Why Guitar Beginners Should Consider Learning Music Theory

For a lot of guitar beginners, it’s easy to jump right into the instrument by memorizing chord shapes, pentatonic boxes, and learning easy songs via tabs. Others may start freestyling and learning what feels and sounds right on the way.

But did you know guitarists are often looked down on and even hated on by other musicians. While everyone else is forced to learn music theory, how to read sheet music, and how to keep time, a lot of guitarists neglect all that and do their own thing. These guitarists then discourage others from learning it since they didn’t need it, thus creating a lot of ignorance and righteousness within the community.

I’ve been told more than once to just, ‘have fun’, ‘play what sounds good’, and ‘don’t think too hard about it’. I don’t really have a choice though since the music I want to play (Japanese rock) doesn’t usually follow western norms, and who knows how long it would have taken me to figure out why if it wasn’t for a couple theory teachers online.

All in all, this can leave a lot of beginners confused. They are already at a huge disadvantage starting years or even decades after more advanced guitarists, and now others are telling them not to learn theory even though it could speed up their learning immensely.

So I’m here to encourage you to at least learn some basic theory, because it has a lot more benefits than you think!

More Creativity & Freedom

When you refuse to learn theory, the majority of what you will or could learn will be through listening to others and repeating what they’re doing, with just a few changes here and there to make it sound more original.

Same with chords. When it comes to chord progressions (the order that chords are placed), you will also feel limited, sticking to progressions you have played before while learning songs or maybe combining progressions from other songs. This is part of the reason why a lot of pop and rock songs tend to have repetitive 3 or 4 chord progressions that have been used thousands of times before.

If that’s all you want to do, then power to you. In the end, these songs are popular because they are good and they are loved by the public. BUT if you want to create more interesting licks, progressions and songs, especially if you are interested in jazz, indie, neosoul, and other complex genres, along with fingerstyle, learning theory is going to help you tremendously.

The reason why the pentatonic scale is used so often is because it only contains the safest notes of a basic progression, but once you start using 7th and diminished chords, or you want to create more melodic solos with more notes, it’s going to be very difficult understanding when to use what, and why some things don’t work or sound good.

I have heard many guitarists say ‘theory will infringe on their creativity and freedom’ but that makes no sense to me. When has learning something ever stopped someone from doing more? If you are only capable of using the pentatonic scale confidently, how does that give you true musical freedom?

Scale charts below are from: http://danbecker.info/guitars/charts.html

The more you know and understand a language, the easier you can convey what you really want to say. The more art techniques you know, the cooler and more beautiful things you can create. An architect needs to understand how structures work to create cool and unique buildings that can actually stand it’s ground. The more books you read, the better writer you become.

So why waste months or years trying to figure out something you could easily look up and learn in a 10 minute video? Why spend a year figuring out what major, minor and diminished really mean and sound like, when it’s a quick Google search way?

Get over these basic hurdles sooner by learning some basic theory, and then you can create and do more with it faster!

You’ll Remember More EASILY

Some may think music is arbitrary and random and magical, but just like with art and languages, there is a science behind it, and that is what theory is. It’s making sense of what we hear and do so others can apply it too without it being a complex puzzle.

100+ chords sounds like a big feat for most beginners, especially when it takes so long just to remember and build the muscle memory for just the 8 most basic open chords. But the great thing about guitar is that there’s a lot of patterns, and a lot of things are repeated.

If you understand theory, and you know that a major chord is just the 1st, 3rd, and 5th note of that scale, not only will you be able to remember chords easier, you can create some, like for triads. At times, if you’re playing a chord from memory and it doesn’t sound right, you can do the math and figure out which note is on the wrong fret.

I get that people think power chords are basic and simple, and they are don’t get me wrong, but I like to look at them as shortened barre chords. For 6th and 5th string barre chords, the top 3 string notes contain the main note, the 5th which is the safest note in a chord, and the 1st again, which is the octave. This is why you can do a 2 string or 3 string power chord and it won’t make much difference.

What makes a chord major or minor is the 3rd. If it’s a major 3rd, it’s major chord. If it’s a minor or flattened third, it’s a minor chord. The 3rd in these barre chords shows up on the 3rd string. The last two strings just repeat 1 and 5 again. So if we erase all of those, we are left with a power chord that just has 1 and 5, and can replace a major or minor chord. It will sound good regardless (with distortion anyways).

If you are aware of the key of the song or the start note, you can easily change a power chord song that would only sound good on an electric guitar with distortion into a full chord song with barres that would sound good on an acoustic. The 1, 4, and 5 chord are major, and the 2, 3, and 6 chord are minor.

This may sound complicated, but it’s such a simple concept, trust me. These are things people could learn in under a month if they wanted to, and they would end up saving more time as it would boost the speed they learn songs and apply chords.

But all in all, things are so much easier to learn and retain when you understand theory. Not everything needs to be spelled out for you or it’s intimidating.

Better Solo Skills

When it comes to lead and improvising, what I commonly hear when watching tutorials is to see what you’re favourites do and copy them. This is a great approach, don’t get me wrong, especially if you are learning to apply bends, slides and hammer ons as you mimic them. However, other’s will notice that you are emmulating another player instead of being original.

Guessing the right notes can be hard if you don’t understand scales, chords and keys. For many guitarists, they’ll just play around, making mistakes, and then choosing notes that sound better by ear, or they stick to a scale that always works like the minor pentatonic scale.

Wouldn’t it be great to jump right in and improvise without prior practice though? You can do that through theory!

If you know what key a song is in, you’ll know what chords could show up, and then you would know what scales would work best for that song in that context. If you know the order of the chords (ie a 1-4-5 progression, commonly seen in blues), you can even adjust your solo to make sure you land on the right note, or a tension note that sounds good but adds another feel to it.

What more, instead of spending months memorizing each scale and it’s 5 boxes….you’ll realize you’re wasting A LOT of time. And I do mean, A LOT.

Not sure if you’ve noticed, but the major and minor scale boxes are exactly the same. EXACTLY the same. They feel different because you are starting on a different note, and thus the way you position your fingers may seem different, but they are the same regardless.

Essentially….all modes and all scales are the same…not in the same key of course. A ‘C major scale’ and a ‘C minor scale’ have different notes. But you can go to the next note, and a ‘C major scale’ will have the same notes as a ‘D Dorian scale’ and an ‘E Phrygian scale’ and so on. Thus you can use the same scale boxes you learned across the neck for the C major scale, and just be aware that the starting or tonic note is different.

Why does this work? Because of scale patterns. For the major/ionian mode, the scale is made using the “W-W-H-W-W-W-H” (W = whole note, H = half note) pattern. To create the D Dorian scale, you will adjust this pattern by starting on the second, thus “W-H-W-W-W-H-W” pattern. I write about modes in detail here.

Not to mention, the beautiful thing about guitar is that, since all notes are equal (instead of piano where sharps and flats are separated), and since scales and chords all follow the same patterns, all you have to do is shift everything up or down to transpose something into another key.

Nothing is a guessing game anymore. You’re not wasting time relearning something because you didn’t realize it’s the same as something else. All this helps you to not only learn things faster, but you’ll know when and how to apply it, even without prior trial and practice. Isn’t that magical?

Better tab reading skills

One reason why guitarists are able to forget about theory is because we have tabs. Other instruments have to learn how to read sheets, whereas guitars have tabs that put the name of the string and number of the fret, allowing them to learn songs without learning notes.

I don’t even blame guitarists for this as it makes sense. A guitar can have the exact same note with the same pitch 3 to 4 times on the fretboard, so if you saw the note ‘C’ in sheet music, how do you know which one to play it on?

Guitar is also one of few instruments that can play chords or that focuses on chords, so chord boxes are necessary to speed up learning and accessibility. Learning to create your own chords as a beginner would take ages otherwise.

However, because a lot of guitarists find tabs and chords easy, they focus more on just learning to play the notes instead of working on actual timing. The majority of lead guitarists tend to focus on riffs and solos (aka the cool stuff), and they are known to have some of the worst rhythm out of all musicians. (I wrote an article about why rhythm is vital here).

Lead guitarists have the freedom to play as quickly or as slow as they like, missing cues, changing things around, and as long as it fits the chord, people won’t really notice. They could make mistakes but just bend or slide to fix it. But because a lot of lead guitarists don’t focus on chords or developing rhythm, they don’t really notice and tend to go off beat, start early, etc.

If you’ve never paid attention to time signatures, either cause tabs don’t have them or because you never noticed, i highly suggest them at least learning that as it would really help you understand a song’s context and timing.

Last week, a guitarist in a group was asking about staff notation. There was a song he wanted to learn, but the notes weren’t adding up for him. He saw the combination of eight and quarter notes, but it wasn’t adding up to 4. This is a common mistake for new musicians, and it’s one reason why learning about theory and time signatures is important.

I answered the question in detail for them as I’m always happy to help someone who is making an effort. I said if you look at the time signature beside the treble clef, it has 6/8, which means there are 6 beats in a bar, and an eight note gets a beat, thus a quarter note gets 2 beats. Not all songs are written in 4/4 time, and not all notes are equal or used the same way in other songs.

When it comes to strumming patterns, if you use Guitar Pro or Songsterr that actually allows you to hear the tabs, these will have the time signature and note values in it, as it’s required for the playback to be accurate. These ‘random lines’ are representative of the notes, like in real sheet music.

In the sheets below, a single line is a quarter note, which makes up 1 beat in 4/4 time. A line with a dot is 1.5 beats. Lines that are connected or have a little dash at the bottom are eighth notes, which is half a beat. If you were playing without the song and only had a metronome or a drum beat, being able to read and know the timing of these songs are vital to playing along with the song at a later date. If you don’t pay attention, you’ll be slow or too fast or play notes at the wrong time.

As for strumming, I’ve noticed a lot of beginners will just play every song with quarter or eight notes and neglect these details, because they don’t really understand it or care to understand it. In a lot of Japanese music, they tend to change the chords on the ‘upbeat’, aka half a beat early. This is a big factor when imitating the feel of the song.

Below is another example from “God Knows”, a very popular and well known anime song. While this song is in 4/4 time, the strumming pattern is a combination of quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes. It’s really hard to hear the strums on the site, so being able to read it and play it right can be vital.

Last point I want to make, I find it easiest to memorize concepts in tabs when I can figure out the key it’s in, as I know where to start and what following chords make sense.

Another case would be arpeggios. Instead of just memorizing numbers, I would look at the notes in that bar, put them together, and see what chord it would be.

Below is a snippet from Tada Kimi ni Hare/Just A Sunny Day For You from Yorushiki, which my band is covering. This bit is quite fast, so doing those arpeggios finger by finger like a lead player would may be too hard for me right now.

However, when you put the arpeggios notes together, they actually make up chords. For bar 67, the first 4 notes make a A#Maj7, the next 4 notes in the same bar make a C7 chord. Instead of trying to memorize 8 notes blindly, I just have to remember these 2 chords for this bar.

Best of all, I will probably use these chords again for other songs or my own creations, so it’s worth learning how to transition early on.

Welcomed Into The Musical Community

If anything, the biggest reason you should learn theory is simply to communicate and be able to work with other musicians.

We’re lucky enough that so many people have picked up guitar at least once so they may have an idea of what we are talking about when mentioning strings and frets, but as a whole, they shouldn’t be bending to work with you or learning guitar to teach you, just because you can’t be bothered to learn the language of music.

Very few would want to work with someone who can’t follow along and who they’ll have to baby and explain every little thing to, since most general terms are out of your vocabulary. If you pretend to understand and then mess up, you’re just going to frustrate others.

If you’re a tab learner who has never pad attention to beats and rhythm, you’re going to be the one to throw everyone else off. They may let things slide and chalk up to you just being a beginner or new to playing with a band, but it will soon be very noticeable that you haven’t worked on your timing at all.

I have often heard guitarists on threads saying that they ‘can play fine alone, but can’t seem to play with others’, and I’m sure a lot of this has to do with a lack of sense of rhythm since they haven’t played with a metronome and went off doing their own thing on their own time.

Playing with other people mean you have to play in time or you won’t be together. This isn’t something you could learn over night or in a jam setting. It requires a lot of work, so it’s best to start early.

In more serious contexts, if they gave you some sheet music, you better know what’s going on so you can play along. If they decided to make a change to the original song, such as a chord or key change, they would expect you to adjust your parts yourself.

If they are kind enough to teach you theory and concepts, but you brush it off or tell them to just ‘tell you what to play’, they may feel quite disrespected as they may have spend years learning theory to play their instrument properly. But here you are, a beginner, who couldn’t care less.

Imagine how you would feel teaching an intern a task you love and are passionate about, have spent years learning it’s intricacies, so you’re trying to go into detail about how and why it works so they could truly understand it, and they’re just like ‘yeah yeah blah blah, just tell me what button to push and when.” You probably wouldn’t want to work with them either. You may just dumb things down because you know they won’t make it far in the field.

Why train someone who thinks like that or has such an inflated ego that theory is beneath them? They would rather assist someone who is interested, even if it’s a bit hard to grasp at first. Having a willingness to learn is vital for many fields and even more so music as it is a life long journey. You’ll never learn everything, so you need to be open to hearing what other’s have to say and what they’re willing to teach.

If you just want to play alone, then it’s okay to have confidence in your own thing, but the most beautiful thing about being a musician is that you have opportunities to jam with others and create amazing music.

So if you do aim to play with others, in a band, as a session musician, in an orchestra or whatever it may be, you need to learn the language of the people. If you ever plan to expand to other instruments, learning theory now will help make your learning a lot faster as you’ll be able to carry concepts over and reapply things.

Conclusion

I hope this article has given you something to think about if you were trying to make a decision on whether to learn theory.

Anyone who discourages you from learning just because they never learned it or don’t see why it’s important, may not always have the best intentions for you. Learning will only help you progress faster, and you’ll be able to cut the time they spent figuring out things in half, even with the basics.

Understand that music isn’t exactly like art. Artists usually work solo and even the weirdest or simplest paintings can be worth thousands of dollars. It’s more about personal expression. Music, on the other hand, is usually played in conjunction with other instruments, and listeners can only groove along if the beat is steady. Being too artistic with music will just sound messy and be hard to listen to.

Hopefully, you paid a little attention in music class and have some things down already, but if not, music isn’t as complex as it may seem at first. What more, I found theory was easier to learn and apply on guitar because every note is equally spaced, and this allows you to change keys by doing nothing more than moving everything up a fret. The world is in your hands with guitar!

Feel free to check out other posts on my blog as I write ‘beginner’s guides’ for basic music theory concepts in conjunction with guitar. My most popular ones are my Scales and Modes article, and my Chords and Progressions article. Be sure to bookmark this blog, or follow my Facebook page so you’ll be updated on future articles that may be beneficial to you.

If you’re looking for a resource that goes over the basics of timing, scales and chord progressions, and also gives you 15 chord progressions and strumming patterns to practice in different keys, please check out my eBook, Rhythm & Chord Progressions. I had yet to find a resource that combines everything on one page so I could just focus on practicing, so I made one myself.

If you’re quite new to the instrument and would like to start off the right foot, I would highly recommend Guitar Tricks. It truly helped me build my foundation the right way and I love that they weave in theory concepts as you’re learning to play, so you can see them applied right away. You can read about my experience and what it has to offer in this article, and you can get a 2 week full access trial with this link! (I am an affiliate for Guitar Tricks. I may get some financial compensation with no additional cost to you).

Definitely let me know your thoughts in the comments about whether you believe in learning theory or not, or how theory has helped you as a guitarist!