Ep190 Q&A New Fretboard Theory Covers Pentatonic Scales Calluses & Picking

And the first thing I want to talk about is the newly updated covers to my fretboard theory books.

Most of my listeners are probably already familiar with my book, Fretboard Theory.

That may be how you first discovered me.

I first published Fretboard Theory on Amazon back in 2005, so just over 20 years ago.

And I self-published the book and created the book.

All by myself.

I had been teaching for years and was really into helping students understand certain aspects of music theory and how they related to familiar songs, particularly like the classic rock genre that so many of my students were into.

And I wanted to make something that was a little different and a little unique.

I had been on a music theory journey myself, and it was a little challenging to collect kind of formal traditional information about music theory and try to figure out… How that related to the music that I was listening to.

But I knew that there were aspects to, you know, Led Zeppelin and, you know, Rush and Jimi Hendrix and Lynyrd Skynyrd and, you know, all these classics that I was listening to.

And I wanted to understand the music better.

I didn't want to just memorize finger placements.

I wanted to know what key I was in, why the chords went together, why the scales worked with the chords.

So once I started to kind of figure out how popular music was put together, and I started to realize that there were some aspects of music theory that were very useful, and then there were some aspects of music theory that just didn't really apply as much for us guitar players.

And I also realized that we have a little bit of a different perspective on things as guitar players because we're playing on a fretboard, and it is essentially a grid.

So geometry is a big part of playing guitar.

We visualize chord shapes and scale patterns, and we can see connections that way.

So I wanted to focus on that in my book because that's what I had been teaching in my lessons, and it was really successful with my students at the time, and things started to click.

Rather than throwing a bunch of formal music theory terms at them or thinking about other instruments such as piano or orchestra instruments, I wanted to focus on the fretboard.

But really, the thing that was probably...

The biggest difference between fretboard theory and really anything else that was available at the time was that as you went through my book chapter by chapter, and as I introduced a new concept, I would also reference several familiar songs that use that specific concept.

So if I introduce a particular scale pattern, I'd say, you know, that's what you hear at the beginning of Purple Haze.

Or if I introduced... a certain type of composition technique.

I'd say, that's what's happening at the beginning of Stairway to Heaven.

Or if I introduce a particular chord shape, I'd be like, that's what the Red Hat Chili Peppers used in this song, and so on.