Some common Musical terms for guitar players

One of the things David Newsam at the Berklee school taught me was the advantage of having some common way to describe your musical ideas. When you’re talking to another musician, it saves a lot of time and frustration if you’re speaking the same language! Some of the ideas we’ll be starting out with and some simple definitions:

  • Arpeggio: the notes of a chord played ascending or descending.
  • Interval: The distance in pitch between two tones. Intervals are labeled by numerical value (degree) which indicates the number of pitches they include, their order in the octave and the name of their note. So, first degree C, a whole step from second degree D and so on.
  • Muting: A common technique in guitar playing. “Muting” a guitar means stopping the strings from vibrating. We can mute with either the left or right hand. With the fretting hand, lift the fingers slightly so that the string stops contacting the fret wire. With the strumming hand. Lay the hand across the strings.
  • Motifs: A motif is a short musical idea that occurs often in a piece of music. A short melodic idea may also be called a motiv, a motive, a cell, or a figure. These small pieces of melody will appear again and again in a piece of music… and we can make our own!
  • Melody: A linear sequence of notes the listener hears as a single entity. The melody of a song is the foreground to the backing elements and is a combination of pitch and rhythm. Melodies are musically satisfying and are often the most memorable part of a song.
  • Octave: sequence of 8 notes in a scale and the 8th note of the scale. The 8th note of the scale is one octave from the tonic note.
  • Picking: Moving a string so that it vibrates to create a sound. There are many ways to strike the strings and part of your journey as a guitarist is to find what works for you. Try a bunch of ways! It may be that you end up having more than one go-to method for striking the strings and you’ll use the method that best suits your need at the moment.
  • Rhythm: in music, the placement of sounds in time. From the Greek “rhythmos”, derived from rhein, “to flow”). Rhythm refers to the length of time between each major “beat”, or accent in a piece of music. It is the sequence of sounds and silences which make up the rhythm.
  • Scales: sequence of notes or intervals in an octave.
  • Strumming: A strum or stroke is a sweeping action where a finger or pick brushes over more than one string to generate the desired sound.
  • Strumming patterns: A strumming pattern is a preset pattern of down and up strokes played with your fingers or a pick against the strings. The strumming pattern will determine the rhythm for your music. You can strum with either your fingers or with a pick.
  • Tonic: The first note in the octave
  • Tuning: the process of adjusting the pitch of each string to a predetermined pitch. We do this by turning a string’s corresponding tuning peg on the head of the guitar. “Standard” tuning on a guitar is EADGBE

Plato: “Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything.”

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