There’s a tiny gift for your thoughts.
Give Feedback“Overflowing with the intimacy of small discoveries.”
- Yohannes, Grand Canyon Dreams, Headspace
You now know more than you currently understand. But you may be wondering, “How do I actually use this info to play guitar better?”
A fair question.
Because of what you learned, you are free to embark on a self directed exploration of music through your guitar.
These lessons not only laid a solid foundation for launching to higher heights, but it also cleared the path. There are tomes of scales you no longer need to work through to fluidly make your way around the guitar.
Likewise there are many wild guesses for why rule breaking music can sound so good. But you know better.
Let’s go over the main tools you’ve been equipped with:
Better Chunking
Shape Shifting
Tension and Release
Lessons 3 & 4
In beginner guitar you were told to memorize the traditional open chords and scales that span across all six strings. While this is a reasonable place to start, it’s an example of bad chunking.
In cognitive psychology, chunking is a process by which small individual pieces of a set of information are bound together to create a meaningful whole later on in memory. The chunks, by which the information is grouped, are meant to improve short-term retention of the material, thus bypassing the limited capacity of working memory and allowing the working memory to be more efficient.
chunking wiki
Better chunking for chords and scales are the triad and 1-oct scale, because this smaller size can be discovered as a common shape and dragged around the guitar to derive the larger chords and scales.
What you chunk matters. Pick what you internalize wisely.
Lessons 1 & 4
Common shapes are great to memorize and made fully useful when you understand the transformations the guitar makes on those shapes.
Cognitively this is the path of least resistance to know every single note on the guitar:
Spend the time to internalize two 1-oct scales.
Practice how the shape transforms on and off the second string.
Chain these two scales together, shifting shapes as needed.
Lessons 2 & 5
Admittedly peculiar, we bundled notes together into two four note chords to represent Tonic (Ⅰ⁶) and Dominant (ⅱ°⁷). By combining these collections of notes you can achieve any level of tension you desire.
By cutting directly to the intended goal—manipulation of tension and release—we simplified music theory. The traditional path requires years of experience synthesizing extensive scales, their derived chords, and their application in songs—a process that often spans a decade.
By understanding the framework for assigning Tonic, Dominant, and Discordant roles to each note within a musical context, you can make sense of music that others intuit only through years of immersion.
I’m confident you can open any guitar video, start an intermediate or advanced lesson, and find your way through. You may not fully realize it yet, but you’ve already encountered every serious concept in music, even if only briefly.
If a complex idea feels daunting at first, don’t worry—return to the foundations you’ve learned here. They provide the clearest, most direct path to understanding ideas that others might explain in a more convoluted way.
Pick a direction and go!
Before you embark, please share your feedback.
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