[pBrane]

I've been playing guitar for years and never bothered to learn the theory. I have now somewhat plateaued in my progress and I think learning theory is the key to getting my playing out of the doldrums.

I've been looking at a lot of videos on youtube and those are really helpful but they do not give you the level of detail that you can acquire from a decent book. So, I was just wondering if anyone here knew of any particularly good ones? I have been playing guitar for 8 years so I'm looking for something fairly advanced and also have a basic knowledge of theory from playing the piano

Cheers

[Cracked World Foundation]

What kind of theory are you interested in? Guitar techniques (eg sweep picking, tapping, etc), scales & modes, complex & compound rhythms/polyrhythms etc, something else? There're a lot of different things that one might describe as 'theory' for guitarists; it would help to know what elements you're wanting to learn about.

[ghyt wembpang]

i learned pretty much everything I know about guitar from reading on ultimate-guitar.com's forums.

[_Mystik_]

please specify what youre referring to when you say theory, that could mean a variety of things, from playing techniques to compositional techniques.

[pBrane]

by theory i mean a knowledge of scales and modes etc

[Lug]

hm..so you know nothing about harmony/chord progressions ?

[Triton64]

Originally Posted by pBrane

by theory i mean a knowledge of scales and modes etc

Then theres a need to think "music theory" not "guitar theory"...

I would start with a basic course on theory, (either online, GIYF, wikipedia) then move on to shoenberg's books.

eg:

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These books are not sunday poolside reading. They are fucking painful and confusing as fuck for me. I have to wade through them at a slow pace, looking up definitions and explanations to every second sentence. Have to re-read over and over until things start coming together. I'm still working through them.

It does pay dividends though.

[Cracked World Foundation]

+1 to the above.

Modes are pretty simple though, and easy to remember. Think of them in the following order:

Ionian
Dorian
Phrygian
Lydian
Mixolydian
Aeolian
Locrian

You can remember the order with a mnemonic - eg "I Don't Play Loud Music After Lunch".

C Ionian is the C natural major scale - eg all the white notes starting from C. Each successive mode can be remembered as all of the white notes starting one higher each time: so D Dorian is all the white notes from D, E Phygrian is all white notes from E, etc. A Aeolian is the A natural minor scale. Modes with different root notes just involve transpositions of the same interval patterns: so D Ionian is D E F# G A B C#, and so on.

Learning the modes for guitar is easy, but takes practice to remember them. Do that, though, and it's a good jumping off mode into more complex theory.

[Numerical]

Originally Posted by ghyt wembpang

i learned pretty much everything I know about guitar from reading on ultimate-guitar.com's forums.

This right here, and also downloading power tab and some tabs from ultimate guitar.com

[Broton42]

Honest to god go to your local music store and you will more than likely find some random books blatantly titled things like "Advanced Guitar Theory"