I was noodling around on my guitar earlier and I found myself thinking about my personal learning journey as a musician.

I don’t have any sort of musical background. Nobody in my family sings or plays music. As a family, we never really cared for musicians, we never went to concerts or anything like that. My dad had a few favorite old tamil songs, and my mum had a few CDs – ABBA, the Bee Gees, the Carpenters. I remember a few Tamil songs from the movies, a bit of Michael Jackson, and not much more than that when I was growing up. At school, there were music classes, but it was always kind of a pathetic simulation-rehearsal of sorts – too many students, and too much variance in pre-existing skills for those lessons to be meaningful at all. I remember they were trying to teach us the treble clef and bass clef and notation – which, honestly, probably put me off music for some time. It just seemed indescipherable, like maybe it wasn’t for me.

I first properly got into music in a messy and clunky way – by wanting to play the guitar with the cool kids. This was around 2002, 2003 – videos weren’t really easy to access online, so most of the learning I did was from tabs.

It feels like an ancient memory now, but probably the first thing I learned was how to play a simplified version of Smoke On The Water on a single string. —-0—3—5—, —0—3—6-5—, —0—3—5—, —3—0—. 4 notes altogether, you only need one finger, and you just move it up and down. And it sounds like music! It IS music!

There are a bunch of other “single string songs” you can learn and figure out. 0-1-0-1-0-1-0-1 is the Jaws theme. You can play Seven Nation Army with one string, too – it’s a little bit tougher, but still fairly simple.

Use two strings, and you can play the bassline to Are You Gonna Be My Girl. It took me a little while later to learn this, but you can play the basslines to most pop songs quite comfortably with 2 strings, and most of them circle around the same 4 or so notes.

Around this time, or earlier, whatever – it’s good to know some really basic facts. Modern music – western music, as played on mainstream instruments like the guitar and piano – is divided into 12 “equal” notes per octave.

because there are only twelve notes, there are only twelve possible intervals between any two notes. being able to identify them all is a powerful, powerful tool in your musical arsenal. nobody quite taught it to me like that. but really, you just need to know 12 intervals. 12 “gaps”. effectively all music is made up of this.

How do you explain what an octave is…? The first two notes of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” are an octave apart. It’s the same note, but one is higher than the other. If you wanted to do that with a vibrating piece of string, you have to half the length of string. (On guitars, this means pressing the 12th fret – which is the mid-point of the guitar string between the nut and the bridge).

Doesn’t really matter if you don’t completely get it – maybe the more interesting, simple point is – basically, all music is made from a stretch of sound, and this stretch “loops” itself over and over again. It’s kiind of like a base number system. Once you count to 10, counting to 20 is just counting to 10 again on top of that. That’s kind of what octaves are like, only in western music it’s 12 chromatic notes. Sometimes you might choose to skip certain notes when playing certain scales. So if you restrict yourself to the major scale, for example, there are 8 notes in an octave. The first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and octave (which is the first again). That’s what people sing in “do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do” – that’s the major scale!

(The Star Spangled Banner is a tough song to sing because it covers over one and a half octaves. People tend to start singing it higher than they should, not properly anticipating that they’re going to have to get even higher at “and the rocket’s red glare”).

There’s something called the pentatonic scale – which is a set of 5 notes that are used in a lot of music. To me, it sounds very “chinese-y”, but it depends on how you play it.

The major scale generally sounds happy, the minor scale generally sounds sad. (If I’m remembering this correctly – if you play the major scale over two octaves, you actually play the minor scale in the middle of it – and vice versa!) For example, the C major scale is C D E F G A B / C D E F G A B C. The A minor scale is A B C D E F G. So the C Major and A Minor scales have a relationship – they are each other’s “relatives”. I mean, they’re the same set of notes!! I was very late to discovering this and it blew my mind.

What else… so commonly when you’re teaching yourself the guitar from scratch, I don’t think you go too much into the details of how and why the guitar is tuned the way it is. You’d typically learn all the “open chords”, which are the chords that use open strings. E, Em, A, Am, C, D, Dm, G, F. You can play a whole bunch of songs with just these chords alone, and spend months on them happily.

You can “reverse engineer” these chords by learning the major and minor scales, and then identifying the constituent notes. Basic major chords take the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes of a major scale. So a C-major chord is C-E-G. And an A Minor chord is A-C-E.

A couple of interesting things to fool around with. Playing a root and the fifth is a “power chord” – you could add the octave too – and that gives you basically the foundation of a lot of pop rock, pop punk material. In tablature, this would be

–3–
–3–
–1–

But you can just play

–3–
–1–

on the lowest strings, and move that up and down the neck, and you can have a lot of fun doing that.

And then – a powerfully simple thing that took me WAY too long to learn – you can represent a major or minor chord with just the root and the third. So you can play a G major chord with just G and B, or an A Minor with just A and C – just root-third. You can play entire songs this way with just two strings.