A major/minor problem

It occurred to me a few months ago that, despite playing musical instruments for a good portion of my life, I wasn’t so clued up on music theory. That is, I wouldn’t have known where to start if I was composing a song, or what, say, Esus4 was at all. Having said that, on the piano at least I could play quite a lot, but only on a note-by-note basis – I had no idea about what key I was playing in and so on.

So, ever since I’ve been trying to learn the theory behind what I’m playing. It’s not easy to get your head around sometimes! What I’ve also been doing is applying what I know on piano to guitar and vice versa. For instance, today I made it my task to learn my scales on bass guitar (easily transferable to standard guitar). Yesterday I tried out chord picking patterns on the piano. It’s interesting because I never linked the two instruments before. Until now I never really knew which notes I was playing on guitar either, just which shapes ‘looked right’.

I’m hoping to continue this over the summer, then come September – fingers crossed – I’ll have a good deal of this malarkey sorted! I’m excited to see what reading pieces will be like once I can see the inner workings behind the notes.