Practical Music Theory Tips

I made a new blog discovery and thought I’d pass it along. I came across Ryan Egan’s blog at iamanoffering.com and thought I’d link the four articles he did as part of a series on practical music theory tips. I talk to musicians all the time who have a hard time getting their head around theory in a way that is helpful for them in their playing. Having a solid grasp of music theory is invaluable for any musician and Ryan does a great job at explaining some concepts that can be kind of tricky to understand.

1. Basic Triads
   

   Perhaps you are a musician who is used to playing by written notes and don’t know how to build a chord. Or perhaps you know how to play chords by ear, but don’t really understand how they’re built. I want to quickly teach you how to play the three basic triads (three-note chords) found in any key.

2. Inversions
   

   Yesterday we looked at very basic ways to build the basic triads in any key. Now, playing those basic triads all the time could make yourself bored and your music extremely boring. Let’s add some color by learning how to invert the triads.

3. Weird Chord Suffixes
   

   Most of us are used to playing the basic chords that we looked at in the last two days, but what happens when you run up against something like Csus or Cmaj7 or C2?Those three suffixes (sus, 2, and some type of 7) are probably the most common suffixes you will see in most praise and worship music. The easiest way to figure out these chords is by looking at the numbers.

4. Relative Minor Chord
   

   Each major key signature has a corresponding (relative) minor key with the same signature. You can find the relative minor of a major key in two ways: count up six steps beginning with the tonic (first note) of the scale. So, in the key of C, we would start with C and count up six steps to A. Building our basic triad (A, skip, C, skip, E) gives us a minor chord now, instead of the major chords we looked at earlier in the week. This chord is root chord of C’s relative minor key, A minor. A minor has the same key signature as C major, no sharps or flats.