Can anyone recommend a good book about music theory /music theoary for guitar players book?
(which is available online)
Thanks in advance
Music theory, even limited to the stuff with the greatest application to guitarists is so vast, its crazy. On top of that - there are so many ways to teach it.
I know how I’d answer this question, but its your answer that matters most. When you say music theory for guitar, what it is you think you mean? What is it you want to know/learn/understand?
As for recommendations, I think a music theory book in the traditional sense is a good cure for insomnia. Instead…take a look at stuff like this:
justinguitar.com (Justin Sandercoe has put together an incredibly comprehensive guitar learning website.) A lot of its free - including levels 1 and 2 for Practical Music Theory.
Marty with Marty Music is another good one to look at:
Michael Pillitiere developed a method for understanding the Major and Minor scales - an all of the modes, using a handful of dead-simple patterns.
This is a cheat-sheet and ignores note names and relationships (because that’s not the point of it - one thing at a time). This is a powerful visualization tool:
1 Like
This is what I had as a text book in a music theory course in college. As for learning via guitar, the reason the vast majority of classes in music theory use piano as the teaching instrument is because it’s laid out linearly and there aren’t the myriad of possibilities and repeats that a guitar fretboard offers but anything learned can be transferred over. I would start with the basics as they are the building blocks of all more advanced music theory. For example chord theory. Learn what makes chords (M,m,dim,aug,sus, etc) and then figure out what notes in the guitar chord shapes are the ones that need to be altered to change a voicing.
When I started teaching my self pedal steel the foundations from this went a long way to flattening the difficulty curve of the instrument since unlike the linearity of a piano the pedal steel is like a Mobius strip.
