LESSON 2

4 WAYS TO
KNOW YOUR PITCH PATTERNS
PITCH is the largest area of music. It's all about HIGH and LOW. But high and low what?
NOTES...Pitch is all about what notes you play and what PATTERNS you arrange these
notes in (like CHORDS and SCALES). The scientific word for pitch is FREQUENCY. You
know that everything that is making noise is VIBRATING and sending out SOUND WAVES
through the air. The FREQUENCY of the wave is how far apart the waves are SPACED.

Low Frequency
equals low pitch

.
High Frequency
equals high pitch
Your guitar is nothing more than a SOUND WAVE GENERATOR. It can generate waves of very precise
STRING and controllable frequencies. But how does it work? A guitar is a stringed instrument. You have pieces of
wire stretched between two points. You pluck the string and cause it to vibrate. The SPEED at which the
string vibrates back and forth positions the wave peaks where they are and defines the frequency of the
sound wave. If the string is vibrating slowly, it sends out waves that are farther apart. If it is vibrating
quickly, it sends out waves that are closer together. So you control pitch by controlling the speed that the
string vibrates at.
PITCH = FREQUENCY = SPEED OF VIBRATION OF THE STRING

SPEED We control the string's vibrating speed using 3 different factors:

1 The MASS of the string That's why your strings are all different
thicknesses. Your low strings are more
massive and so vibrate slower.

2 The TENSION of the string

That's what TUNING is. You tighten or
loosen your strings to certain predetermined

.
vibrating speeds. This is also how you bend notes.

3 The LENGTH of the string

How do you play different notes on the guitar?
You move your fingers to different FRETS,
stopping the strings at different lengths.

Like any language, music has an ALPHABET. In order to do anything creative with a language, you first have to learn it's
alphabet. All the thousands of tunes you've heard in any musical style are all formed out of this simple set of notes just
like all the thousands of words you know in the English language are simply patterns formed
out of it's 26 unit alphabet. HOW MANY UNITS ARE THERE IN THE MUSICAL ALPHABET?
The Answer is
How many musical notes are there?
Most people are taught that there are only 7 (A-G) and that the sharps and flats are somehow
"different". But that just isn't accurate. You will come to see that the five "black keys" are just
as common and just as important as the seven "white keys" on the piano. Your guitar plays these
same 12 notes. These notes then repeat in higher and lower OCTAVES.
12
You have to learn how to form about 50
patterns out of this 12 note alphabet.
13 INTERVALS 14 SCALES 20 CHORDS
Think of these as "words" in the language and understand that they have "spellings" out of this 12 note "alphabet".
When you move your fingers around on the neck, you are "typing" these musical note patterns. These patterns
are all on your SLIDERULE so be sure to assemble it right away.