Originally Posted By: eddie1261


And this is exactly where the divide begins, Herb. Let me play "newbie" for a minute.

"The 1 the 4 and the 5 of what?"

Your answer would correctly be "The 1, 4 and 5 of the scale."

"What's a scale?"

I have discovered that trying to explain theory to people with no music background is similar to having some little green alien drop to the earth from Mars and try to teach him about football or baseball. There is SO MUCH implied knowledge involved. You and I and whoever else is in this thread KNOW 1-4-5. (We even know about 6 minor!)

My best male pal Andy has like 6 guitars and all he can play is the intro to Smoke On The Water. He asked me to try to teach him. I said "I can't. I can't teach you anything about guitar until you know enough about music to know what a half step is. And a 3rd. And a 5th. I can't teach you about the guitar neck until you can relate that one fret equals a half step, and know what steps are." And so forth. I sat him down with a guitar on his shoulder and had him put a finger on any fret he wanted. I then played that note on the keyboard and told him to move down one fret and showed him the correlation of that fret to the keyboard. I spent an hour with him. For the whole hour I saw the same the same look on his face that you'd see when if you tried to explain long division to your dog.



No offense, but I think you went about this exactly backwards.

What your friend needed to know was not intervals and all that. What he needed to know was how to play the rest of the song.

He asked you what time it was and you tried to tell him how to build a clock

Last edited by Byron Dickens; 07/21/22 02:28 PM.
Byron Dickens

BIAB. CbB. Mixbus 32C 8 HP Envy. Intel core i7. 16GB RAM W10. Focusrite Scarlett 18i 20. Various instruments played with varying degrees of proficiency.

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