by Kewoni Berkley

Created on: May 28, 2008   Last Updated: May 29, 2008

This article will introduce you to the some of my strategies for effectively gaining knowledge of the guitar, not as just a musical instrument, but as YOUR instrument for making beautiful sound.

Study music, and gain a keen understanding of how it works; it makes no sense buying a cell phone when all you can do with it is make phone calls. You need to know and understand every aspect of music so as to become a great musician.

1. This may seem very irrelevant however I trust that it will definitely help you gain a better knowledge of your instrument. I suggest that as a musician, you should have some knowledge of the keyboard (or piano). However, I am not saying that you should put down your guitar and take up keys, for newcomers to music, the both should be learned simultaneously. I say this because the keyboard is the perfect instrument for gaining a knowledge of scales, chords and progressions.
A living testimony to this strategy is myself (:^). My first instrument was the key board, I love it to this day however I wanted to learn the guitar. Personally I thought the guitar would be the most challenging instrument to play, but once I learned the what each was, I quickly began to apply my keyboard knowledge. I quickly learned all my major scales and I found many triad chords by simply combining three the three notes necessary to make the sound. I bought the guitar in August of 2007 and now in May of 2008 I am able to solo on any song, find the relevant chords for the song and also compose great songs which I am sure you will love.

By studying the keys on the keyboard you will gain solid knowledge of scale formation which is critical for every musician. The notes which must be present in a key is determined by its scale. For example, any song in the key of "A" major will make use of the notes A B C# D E F# G#. This is because these are the main notes which are used when playing in A major. Now it it would be much easier for a guitarist to find his or her way when accompanying a song as instead playing around with 12 notes, you know only 7 are needed.
By now finding these notes on your guitar you will find a comfortable way of running scales and also the relationship between notes and the six strings in relation to the key.

Also, the keyboard best illustrates chords. On the keyboard it is seen that a triad major chord consists of only three notes, these are: 1st 3rd and 5th. To clear up this concept, I will refer again to the key of A major. The root note of this

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