Guitar Reviews

    modes (sounds scary, eh?) Not really. Music modes explained   Modes in music have been around for a long time, they are nothing new. They were formalized in the 1600’s and are used in all types of music and used by a wide variety of musical instruments. Should I learn modes? Learning modes allows you to colour any tune you are playing, or improvising, with feeling. It also allows the sound of the song to focus on a differing tonal centre. If your playing is beginning to sound boring and you feel you are stuck in a rut, this could another reason to study modes. Modes can be seen as scales within a parent scale. Many people use mode and scale to mean the same thing, however, this is not strictly true. A mode can be seen as a scale of it’s parent scale, derived from a different point in the parent scale. All modes are scales but not all scales are modes. The Blues Scale for example is not a mode. From the ...

  Scales and Intervals -Why Bother If you understand the Major Scale, it is the basis of all other scales and chords. An understanding of the Major Scale makes it easier to build scales, chords, understand keys, and how they work, understanding songs and writing your own songs. Music scales This is an ordered sequence of notes that may be played ascending or descending. The pitch will correspondingly increase or decrease. This ordered sequence will continue in the order given with the presented intervals. An interval is the difference in pitch (sound) between one note and another. On a guitar the interval is measured by frets, or semitones (one fret = one semitone or half tone, two frets = whole tone). Shown below is a Major scale played on one string of the guitar. To play a major scale on guitar the sequence of intervals would be W W H W W W H This may be easier to see on a piano keyboard If you look at the C major scale, and count up using the pattern, you’ll see that it f...