Anybody used this book?

[TelZilla]

Music Theory For Guitarists: Everything You Ever Wnated to know but Were afraid to ask?



Would you recommend it?

I just want to learn some theory so I can better understand other instructional books talking about scale degrees (flatted 5th, etc.).

[Tele Fan]

If you go for it, let me know if it's any good. Sorry I'm not any help.

[Brent Hutto]

Is that the one by Tom Kolb? I have it and it's the most usable of the guitar-based theory books I've seen. BTW, I also have a college-undergrad level theory textbook but would probably never work my way through that whole thing.

The ear training exercises in the Kolb book are useful, especially the ones that have you playing along and matching the tones you hear with notes on your guitar. At the point I'm at right now he really goes into high-speed mode and covers "Chord Construction" with a zillion chords and voicing in a few pages. For instance, on pages 40-47 he covers "Major and Minor Chords", "Suspended Chords, Power Chords and 'Add' Chords", "Sixth Chords and Six/Nine Chords", "Seventh Chords", "Diminished Seventh, Dominant Seventh SUS4 and Minor(Maj7) Chords", "Extended Chords", "Altered Chords", "Slash Chords" and "Polychords" with copious examples of each in notation and fretboard grids.

The idea is you'll familiarize several voicings each of, for example, a Cmaj13 chord. But unless you just play through each chord a couple times and move on, you'll be working on those eight pages every day for a weeks with no particular explanatory text. Just a quick paragraph about each type and then the examples. Kind of leaves you up in the air with no context...and no ear training examples either.

Anyway, I'm thinking about skipping over that section after just a couple hours work the sooner to get on to stuff like "Chapter 9: Determining Key Centers". Overall it's pretty well pitched to be detailed, with plenty of self-graded quizzes and from an applied perspective. A few glossed-over patches but that's par for the course with this kind of book I think.

[jazztele]

well, if you want to understand scale degrees, you don't really need a book. see if this helps before you spend your money.

in western music, there are 12 notes. we can call this the chromatic scale, but really, it isn't a scale, it's every note available to you on your guitar. I'll start with E, since that's the lowest note on your instrument in standard tuning, but you can start anywhere.

E F F# G G# A Bb B C C# D Eb (and then it would start over again, at E)

not so bad, right? ou knew that. I'll throw in here that F# can be called Gb, G# is Ab, C# is Db and Eb can be D#. same note, different name. we can get into why later, not that important yet.

okay, so now, EVERYTHING we talk about is going to relate back to the major scale. there's a pattern that the major scale follows: start on a note--whatever one you want. I'll pick C, since there's none of those pesky sharps and flats in the key of C

the distance between the notes in the major scale is either a whole step (2 frets or W) or a half step (1 fret, or H) the pattern for the major scale is WWHWWWH. huh?

start on C. up a W (whole step) to D. Up another W to E. up a H to F...see what I'm doing right? you probably know this already too.

so you'll end up with C D E F G A B (and back to C) for your major scale.

okay, now each of these notes has a number, or a scale degree. We started with C, because we wanted the C major scale. so here's the scale degrees for C major

1:C
2:D
3:E
4:F
5:G
6:A
7:B

now when we talk about altering or changing a scale degree, we talk in terms of half steps, or one notch up or down on the chromatic "scale." here's the C major scale, in red, inside the chromatic "scale"

C C# D Eb E F F# G G# A Bb B and again, C

so this shows you, in black, all the notes out there that are not part of your C major scale...so lets say somebody asked you, what's the "flat fifth" of C?

go to your fifth scale note, G. flat means "lower," so move down one notch on that chromatic scale. F# is the flat fifth of C. not too bad, right?

let's say somebody threw this at you: The blues scale is 1, b3, 4, b5, 5, b7.

what would a C blues scale be? If you can do that, you're well on your way.

I say make a chart (or search for Larry's excellent "here are the major scales thread"--but i say do it yourself) of all 12 major scales. number the scale degrees. keep it on hand and test yourself.

the only other thing (well, not the only, but for now) i can see being tricky is when folks throw 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths at ya. just keep numbering your major scale...

so, you'll find the 9th is the same note as the 2nd, an 11th is a 4th, and a 13th is a sixth--all up one octave from your starting note.

try this stuff out. hopefully, i saved you a few bucks to start.

[tele-martini]

I bought this book last winter. My goal was to read each chapter and complete all questions at the end of each chapter. I made it about 3/4's of the way thru missing 2 or 3 questions. Kinda lost interest after that so I haven't touched it since.
It's a good book and covers all the fundamentals of music theory as it applies to the guitar. It's by no means a book that needs to be read cover to cover like my approach. Each chapter covers a different area of study. I think it will be a good reference book in the future. Presented in a straight forward manner. A lot of it was review for me but much needed just the same. All in all not a bad book to learn from and a handy reference for future use.
Hope this helps,
Gene