Three string guitar

Hi again. All is well on Tamborine Mountain. I continue to slave over a hot computer, to play and create my mini movie lessons. I continue to get in trouble on guitar forums where my unorthodox views are picked apart and critiqued -- which I love -- and I continue to play live with a few different line ups.

One of the lessons that took me a long time to learn when I started playing the guitar was to stop seeing it as a six string instrument. For years I was under the silly impression that all those chord diagrams showing bar chords required all strings had to be played, that there were six notes in any chord and that unless you played them all, you weren't doing it right.

I guess it was when I discovered that chords consisted of three notes -- simple chords I'm talking about here -- that I started to change my way of thinking. Those notes are of course the 1 3 5 of the scale, and they are all that's need to qualify as a chord. What a breakthrough that was. I could now start to zero in on the music in a more compact manner. I started thinking in string sets.

In other words: 123 - 234 - 345 - 456. One note per string.

Since music can be boiled down to a chord, and since a chord at its most basic is a three note triad, then an easy way to break it all down on the fretboard is to think small too and look at three strings at a time. I quickly discovered that the guitar was tuned in such a way as to easily accommodate these three-note chords, that the required notes clustered themselves into shapes that are convenient to finger and memorize. The compact size also makes it much easier to label the notes within, which is essential knowledge if you ever want to get serious about playing, and I don't mean label as in C# or B, I mean label as in root, third, fifth. It's that information that comes in handy when you're actually playing, not the name of the note.

Thinking in string sets, it didn't take long before I started noticing some interesting things, such as:

The identical make up interval-wise of major seventh chords and minor chords. How did I discover that? Just by looking at the shape. Play a DMAJ7 on the treble string set xxx222 and then look at the treble notes of an F#minor chord: 222. Same thing. An F#minor chord is the III chord of D.

The identical make up interval-wise of major chords and minor7ths. Again, just by looking at the shape on the string set. Look at the treble notes of a D chord xxx232 and the treble notes of a Bminor7th chord (at the 2nd fret). 232. Same thing. Bminor is the VI chord of D.

The more you look into these shapes that the 1 3 5's of the scale imposes on the fretboard, the more the context of the key becomes apparent, the more the structure of the key makes sense.

How is any of this useful? Well, for example, if I'm improvising over a major seventh chord -- lets say Amaj7, keeping in mind that Maj7 chords equate with their III chord, that I can switch from thinking Amaj7 to thinking C#m and continue my improvisation. The difference in approach to improvising over C# is a very neat way to make your playing interesting. Same goes for the I chord. Lets say we're in C. When your improvisations start sounding boring, switch your thinking so that you're playing over the VI chord, Am. You can equate the IV and II chords in this way also, in D we're talking the G and Em.

The next step in this process of breaking things down is to look into more complex chords using the same string set concept, only this time four at a time. So 1234 2345 3456.

The guitar, designed and tuned the way it is, must be in the top ten most difficult man made contraptions to decipher. The kink in the tuning, the asymmetric nature of the major scale -- the Mother of all Music -- The multiple positions for any given chunk of music, make decoding the layout a daunting task. Breaking music down into smaller more manageable chunks, such as triads, and projecting them onto string sets is one way to approach it. The devil is in the detail as they say, and breaking things down to their smallest configuration, studying them, and then reassembling them all is the way I dealt with it. Over the four decades and a bit that I've been playing, I've been able to build up a mental picture of the entire fretboard by experimenting with these manageable chunks.

If you're interested in finding out more about this way of perceiving music and the guitar, drop into my site http://planetalk.thatllteachyou.com where I sell my book PlaneTalk -- The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book which is an exposition comic-strip style of a simple visualization trick I taught myself years ago to keep track of it all, a master template against which everything can be measured, tracked and de-coded. You can also take advantage of the many free lessons there.

You will also find a couple of paid lessons there, very reasonably priced, that consist of a downloadable zipped folder containing a Quicktime movie, exact tablature and midi files of some finger style guitar. The Eagles' Desperado is the feature lesson. It's pretty complex, but if you like a challenge, this is one for you. Check it out at http://planetalk.thatllteachyou.com/desp.shtml

All the best for this week, keep on twangin'

Kirk
http://www.guitarforbeginners.com

http://www.bottleneckguitar.com

http://planetalk.thatllteachyou.com

http://www.mp3.com/kirklorange

http://www.kirklorange.com