Best Place On-Line to learn Music Theory for Guitar?

[Kerbie]

Originally Posted by Tannin

... it makes much more sense to learn your theory on an instrument you are familiar with and use every day.

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

No not true, anyone with no prior experience can play the piano, you only need to put a finger on a key and push, to understand theory you don't need any other skill, it's all done with the brain.

Seems to me that both of these general statements are true. I think theory is mostly brainwork, but using an instrument as an aid is a helpful tool. Good teachers are always looking for visual and audible aids to help get their points across. And if the instrument chosen as a visual/audible aid is one the student is familiar with, doesn't that just enhance learning? I don't think the essence of your two opinions is mutually exclusive. There is truth in both.

[nightchef]

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

No not true, anyone with no prior experience can play the piano, you only need to put a finger on a key and push, to understand theory you don't need any other skill, it's all done with the brain.
Access to a keyboard is usefull because understanding a large part of how music works requires understanding intervals and the intervals in the key of C, once someone points it out become imediately obvious in a visual way on a keyboard, you can see them and how they combine to create the chords we use.. You can stare at a guitar fretboard all day but you'll never see with your own eyes that a scale is a repeating pattern of major and minor intervals or that 2 3rds make a 5th which is the basis of harmony.
Once you can see that or it's shown to you don't actually have to try and play the piano if you don't want to, you take that understanding and apply it to any instrument.

It sounds like you are a visual learner — and lots of people are. But not everybody is. I’m not, and for me what worked was approaching information about theories and scale/chord construction in a more abstract/conceptual way, which works just as well on guitar as on a keyboard. (All the intervals are there on the guitar, they’re just not laid out in a single row.)

That said, while I agree with Tannin’s point, the flip side to it is that learning multiple instruments is a powerful way to deepen your theoretical understanding. All the really good musicians I’ve known have been multi-instrumentalists.

[ljguitar]

Originally Posted by Tannin

Sure. But it makes much more sense to learn your theory on an instrument you are familiar with and use every day. Expecting people to learn an unfamiliar new instrument (typically piano) at the same time as they are learning music theory is not good teaching practice.

Hi Tannin
I'm not sure I agree.

Theory to Music is like Grammar to Language.

In language, we have letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books etc…

Our 4 sons were communicating very well by the time they were 4-5 years old, so when they went to school, they learned what to call the 'components'. But when they speak, they are not thinking verb, adverb, adjective, contraction etc.

They were telling stories…which they sometimes later wrote down. They just had ideas and spoke extemporaneously.

In music we have notes, scales, chords, phrases, passages, verse, chorus, (intro, outro, endings, etc). But I just play music, not scales, chords, etc. I'm not putting a lot of thought into the components if I've learned the tools well. And when our 3rd son & I get together to play music, we don't pull out charts (though we may rarely mention a key). One of us starts and the other keeps up.

This particular son knows nothing about scales, chords, etc, but he's a great singer-songwriter, musician who can jam all day long, and occasionally says 'show me that thing you're doing'. So I show him, but rarely try to describe it in theory-terms.

I personally think in chords in relationship to what I've learned on keyboards, and guitars, not what I learned in theory class. I think in melody and harmony in relationship to what I've learned from 18 years of classical trumpet, and 15 years of classical singing.

I was already playing, singing, performing when I finally took theory class. I didn't learn many new concepts from theory.

Theory provided and assigned language to what I was already doing.

I'll stop here rather than turning this into lecture instead of dialogue.

[Andyrondack]

Just discovered this website Hubguitar, great learning resource I think with sections on all sorts of guitary stuff , tabs tunes improvising and theory , sort of like a guitar school campus on one site.
http://hubguitar.com/music-theory

[tbirdman]

Justinguitar.com $10 for 6 month access plus free workbook/text.