Music Theory

A basic knowledge of music theory is essential for any guitarist who wants to improvise or compose music. At Paper Moon Music you can explore how music works in order to improvise on the guitar, write songs, or just better understand music by learning the fundamentals of harmony, chord theory, and theory in general as it is applied to the guitar.

A knowledge of theory can range from a basic understanding of chords that go together to an in-depth understanding of harmonic relationships applied to the guitar fretboard.

Learning how to improvise on the guitar is surprisingly easy compared to many other instruments due to its easily identifiable numbered frets. The visual nature of the guitar allows you to “see” scales and chords on the fretboard as an interlocking series of dots which simply move up or down the neck from key to key.

Once you can visualize the neck in this way, you’re free to experiment with guitar soloing! These experiments often result in new melodies and songs. Paper Moon Music will introduce you to different ways you can approach improvisation, chord formation, and songwriting.

Even if you don’t grasp the subtleties of music theory right away, you can easily memorize the visual patterns on the guitar that allow you to improvise over any song you might hear on the radio.

Along the way, you’ll begin to see chords and intervals hiding inside these larger patterns and your ability to improvise will improve along with your knowledge of music theory.

If you choose to focus your guitar lessons on music theory and improvisation, you will learn to understand and apply Chord Theory, Arpeggios, Scales and Chord/Scale relationships, Intervals, Modes and Modal Theory, among many other topics and concepts.