just playing guitar and you said a sharp i would know what you're talking about and i wouldn't argue with you although i do have friends that would get all upset and want the word b-flat because it makes more logical sense and but if we're just talking about guitar you'd say what you want but if we're talking about you know theory like we are now when we're talking about the key of f we got to call it b-flat it's what makes sense so i want you to think about when we did the key of g you created a sharp because there was a problem and you needed to push that note further away to make the distance correct in the key of f it's just the opposite there's nothing wrong with that a you can't push that forward because then you'd screw up this and screw up this so let me uh um i know we're going to get this question steve so somebody wants to know why could you not just make it f g a a sharp c e well again like we said in the very beginning you can't have two of the same note you can't have a and a sharp in the same key not only can you not have two of the same note you must have every single note every letter present right every letter needs to be present and we said that at the beginning every letter needs to be present so here we've learned that we can't have a b in the key of f we have to have a b flat you can't have an a and an a sharp you can't have your key be you know f f sharp f double sharp f triple sharp f quadruple sharp you you can't do that it doesn't make any logical sense because music needs to have one of each one of these prime notes it needs to have an a of some or in this case an f of some sort a g of some sort an a of some sort a b of some sort but it does it can't have a b flat and a b or an a and an a sharp it can't so i mean again as much as theory seems crazy and you go what the heck and harmonic why now you're understanding that there's a logic to it like these guys weren't just crazy there really is a logic to how all of this stuff actually works and why a musician like if you were talking to you know a clarinetist or a you know somebody who plays saxophone or something like that you're never really going to hear them say a sharp you're going to hear them say be flat it makes more sense in their head why because they've probably studied music theory they probably know something about keys and things like that where a lot of times when you're you're a guitar player coming from the rock world you don't really think in terms of keys you don't really think in terms of those sorts of things you just visualize on the fretboard and play things that you've memorized in tabs and whatever and i'm not saying that that's wrong i'm just saying that's the that's the world i came from so when all of a sudden i had to make i had to understand if i'm playing with other people that are talking about the key of f i'm the problem if i don't understand what they're saying right and i have two choices either i don't subject myself to that situation or i learn what the heck they're talking about so i can do whatever with them so i can engage with them on a musical level and those are my only two choices so you know if i'm playing in one of my metal bands and we're playing slayer do i care about this no it makes no sense at all but there are other places in my life where this makes a huge difference because there are musicians i play with that talk about the key of f or talk about chord charts or talk about whatever it might be and i need to know what it is that they're talking about now again this is just very basic but it gets us it gets us on the level yeah and i would also say guys you know if you're like i recently had a situation where uh i was at a karaoke place and you know they had a live band there and they were just taking requests and stuff and you know there was a bass player i requested the song and he the bass player didn't know what the notes were he didn't know the song and the guitar player was like oh you know it's just in the key of whatever e minor and it goes like this and the guy just he had it like that even though he didn't necessarily know the bass line he knew which notes are in that key and he faked it as good as you know it sounded great and it happens a lot like if you go out to a club and a band's playing and they go hey get up with us you know play whatever and you might get up and it might be a song that you know but they played in a different key so you're like oh you know okay we're going to do uh brown eye girl it's in the key of g i know that song and they go yeah we're going to play it in b flat because our our singer is female and she's going to be singing this song and you're like b-flat whoa let me get off stage i don't know what you're doing or you just go and again we're not there yet but you think through the logic of the chords that you in the key that you were in and change it which we call transpose into the new key and keep that logic going now again just uh i'm sure we've got some other things to talk about here but what we're going to do tomorrow is we're going to take this idea now and we're going to start making chords out of them so we're not just learning what the scale is but we're actually going to learn now we know the chords or excuse me we know the notes to a major scale let's just say the key of c major we know the notes to the c major scale well if there's seven different notes which there are in any major scale there are seven different chords in the key of c and the key of g and the key of d and all that and that's what we're gonna talk about tomorrow it's gonna be so cool yeah it's awesome guys i really hope that this is uh starting to become clear to you look if it's not that's okay just hang in there that's the most the best advice i can give you is just hang with it most people just give up on this too easily and they're like well theory's not for me or you don't need no theory to play guitar blah blah blah it's just i'm sorry those are just a bunch of excuses just hang in there okay um you will get it if you just persevere this stuff takes time to get your head wrapped around and then it's like riding a bike once you get it you just it is like steve said this was burned in his brain that half step thing that his professors showed him there and there's and also if if you're like i sort of get it but not 100 there's other ways to learn the same information that he's given you here there's other approaches to learning this whole half step formula that may work better for you and that's okay of course is the way that this is but what we're trying to do is get give you the most practical application of how to take this stock stuff and put it on your fretboard and actually be able to use it yes and the the one thing i'll say to that too is is that when we're younger you know we go to school we learn to write things down we learn to write things down constantly and when we get older we kind of assume that it's just supposed to enter us via osmosis and it's done like i watched the video and now i should know it all right and that's so not true like with this kind of stuff there's nothing wrong with getting out a pencil and a piece of paper and practicing it because if it doesn't make sense here it's not going to make sense there it's not that you can't learn how to play a major scale on the guitar you might already know how to do that the difference is like i said before i've encountered many people that know how to play lots of things on the guitar and they have no idea why they even know it it's just somebody said you should learn how to play the g major scale on the guitar so they so it becomes an exercise maybe like a finger exercise right something but there's no logic behind what they're doing they have no idea why it is that they're learning what they're learning they're just told to learn it right if you learn why you're doing it and how it works and then turn around and apply it on the guitar it's twofold because now you understand how to play it but you understand why you're learning it in the first place right guys if you're if i want to thank you for being here all of you um if you're just not joining us i'm sorry we're about to wrap it up here but i want to let you know a couple of things one this is the music theory workshop series it's going to be going on for several days um hopefully that you will join us again please subscribe to the channel turn on notifications so you can get the notif notification of when the next one goes live we will all of these will be saved to the youtube channel you can go back and watch them we will put them in a playlist for you where you can just go through and watch them at your leisure um it would be helpful to to go back um and and take a look at those into you know from the first one to the second one and then tomorrow we're gonna do part three um but don't worry if you're not getting it it will be here for you in perpetuity so you can go back and watch it as much as you want um if you've enjoyed this if you're like i think i'm starting to get it and i want to go from the ground all the way up you can check out steve's master class which is available at guitarzoom.com he has a music theory class that goes through this entire thing which when we first released it it was uh 12 weeks i think it was steve it was yeah right and now when you um when you enroll in the master class you get all 12 weeks immediately and it's all laid out for you from step one to step whatever and uh if you're like okay i already know my key signatures i just need to understand what modes are you could jump to that or if you know whatever your wherever you are in your journey that master class is like it's amazing it's a great great work that i know you're proud of steve and people everybody that enrolls in that masterclass absolutely loves it so um it may fill in a lot of gaps for you so you can check that out at guitarzoom.com if you want um if you find that helpful and please join us again for another uh live session thank you for your comments we'll check those out and hopefully we can incorporate some of that into the next one and help people even more if you enjoy this please share it like it comment uh and subscribe and turn on those notifications so you don't miss the next one coming up thanks again for being here all of you i really appreciate it you guys just don't know what you mean to steve and i it's uh it's a great blessing and privilege to be here with with you and and hopefully help you help you anything else to add steve no i think that's enough for now and we'll continue on tomorrow so this is really good stuff man stuff i wish i knew from the beginning no kidding so do i so all right guys thanks again see you soon take care stay positive

Channel: Steve Stine Guitar Lessons

Views: 44,098

Keywords: music theory, steve stine, guitarzoom, music theory workshop, notes on the fretboard, chord theory, scale theory, chords and scales, guitar scales, guitar chords, circle of fifths, find the right chord, songwriting, which chord comes next, theory lessons, music theory lessons, music theory for life, masterclass, memorize notes, memorize scales, easy chords, easy scales, scale pattern, guitar solo, play a solo on guitar, memorize chords, instantly know all chords in all keys

Id: uX1nKRffyHM

Length: 54min 59sec (3299 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020