Theory

I started to learn a bit guitar/music theory. I don't know what do you think of it all, but it's seems harder then chess theory :) Sometimes I feel i understand it (basicly I understood how to bulid up a minor, a major and a 7th chord), and suddenly I run into this kind of sentences: the dissonant minor fifth interval between the 7th note and the 4th note in a scale will be resolved by going to the tonika (1st note). The 7th and 4th notes of the scale are the 5th and the 7th notes in the dominant 7th chord.

In this moments I sit confused without a chance to understand and just play guitar for my peasure

Well, it's pretty easy with the right background. Just like chess, you can kind of 'stack' knowledge. You don't forget everything you learn (in fact, you forget very little of what you learn if you study regularly) so things that used to seem hard begin to seem easy and you can tackle more difficult stuff.

I'm not sure if you copied it wrong, or if the person just doesn't know what they are talking about, but there are a few things wrong with your sample sentence. First of all, there is no such thing as a 'minor fifth.' Also, the 7th and 4th notes of a scale are the 3rd and 7th of that scale's dominant 7 chord.

Basically, what they are trying to say is that one of the most commonly used ways to create tension and resolution between chords is to resolve the dissonant sounding tritone (or augmented fourth or diminished fifth) in a leading tone chord or dominant seven chord to the very consonant sounding major third interval in the tonic chord.

The 'dominant' chord is the chord built on top of the fifth tone in the key's scale. So, say we are in the key of C major. The dominant chord will be G major. This will consist of the notes G, B, and D. The dominant seven chord will include the added seventh on top which, in this case, would be F. All this, you probably already know.

So, when you play a G7 chord and then a C chord, it sounds good, right? It sounds like it resolves. All this sentence is saying is that the reason for this is the resolution of the dissonant sounding tritone in the G7 chord (B and F) to the consonant sounding major third in the C chord (C and E).

If you have any questions about anything, you can always ask me!

~TO

P.S. Great picture

Thanks TonightOnly! - at least it has sense - somebody understads it, if you read it with a knowledge like mine it nothing just blahblah :) so I've just bought a book about basic music theory - I'm gonna learn hard. The sentece comes from Olav Torvund's bluesguitar site http://www.torvund.net/guitar/.

That's a great site anyway :) with lots of lessons, licks and theory.

Do you still not understand it after reading my post? Do you have any questions?

Thanks for the link to the cool site.

Its because my poor english knowlege i think

Im telling what I learned yesterday TO plese correct me if Im wrong

so ther are the scales which has notes numbered to 1-7 but there are more notes the half notes

the intervals between notes - so this is the part i don't understand soforth - do we count the half notes or not into this? e.g a third contains 3 half notes or 3 normal notes?

hehe yesterday I learned that the ancient musicans couldn't build chords, because they found thirds disharmonic

Ha ha, okay I could see that. I imagine it would be pretty hard having something like this explained to me in Hungarian or something.

Scales are generally 7 notes that fit into an octave. So the C major scale would be C and then six more notes (D E F G A B) and then another C. However, all the steps are not whole steps. In a major scale, the pattern is

1 - 1 - 1/2 - 1 - 1 - 1 - 1/2

So if we are talking about a major sixth interval it is just the distance between the first note and sixth note of any major scale. This is why it is called a 'major' sixth. Since all major scales have the same pattern of half steps and whole steps, the distance between the first and sixth note will be the same for every major scale, and this 'distance' is exactly what defines a major sixth interval. So, a major sixth interval is definitely larger than six half steps, but it is not quite as big as six whole steps.

When you build a major chord, you use the root, 3rd, and 5th. This just means that you use the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of the corresponding major scale. So for a G major chord, you would use G, B, and D. This is just because they are the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of the G major scale, as you can see:

G A B C D E F# G

The D happens to be 7 half steps or 3 1/2 whole steps away from the G, but this is unimportant when learning how to build chords.

It will be good to eventually know how many half steps and whole steps there are in intervals, but for now, you should think in terms of the notes of a scale.

Wow I see - it is easier than i thought

you know the language makes a lot of confusion - like we say

for major: dur

for minor: moll

 we don't say third sixth and so on but use latin words like prim, secund, terc, quart, quint so on :)

I realized the chord theory which is qiet easy now

a major (dur) chord contains a major (4seminote interval) and a minor third (3seminote interval)

a minor (moll) the same but upside down minor-major

a major 7th major-minor-major

a minor 7th minor-major-minor

is is right TO?

Wow, that is exactly right. I had not thought of it that way before. But like everything in music, there are so many ways to look at things. I know my dur and moll scales so well that I always thought of it as notes in a scale, but you can think of it as stacking thirds.

In case you were interested...

The reason they are inverted (major-minor/minor-major) is because fifths are what we call 'perfect.' I was talking about how a 'major third' interval was called this because it is the distance between the first and third note of a major scale. Likewise a 'minor third' is the distance between the first and third note of any minor scale. Well, the distance between the first and fifth notes for both minor and major keys is the same. So, in both major and minor scales, it is a 'perfect fifth' between the first and fifth notes. So if the first third of a major chord is major and the second third is minor, then a minor chord would have to be the exact inverse because they both have to fit into the same 'space' of a perfect fifth.

I recommend to everybody to learn some theory - thats really useful. I learned a lot lately and i found a great guitar book too - mainly for beginners, but not just for beginners - it is the Guitar for dummies the 2nd edition. It contains a lot half-expert stuff too. It is the second best gutar book I ve encountered. The best is in Hungarian the Muszty-Dobai.

I think this site is an amazing free places to learn theory at: http://www.zentao.com/guitar/theory/

Check it out if you want to learn some theory. I know it says "music theory for experienced players" but if you start from the first lesson it's just basic stuff and then you will learn your way to the last lesson. It covers the most important things in music theory that a guitar player needs.

Thanks gobbel, that's a great site

I wonder how this picture (above) works. It's like a tattoo. When I dechipered this perhaps i gonna make it on my forearm, and then never can forget  

That's interesting, what Bardamu said about using Latin for scale tones. I went to Spain recently and instead of saying c-d-e-f-g-a-b (letters for tones) they used solfeggio (solfege), like do-re-mi.

I dont' mean to be buming up an ancient threat, but that picture is amazing!  My kid learned a couple of weeks ago about "theoretical minor scales", or building a minor scale on something like a Bx (B double sharp, which we'd call Db or C# most times).  I'm going to print out that picture and show it to her.  The only issue I got with the picture is that where it says C, 0 sharps or 12 flats, the 12 flats would be for the key of "Dbb" (D double flat) (which I guess we'd call a "theoretical key" since we'd just call it C most times).  I like the cumulative nature of the flats/sharps, instead of thinking this many flats/sharps and this many double flats/double sharps, you just count up the flats/sharps total.