Hey Friend,

So I got to thinking about yesterday's email. I was throwing around a lot of ideas with regards to the notes that make up the majority of guitar chord forms. 

Unfortunately, a lot of ideas coming at you fast is not helpful. I know when too many concepts hit me at once, I'm lucky to remember a tenth of the information. So I'm going to step back and really walk you through the concepts of chord construction. Don't worry, by the time I'm done you'll have a solid understanding of what makes a chord a chord.

To refresh, in Rock music, we mostly use major and minor chords, and we like to mix in 7 chords as well. If we're into The Who, U2 or Rush, we like a lot of suspended chords.

To just read that last sentence, it doesn't seem like I said too much, does it?

But there is a lot to learn within the four chord forms I just mentioned. You have fundamental chords to cover the very basic emotions of happy and sad. With those alone you can carve out a career in music, and many rockers have.

Add in the various entry-level flavors of 7 chords (dominant, major and minor) and you're now able to add Blues and Country to your skill set. These chords add another level of expression to your playing. 

Go further to include suspended chords into the toolbox and you've successfully taken your guitar chord playing to new heights.

All these different chords aren't necessarily difficult to play - you just have to learn some new shapes to add them into the repertoire.

The thought that kept popping into my head is I talk about these individual notes like you're already very familiar with them. But you're not - I know that, because I wasn't familiar with them for the longest time.

Believe it or not, I was blissfully unaware of intervals and scale degrees, note and chord numbering, modes and intervals. Truthfully, you don't need to know them either. But I'd like you to be better prepared than I was, so you're gonna get it, whether you like it or not! 

And if that's too much for you, well, there's an unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email. Just sayin'. I don't want to drag anyone kickin' and screamin' to the knowledge pool! Of course, sometimes it's fun being thrown into the pool...

With that out of the way, let's talk some basics. 

There are tons of scales out there in the world, but you only need to learn a handful to become well-versed. The Pentatonic Minor scale is used the most in Rock, and if you know it, you also know the Pentatonic Major scale, but we'll come back to that later.

I want you to learn the grand-daddy of the Pentatonic scale - that's the Major scale.

The major scale is the foundation for all the music we strive to learn. With a total of 12 notes that repeat roughly nine times within the range of frequencies we can actually hear, every other scale in Western music is derived from the major scale. 

Humans can technically hear sound waves with frequencies between 20 Hertz and 20000 Hertz (20 kilohertz), but practically between about 20 Hz and 7.9 KHz. Anything below 20 Hz sounds like a thump rather than a note, and above 7900 Hz is too high pitched for it to register (although your dog will hear it just fine).

Each set of twelve notes is called an octave, and each octave is numbered to let you know where you are in the range. They actually start the octave with the number "0," and the note we start with is a C note at a frequency of 16.35 Hz (called C 0). That's too low for us to hear as a note, so the first note we can actually hear E 0, and the first note to show up on a piano is A 0.

You've probably heard references to "middle C," right? Middle C is in the center of this range, and is usually pointed out as the C note right in the middle of a piano keyboard. Middle C is the beginning of the fourth octave we can hear.

On guitar, we can look at middle C as the fifth string, third fret (although compared to the piano, this is the octave below middle C - don't ask!).

Alright, let's come back to this tomorrow. 

Like I said above, you don't need to know all this stuff about notes and frequencies to start playing your favorite songs. You don't even need to know full chords. You just need an simple way to jump-start your playing. Power chords can do that for you.

You can learn a handful of Easy Power Chords and be playing actual Rock and Blues tunes this afternoon. You can get your hands on Easy Power Chords right here.

Peace~

Dave