a little help
 

ive been playing the guitar for about 6 years now and im pretty much self taught but i dont feel like i know as much as i should for example: key changes, chord progressions, and a few other things. Now im sure i do know the jist of them all however im doing two different genres at the same time and would like to improve my skills on the metal side with the drop c tuning. so if anyone has any pointers i will gladly take them!


RT

That is an extremely broad question... about the only things I can think of for a question that meaningless are a pair of equally meaningless answers: learn theory and practice your technique.

Learn more music and learn how it works in theory terms. That's about it.

Look up modes and how they work. Understand how and why A minor and C major have the exact same notes. That will help you with chord progressions - like when to play major or minor chords and which notes to play over certain chords/scales. As for slide... I've been playing a lot of slide too lately and I highly recommend open tunings. It is fairly easy to mess around with a 12 bar blues structure in open G or E.

Theory can be confusing at first, so read as much as you can and don't forget there are no stupid questions.

Cheers :)

No. TS does not need to know anything about modes, just like almost every other guitarist on Earth.

well thanks for the help people

First '13 I've seen so far :)

Read the lesson in my sig. Ignore anyone who tells you to learn modes. You will start to learn theory by learning the major scale.

Thats Positive

Get to the point...

I honestly doubt that anyone who posts things like "learn modes, they are the holy grail of music theory" knows anything about modes in the first place...
(if they knew anything about modes they would see how useless they are)

Maybe, maybe not, the point is that someone needs to keep telling the people who ask these questions to ignore the people who do recommend learning 'modes'. Not that most people who would say that actually know what a mode really is.

The point is, my friend, that this is a learning environment and telling somebody that they should go out of their way to not learn something (in any subject) is bad advice. Be positive. Sure, modes aren't a very important part of guitar playing.

What I meant to say in my last post was that it is important to know what chords to play in certain keys or scales. Now that I'm thinking more critically about this, I realize modes don't have much to do with that. I remember it helping me when I figured that stuff out, I thought maybe it would help him too. I don't visit this forum often and I didn't realize there were a lot of people overemphasizing modes.

Still, telling people to not learn things is bad. Aristotle figured that out and he was a pretty good teacher.

I'm quite in favor of telling people to ignore set theory that assumes the axiom of choice to be false.

Thus, ignore modes for a long time. They're kind of cute once you know the important stuff -- and confusing and worthless until then. (That is, Metallica's Battery does not begin with an E Phrygian lick.)