Even though music is something you listen to and hear, I have always looked for ways of picturing it visually, both for my own understanding and as a way to teach. Below is an analogy which may help some of you get a grip on how music connects up.

I have in previous articles stressed how important it is to know your keys. By that, I mean know which chords belong in each family, or key. I guess that's the first analogy right there. I picture a 'key' as being a family of chords which have arisen out of the major scale. Seven notes, the scale, give rise to seven chords, the key. These seven chords are built simply by picking three alternate notes from the seven. Seven starting notes -- seven chords.

OK. That's pretty straight forward.

Now picture this -- and I've used this analogy in a previous article, but only briefly -- imagine the seven chords as being rooms in an apartment, or 'flat' as they say in the UK. Let's say we're in the key of, for simplicity sake, C. It's nice and uncluttered, with no sharps or flats to cloud the issue.

The scale reads C D E F G A B (C)... Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do...

The chords which arise out of that scale are: C, D minor, E minor, F, G, A minor, and B half diminished (and back to C).

Let's say that our C chord, the "One Chord", the main chord, is our living room. Then we could imagine the other major chords, F and G (the Four and Five chords), as being other important rooms. Let's call F and G the bedrooms. Then there are three minor chords. We can say that Am, the relative minor, the Six chord, is the kitchen. That leaves two more minors, the Two and Three chords. Let's call them the study and the laundry. One more, the Seven chord, that half-diminished, we'll call the bathroom. Don't let it scare you. It never realy comes up.

So there it is. Each room (chord) has a specific function. All rooms connect and are laid out in a fixed way.

That's one key. All music is a twelve storey apartment block, twelve floors of identical layout. (Pedants would say there a couple more floors representing C flat and F flat...we all know that Cb is B and Fb is E). The Music Building.

So, each key consists of seven chords, laid out identically. If you know one, you know 'em all. The One chord will always be the living room, the Six chord, always the kitchen etc. etc. Same function.

If some of you are thinking " Seven times twelve! that's 94 chords! How can I remember all those chords!", relax. There aren't that many. A minor, as an example, shows up on three floors -- once as the Six chord of the key of C, once as the Two chord of the key of G, again as the Three chord of the key of F. So it's the kitchen in one, the study in another, the laundry in the next. Same chord, different function.

As confusing as all this sounds when you're starting out, it becomes second nature quite quickly if you apply yourself. It really is essential to know this stuff if you really want to get fluent. I find it comforting to be able to picture music as being confined within this twelve storey apartment block. Especially as all floors are identical. I used to think it was endlessly complicated, but actually it all lives in this one building. All scales, modes, chords... it's all inside that building.

The difficulty really comes from the fact that we have twelve floors and only seven letters to name them by, so we have to add 'sharp' and 'flat' to some to make up the shortfall. But there is nothing different about a sharp or flat. On a piano maybe, they're black, but on a guitar? Just another of the twelve notes.

PlaneTalk, the book I wrote which I subtitled the Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book, is full of similar analogies. As I said at the beginning, it's hard to zero in on a something you can only really hear. It's easier to picture something, to visualize. For those of us who didn't learn notation (the conventional way of putting something you hear in visual form), these analogies might help.

PlaneTalk also reveals the trick to keeping track of all this theory stuff on the fretboard. Read all about it at WWW.LORANGE.KIRK.NET, and order one! I sell them all over the World, takes two weeks at the most to have one airmailed to you. Comes with The Guitar Slide Rule which will make you go "So that's how the guitar works!..." All for the price of a couple of guitar lessons. You'll never have to go back to your teacher again! What a good deal!

Until next time

K i r k

Kirk Lorange
PO Box 186 North Tamborine
Queensland 4272 Australia
Ph/Fax +61 7 55450138
ICQ# 35602250
www.lorange.kirk.net

More of Kirk's articles:
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