GuitarOS Practical Theory: Update The Operating System Between Your Ears

Inches, feet, quarts, & pounds are a perfectly fine operating system for day-to-day living in your native America.

Unless, of course, you want to be a scientist.

Being a scientist requires thinking in the metric operating system. Not just converting back and forth between inches and centimeters, between pounds and kilos, between milliliters and ounces, but thinking in and intuitively knowing the OS of the metric system.

If you just want to be pretty good at guitar, then the shape-based operating system of TAB, scale shapes, & chord grids is perfectly fine. Combine it with a really good ear, great taste, and a shit ton of luck, and you might even get famous this way.

But if you want to deliberately become a badass guitarist?

Then you need to learn the operating system that all serious musicians use.

This used to mean you had to go back to square one to re-learn the instrument by reading through basic method books, and then diving into the deep end of music school and trusting that you’ll learn to swim before you drown.

I’ve done it. It fucking sucks.

And that’s why there are millions of guitarists who are pretty good at the guitar, but who can’t quite seem to make the leap to the next level––badassery.

Even though we know what the problem is (how many times have you decided to “learn theory?”), we haven’t had the proper tools to do it well. Until now.

You see, there’s another problem that’s invisible to us. Because most of us never venture out from our native Guitarlandia, we don’t realize that the rest of the world has already devised a slick, tidy, dare-I-say easy solution that actually works.

Even if you have no need to read music, don’t read music, won’t read music, hate reading music, are terrified that I might ask you to read music… the answers you seek are found in the seeds of one tiny portion of the music-reading world: note names.

If you switch your operating system over from shapes to names, a world of possibilities opens up to you.

Once you can look at your instrument and see names of notes instead of a set of coordinates, your brain has a powerful new way to organize the huge amount of meta data that’s stored in each and every piece of music you ever learn, play, or hear.

Once you’ve updated your “operating system” in this note name-centric way, everything useful about music theory flows logically from one thing to the next.

• If you know the names of the notes, it leads ipso facto into understanding keys.
• If you know both notes and keys, you can easily understand chord construction.
• Once you know how to build chords from notes & keys, you can easily build progressions from chords.
• If you understand notes, keys, chords, & progressions, then learning about rhythm goes from "nice to have" to "incredibly useful to have."
• If you know about notes, keys, chords, progressions, and rhythms, you can easily learn to read & write basic charts.
• If you understand enough about music to read & write basic charts, you can get paid to gig with other people, and you can hire the best musicians to play in your own band.
• You can pick up a book on music theory and understand it in the same language it was written in, without needing to translate back and forth into guitar-ese.
• You’ll think and talk about music in the same way that badass professional musicians do.

Being a musician who doesn’t think in notes is like being a scientist who doesn’t use the metric system.

It’s not that you can’t enjoy Neil DeGrasse Tyson without using the metric system, or that you can’t be famous without understanding notes on guitar.

It’s that being a scientist is SO MUCH EASIER with the metric system, and becoming a badass guitarist is SO MUCH EASIER when you’re using a note-centric operating system.

Let me show you.