For samples and more details checkout my website: https://www.piercemurphymusic.com/fretboard-mechanics
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' observations 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. That's where I figured I could lend a hand. My name is Pierce Murphy, I'm a college educated jazz guitarist, an award winning graphic designer, and a writer whose spent his teaching and design careers figuring out approachable ways to describe complex concepts.
The book was designed from the ground up to rely on minimalist design styles to produce a spruced up fretboard diagram; 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 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.
Table of Contents:
1 | Building Blocks: Intervals, Chords, and Extensions
2 | Keys to Success: Keys and the Natural Harmonic Function of the Major Scale'
3 | Race to the Bottom: Inversions and Basic Voicing
4 | One Step Further: Modes and the Seven Extensions
5 | Symmetrical Scales: Patterns for Exploration
6 | Harmonic Minor: Non-Diatonic Exoticism
7 | Melodic Minor: Something for Everybody
8 | Pentatonic Scales: Five Notes to Freedom
9 | Playing Out: Wrong Notes Made Right
10 | Modal Borrowing: The Fully Unlocked Fretboard, Fretboard, Guitar, Harmony, Harmonic, Mechanics, Theory, Pierce Murphy| 9781257760558 | 99PAGES