Page 1 of 339 Heuristic Musicians Guide to understanding musical composition and improvisation For guitar and keyboard Immediately Applied Music Theory Where most guides and teachers offer you mere maps We offer you an intimate understanding of the terrain From muddling to Mozart? From bumbling to Bach? From zero to hero? In as long as it takes you * *But much faster than you otherwise would have gotten there! Copyright 2018 Markus Heinrich Rehbach and TROONATNOOR All Rights Reserved Page 2 of 339 Contents Where most guides and teachers offer you mere maps ........................... 1 We offer you an intimate understanding of the terrain........................... 1 Contents ................................................................................................... 2 Introduction ............................................................................................. 9 The map is not the terrain ...................................................................... 14 Your personal musical evolution ........................................................... 18 The best place to start learning guitar is with a piano keyboard .................................. 25 What precisely the term ‘Interval’ refers to .......................................... 26 The Chromatic Scale ............................................................................. 30 Scales and Intervals ............................................................................... 35 Minor Scales and Modes ....................................................................... 36 Building EVERY possible chord and scale and mode from the Major Scale 37 Building Major, Minor, and Seventh Chords ........................................ 38 A C ‘shaped’ chord can be a D Major Chord (or any chord for that matter) 40 The power of C ( A G E D) ................................................................... 42 Enter the Fourth (to find the Fifth) ........................................................ 53 The Modes ............................................................................................. 59 Ionian (Major Scale) .............................................................................. 62 Dorian .................................................................................................... 63 Phrygian................................................................................................. 64 Lydian .................................................................................................... 65 Mixolydian ............................................................................................ 66 Aeolian (Natural Minor Scale) .............................................................. 67 Locrian................................................................................................... 68 Jump in the ‘deep’ end to discover you can really swim ...................... 69 Page 3 of 339 Blank fretboard diagrams ...................................................................... 71 Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do Vis a Vis the modes .................................... 73 Harmony and ‘thirds’ ............................................................................ 75 The Stave, and the Bass, Treble, and rhythm Clefs............................... 75 Sharps and Flats..................................................................................... 81 Tuning your Guitar ....................................................................................................... 82 Relative tuning, and Harmonic tuning................................................... 82 Alternate Tunings .................................................................................. 83 Drop Tunings ......................................................................................... 83 Open Chord Tunings ............................................................................. 84 Guitar technique: motor skills you need to master to take your guitar playing to the next levels ..................................................................................................................... 86 Start forming ‘Generative habits’ ‘out of the gate’ ............................... 86 Tip for budding song writers with zero musical background ................ 87 Begin ‘generative’ ‘creative’ use of scales from day one ..................... 88 Literal hit and miss creativity ................................................................ 88 ‘Staggering’ your scale runs .................................................................. 89 Playing notes is only half the battle: the other half is muting all the open strings ....... 90 A ‘clean’ distorted sound?..................................................................... 94 Fretting hand muting ........................................................................... 101 Funk chops: The power of hitting muted strings but voicing only the note you are fretting ................................................................................................. 107 Picking hand muting ............................................................................ 109 ‘Satriani’ style picking finger Vs picking hand string muting technique113 String muting Vis a Vis ‘palm muting’ ............................................... 113 Fret wrap? ............................................................................................ 114 Building manual dexterity, co-ordination, finger strength, and finger flexibility ...... 116 Pick Gauges and technique.................................................................. 116 Alternate picking ................................................................................. 117 Page 4 of 339 Chromatic Scale ‘Spider fingers’ exercise with 1,2,3,4 fingering ...... 117 Chromatic Scale ‘Spider fingers’ exercise with 4,3,2,1 fingering ...... 119 Then introduce more complex, challenging fingering patterns ........... 120 Now add finger Walk-ups when ‘descending’ the chromatic Scale.... 121 Tremolo picking .................................................................................. 122 Pedal Sequences .................................................................................. 122 Double Stops ....................................................................................... 122 Natural Harmonics............................................................................... 122 Pinch harmonics (artificial harmonics) ............................................... 123 Hammer Ons and Hammer Offs .......................................................... 124 Trills .................................................................................................... 124 Finger Tapping (and Pulling) .............................................................. 124 Tap Harmonics .................................................................................... 125 Flat Fifth blues note ............................................................................. 125 Flat 9th (2nd) note to extend a Pentatonic ............................................. 125 Fretting finger Slides ........................................................................... 126 Pick Slides ........................................................................................... 126 String Bends ........................................................................................ 126 Plucking strings ................................................................................... 127 Raking.................................................................................................. 127 Smooth Precision bends ...................................................................... 127 That ‘Pink Floyd’ sound: adding ‘a hundred tiny inflections’ ............ 128 First finger b3 to 3 bends ..................................................................... 128 Smooth Precision Vibrato.................................................................... 128 Arpeggios: Playing the 1-3-5-7-b3 and b7 notes of scales .................. 129 Key to it all is understanding musical intervals .......................................................... 131 Intervals ............................................................................................... 131 Why we ‘scale’ an octave in 12 steps.................................................. 133 Page 5 of 339 A 440 Hz Concert Pitch as an example to explain what an ‘Octave’ is133 ‘Scaling’ an octave with various ‘intervals’ between each ‘rung’ on ladder 134 The Chromatic Scale ........................................................................... 136 Why there are 12 semi-tones in an Octave........................................... 139 The Major Scale and its 8 stepped Celta-delt ...................................... 141 Why we conform to Church standards ................................................ 146 Taking any stringed instrument can provide a more intuitive, non-mathematical way to comprehend why we divide an octave into 12 notes, and even why fret distances get shorter from nut to bridge .............................................................. 152 Just intonation and 12 tone equal temperament .................................. 154 ‘Scaling’ the ‘rungs’ of the musical ladder between Octaves ............. 158 Changing Keys .................................................................................... 159 Compatible Keys and Chords ....................................................................................