10 posts were split to a new topic: Borrowing licks and ideas without stealing
Any self-teaching recommendations for music theory? I think that would be relevant for this section. I can recommend the ‘fretjam’ youtube channel.
I think there already is a theory section
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I love the idea!
Some time ago i asked for some directions on the forum because i stumbled upon a plateau, and I started to feel burnt out.
Focusing on technique too much kind of blinded me to the fact that, on guitar, knowledge really IS power.
So now i´m cutting back on playing the same lick over and over until it´s up to speed, and I invest that time to follow a music theory/ songwriting course that I bought from a guy I follow on youtube. Taking it slow and step by step, i noticed that the mystery of how my fretboard works is slowly vanishing. It´s not like, oh, now i know about X, now i can shred, no…theory has this unveiling effect on me and it has nothing to do with technique, my view just gets clearer over time and now, i´m starting to like it.
Anything you guys would add about theory I would consider a very nice bonus in addition to what i´m learning in my main course. I will definitely try and be a part of this one way or the other.
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I mean we only have 4 fingers so the big pattern list isn’t that big.
1234
4321
123
321
12
13
14
312321
1323
and of course you can play any of those fingers more than once but the basic shape doesnt really change.
we could grow it a bit bigger by adding in right hand tapping but you get what i mean.
It’s funny cause when I started back up playing I had this thought I should try to arrange a routine that would focus on certain techniques for only a limited time, and maybe focus only on certain kinds of technique every few days. Like one day do legato, the other picking, tapping, sweeping, chords, and just keep it to around under an hour then move on to the bigger picture. Either learning the greats phrasing, learning how progressions work, and working on changes. But guess I failed the idiot test. 
This seems like a great idea!
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I like this guy
I was messing with Bach style modulations a lot a few months ago
One example in this composition at about 1:40
I had been watching this video which went into a couple methods of cycling through keys back to the original key which I found interesting and borrowed the overall pattern for the above song
That led me to the music theory YouTube channel
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Great addition, tommo!
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Nice one! I’d been looking for some good music theory resources. Just subscribed to that channel.
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Which one? Tomasso’s? Tomasso is good because he approaches it from a guitarists perspective, the only thing that I would caution a bit is that it is still taught largely from the common practice perspective so as usual it really depends on what you are trying to apply the knowledge to.
I also think he has a free ebook too iirc.
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This is a good point! Pop music (so often snobbed by jazz/rock/classical musicians) actually did a great deal to challenge the traditional “rules” of harmony.
“Simple chord loops” used in pop are a very interesting topic, here’s a video about it from a channel I like:
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Another good thing to research in the realm of that, which may get you off the ground faster is chord substitutions/borrowed chords. They are used so frequently, it is a must for writing more interesting progressions in any style.
This seems like an interesting alternative approach, I got the book but it’s on my massive pile of unread books
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This is so cool!
I took all the common-practice theory courses in college (ages ago) but these days I’m really into some simple pop songs. This is a really cool way to think about them.
To this I’d add that pop music being harmonically “simple” is a pretty new phenomena. Go back to the Beatles, and you can absolutely tell that those guys cut their teeth playing vocal jazz standards.
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I learnt a lot of theory back in college. It was all jazz based. That was many years ago now and I need a serious brush up.
I’m mostly interested in learning about key modulation techniques, the many different chord substitutions, borrowed chords, secondary dominants etc etc. I want to learn it more for my songwriting. I tend to write pretty simple stuff, but I’d like to study more and experiment with different concepts.
The downside of this is, it’s surprisingly hard to find exactly what you want with so much out there these days…
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I found this helpful because I was looking to emulate classical/baroque composers when I found the channel. There’s also the Berklee method books which I have some old copies of, if you know of some good YouTube channels that use the Berklee method that would be interesting - I prefer to have some pre-recorded examples and visuals
I had a feeling that’s what you were really after. I think in that case Narrowing your scope and doing searches for what you are going to find immediately useful is the way to go. There are a lot of YouTube vids and other resources on modal interchange/mode mixture, parallel borrowed chords etc. if you just narrow it to that one thing, I think that will get you started on the path you want to go on in terms of writing interesting progressions.
The other thing too, dont sell the normal stuff short either. You can have fairly vanilla chord progressions that sound impressive just by how you layer them.
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I’m not sure of ones that use that specific approach, but to be honest, the only real thing I recall about Berklee’s approach was terminology. I have my old textbooks from there that I’ll dig out if you want. They get pretty ridiculous the further up you go because the harmony is so far away from functional harmony it’s really left to interpretation.
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Thanks for the tip. I think that’s the way I’ll go. I had been searching for courses and books etc, but seems like a smarter idea to look for specific videos.