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

Desi Serna (0:00)

In episode 190 of the Guitar Music Theory Podcast, I discussed the new cover designs for my Fretboard Theory books, and answer listener questions about choosing scales, maintaining calluses, pentatonic fingerings, and fingerstyle versus flat picking.

Greetings, guitar engineers. Welcome to the Guitar Music Theory Podcast. I'm your host, Desi Serna, author of Fretboard Theory. This is the place where we nerd out on all things related to guitar playing and music theory. I teach you how to analyze songs, get to know your way around the fretboard, and play with purpose. Today, I'll be answering some listener questions about how to finger pentatonic scales, how to choose the right scales to play over a chord progression, how to build and maintain calluses on your fretting hand fingers, and whether it's better to play lead guitar with a pick or with your fingers. I'm also going to discuss some recent updates to my best-selling Fretboard Theory book series, including the new cover designs and a little history of the books. It's going to be a great discussion, but before we dive in, I want to invite you to visit my website, guitarmusictheory.com. Answer the question I ask you about your playing, and I'll send you free custom video instruction calibrated to your current level. Whether you're a beginner still needing to learn the basics, or you're focusing on improvisation and understanding music theory, I can provide you with a step-by-step plan to take the guesswork out of learning, and help you make steady progress toward your musical goals. Once you're in my system, you'll also get my free newsletter, which includes helpful and encouraging messages to help you make the most of your practice time and enjoy playing guitar. You'll also be notified when I create new content and offer online classes. So enroll in your free video course now at guitarmusictheory.com. You can click on the link in the podcast show notes.

Guitar Music Alright, so we are ready to dive in. 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, a little unique. I had been on a music theory journey myself, and it was a little challenging to collect 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, Lebed 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. And 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, you know, 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. And I think that's what really helped this stuff click with readers. And one of the reasons why I amassed so many positive reviews on Amazon is people finally understood how the music worked, that they were actually interested in and listening to.