A New Approach To A Timeless Puzzle

Music theory predates a lot of stuff. The internet. Cars. Sliced bread. Even the modern guitar. And because it's been around so long, it's friggin' complicated. A few millennium's worth of music nerds compiling observations, yielding a massive system of patterns and structures, can be a little overwhelming to slap on the old six string.

Lot's of folks have tried to thread the needle between full-on info dump and light touch introduction, with varying degrees of success. Yes, there are piles of textbooks that dive into the nuances of counterpoint. Yes, there are occult themed tomes that will give you page after page of esoteric scales. And yes, there's little kid style flash cards. All of these have value in their own right, but they tend to be light on design, heavy on fluff, and a real snooze-fest.

That's where I figured I could lend a hand. My name is Pierce Murphy, I'm a college educated jazz guitarist, who's been performing and teaching for more than 20 years. Also, I'm an award winning graphic designer, specializing in everything from layout design and branding, to illustration and motion graphics. Lastly, I'm pretty decent with a word processor and have spent my entire teaching and design careers figuring out approachable ways to describe complex concepts.

This whole project started because I wanted to build a curriculum that I could give to students. Something with a beginning, middle, and end, unlike the sort of infinite meander that most music lessons become. But once I got into fleshing the idea out, I realized it would be just as handy as a standalone book. Not a method book, exactly. I'm not teaching you what finger to use where. But more of a reference manual. Like what you'd find in a glove box. These are all the pieces, how they fit together, and how to use them.

Design

The book was designed from the ground up to rely on minimalist principles (a la Bauhaus, Swiss, and Japanese design styles) to produce a spruced up fretboard diagram, familiar to anyone who's ever held a chord, but bold, concise, and color coded, with each note labelled clearly by number. There is zero traditional staff notation in this book. Reading music is not the same as being a good musician. It's a handy skill, but has nothing to do with music theory. On the other hand, a big downside of books like these is that they tend to leave you out in a wilderness of diagrams. So I made sure to accompany every concept, no matter how small or out-there, with a detailed explanation written just like this.

All the elements of the book's formatting are inspired by this fretboard diagram style. Chapter headers, page numbers, the whole thing is built and custom designed by yours truly for cohesion, readability, and style. My design philosophy is that everything deserves to look cool. Music stuff especially.

I also chose a specific typeface to set the book in: Eina, developed by Extratype for EINA University School of Art and Design in Barcelona, is a clean, modern sans serif with loads of personality and readability. It being designed for a university means that extra care was taken to make it geared toward education and learning. Chiefly with an eye for clarity and accessibility. There's four versions of Eina, and this one is the more geometric style (Eina 03), which compliments the diagrams nicely.

Methodology

The book's content is derived largely from my experience with college level curriculum, experience teaching people who both are and are not headed for college, and my own learning and understanding, developed mostly in a jazz context. So if you've got a day job and kids and you want to figure out what harmonic minor means in your spare time, this will help you. If you're a high school player who wants to get some concepts under your belt before auditions, this will help you, too. If you've got a pretty good grasp on some scales and licks and can shred on a backing track but aren't quite comfortable at a open jam, this will get you familiar enough with some ideas to get started. And if you want to get in the weeds with some pretty wild scales, this will help you roll those sleeves up.

It is worth mentioning that this is probably not ideal for complete beginners. If you're just learning how to play a G chord for the first time, maybe keep this in mind for the future when you start to wonder not only what works, but why.

The text goes decently deep with a few concepts that are not for the faint of heart. The central thesis (of the book and my own playing) revolves around modularity and modality, not just meaning the modes of the major scale that are themselves a little elusive, but how patterns that are interconnected, interchangeable, and interactive can be seen in a sort of micro way and then applied at scale. The goal is to simplify. Take things down to the nuts and bolts so that we can build up confidently and consistently from there.

A quick perusal of the table of contents above will give you a good idea of where things are headed. Most of those concepts are presented with all modal extensions, meaning you're getting multiple scales and chords built out of each parent idea. But more than that, you're getting a walk through of not only what they are, but how to use them.

No, we're not going to talk about the "Nashville number system" or whatever (hint: it's just calling chords by numbers instead of letter names. We do that here in Denver, too...). We're not going to talk about CAGED either. A few minutes on YouTube with that one and you'll be just fine. Also the scales and chords in here are not presented in all twelve keys. In doing research in the early phases of this project I saw review after review of popular method books–mostly negative–saying they were so full of fluff that they were almost unusable, obviously jockeying for maximum page counts so as to charge more. On my book I aimed for all killer, no filler. It focuses on and builds up to ideas and techniques that professional players use on the regular, and it presents them in a way that encourages exploration on the part of the reader. 

Please help yourself to some samples directly from the book: