Okay I must admit, when I first decided to learn to play guitar, learning guitar music theory was the last thing I had in mind. I mean, as a teenager I just want to get into action, shredding the strings all over frets and smash it on the ramp by the end of the song. Yeah that’s what I thought. I mean the whole idea of learning all of that music theory is like have to go to school on Sunday! Definitely something I wouldn’t look forward to. I just can’t stand staring at those flagged dots on bars and try to figure out how to read it. It’s just too much work!
But it all changed when I try to learn a song over some musical score and I couldn’t do it. Not because I wasn’t good enough, but simply I didn’t know how to read it. It just froze me on my track to see something like this:
It’s a “tuplet” as I learned later, and it makes me realize that if I didn’t want to learn how to handle such basic musical notation you can imagine what kinda player I would be. I have to study this to reach my full potential. I have to do it and solve this basic issue, learning some music theory.
And you should do it too. If you can’t play a guitar solo run because it’s too friggin’ hard that’s one thing. But if you can’t play it because you don’t know how to read and understand to play it, that’s another thing. You need to solve that. You won’t let this technical boundaries stops you to reach your full potential don’t you? And I’m gonna help you with that.
In this page you will find important things you need to know about music theory related to guitar playing. If you want to learn about just intonation or any other obscure concept then I’m afraid that you will be disappointed. But if you want to learn how to play anything you see in tab or music sheet, then you’re in the right place.
And these basic topics that you should address to solve:
- Tempo – describe how fast or slow a song should be played. Simple stuff.
- Basic Note Values – every notes has a values, it describe how long a note should be played or hold.
- Tuplets – a group of notes with same values played in a time.
- Time Signatures – describe how many of which notes get put in each measure.

I know this may sound difficult for any beginner like you, but don’t get caught up with difficult terms you are having. These are just aspects of guitar music theory just yet. There are tons more, and it’s all worth learning. As always the more you know the better you’ll be. I say you should work on this and going all from here.
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