Music Theory Basics: Learning the Language

Intermediate · 3 lessons · Eight weeks

What sits behind the sounds: scales, chord construction and harmonic families — the code that every song you love is built from.

The major scale and intervals

The Building Blocks of Music: What Is a Scale?
Two words of vocabulary, one formula seven steps long, and the whole guitar neck stops being random.

What you'll learn
- Understand the half step and the whole step, and know where the two half steps sit among the notes.
- Build a major scale on a single string from the step formula, starting anywhere you like.
- Explain why we pick seven pitches out of twelve.
- Number the degrees of the scale, and understand why musicians talk in numbers.
- Know that a natural minor scale shares its notes with the major scale beside it.

Building chords

The Musical Sandwich: How a Chord Is Built
A chord is three notes, not six fingers. We will see where they come from, which of them decides happy or sad, and what all those letters in the name are telling you.

What you'll learn
- Understand that a basic chord is three notes repeating themselves across the strings.
- Build a triad out of a scale with the rule of skipping a note.
- Recognize that the third is the only difference between major and minor.
- Understand why a power chord is neither major nor minor.
- Read a chord symbol and know what it holds.

Functional harmony

Pop's Secret Recipe: Families of Chords
Why the same four chords come round in hundreds of songs, how to give every chord a number, and why that is what lets you learn a song by ear.

What you'll learn
- Build a chord on each of the seven degrees of the scale, and understand why some of them are minor.
- Explain the three jobs: home, the road, and tension.
- Play a one, four, five progression and recognize the moment it lands back home.
- Play the one, five, six, four progression and recognize it in songs.
- Move a progression between keys using degree numbers.

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