Richard: I'm a guitar player who started out playing by ear in garage-type bands about 18 years ago. In the last few years, I've been diligently studying with a friend who is a professional jazz guitarist and teacher. While studying with him, I've been absorbing a large amount of theory, philosophy, and hopefully superior musical knowledge. I visit your site regularly, and I enjoy your philosophical explorations of the nature of music and the universe itself (I really liked the tritone/solar system metaphor). My question is this: My teacher says that we will study the Cycle of Fourths moving in the "flat" direction (C, F, Bb, Eb, etc.) since that is how jazz tunes usually move around from chord to chord. My limited experience seems to bear this out. Why is this? Is it because the "sharp" keys are those which correspond to open strings on the guitar, which are usually keys for county and blues and folk musics, which are the elements of rock music? And if I study the "wheel" moving in fourths rather than fifths, is it moving "away" from rock and roll? Thanks for your time, Jamey
	Hi Jamey, Thanks for writing and for your great question. It sounds like you have a very good teacher who knows what he is doing. I'm sure that studying with him will do you a great deal of good. My understanding of musical movement and of the cycle of fifths/fourths will be somewhat different but not in conflict with your teacher's understandings. Jazz tunes do move in fourths, but they do so because they follow musical law -- they do not establish musical law. This cycle of fifths/fourths is a representation in musical terms of the Creation from the primordial unity towards number. Without going into a lot of explanation that is best done over a period of time and in person, I can say the following: Forgetting for the moment about the alphabet, which came later, we will only follow the numbers. The first number is one, represented by the Roman numeral I. This stands at the top of the cycle of fifths/fourths and represents God, or if you will, the Creator or Creative Urge. That is beyond human understanding but we do our best. The one represents wholeness, unity, primordial bliss. Out of his unopposed Will the Creator decides that there should be number. In musical terms we develop the notes through ratio. The first ratio is 1:2; this yields the octave. The second ratio is 2:3; this renders the fifth. The Western world made the rest of the notes by continuing to follow ratios of whole numbers like 3:4, 4:5, etc..., but what most other cultures did and which amounts to the same thing is to take the fifth and use it as a new I thereby to develop yet another fifth, and another fifth from that etc. You get all 12 chromatic tones that way in a cycle of fifths. Now, all things are separated things -- they all find themselves estranged from that oceanic wholeness and bosom of primordial bliss which is the Unity. All things and all numbers wish to return home to the One. So, they try to climb back up the ladder like salmon swimming upstream. The return journey is the cycle of fourths. However, the cycle never ends and the entire wheel becomes something of an exitless magic circle. Movement along that circle is the perpetual motion machine. Now, all the numbers say "I". They all think of themselves as the One, but at the same time they are homesick so they move away from themselves in the hopes of conjoining. This yields musical movement. Let's consider what we would do if we had a musical instrument with overlapping staggered pitches -- not an instrument like a piano or a harp with a string for every chromatic pitch but an instrument with fewer strings. How would we tune them to gain the most musicality? Well, the first choice would be to tune instrument in fifths. That is what symphonic instruments are tuned to, like the violin. This is because symphonies are designed to replicate the August Majesty and creative force of the Creator or of Nature. Instruments tuned in fifths are called classical instruments. Instruments which are tuned in the other direction -- that is to say, in fourths, are called folk instruments, and they are designed to replicate the supplicating plea of created things to return to the bosom of the primordial bliss. This is one reason why they are used for love songs etc., because in the union of man and woman is a foretaste of the primordial conjoinment. The guitar is a folk instrument principally tuned in fourths. Although when we look at the instrument we don't see the movement in fourths or fifths but rather we see the vertical movement up a scale. This is a little like looking at cloth. When you look at cloth you see the flat landscape of the cloth but you do not see the action of the needle which ran perpendicular through the cloth in order to create it. The cycle of fifths/fourths runs through music the same way. With my own students we practice almost everything either by fourths or fifths depending. Since every number and every letter says I, it doesn't matter where on the cycle you are. Sometime in the Middle Ages it was decided that the major scale was so important that a special instrument was designed to emphasize it so that any moron could play a major scale without difficulty. Something like a harp with a string set for every chromatic patch was placed sideways in a box and levers were built so that some of the levers could be offset and others could be emphasize, giving the major scale. This is the piano, which I have a pet name for -- the Major Scale for Dummies. After they did this, the instrument was locked into a pitch structure. Then they had to decide what to name the notes which beforehand were numerical. They decided to use the first seven letters to the alphabet but to distinguish it from the ABCs of writing they decided not to start on A but rather to start on C. This is the reason Western music and written music is entirely in the key of C, and all other musical keys have to be derived from the key of C. The guitar is not like that. It is not locked into a key except that all of the open strings are notes in the key of C. But once you leave the nut behind the guitar is principally key free, and that means that you can study it numerically rather than alphabetically. But since written music and the piano have a homebase in the key of C., most guitarists have been conditioned to learn everything starting in the key of C. To me, that is not a very sensible approach to an instrument that presents an a priori alphabetical determination of pitch, but it is the common authority. Rock and popular guitarists are like children in kindergarten. It is easiest for them to play in keys containing open strings. All the open strings on guitar are named notes, but that hardly means that if you study the cycle of fourths you are leaving rock and roll behind, because the cycle is a circle of 12 notes. You will go around and around the whole thing. And if it troubles you, just take the cycle of fourths and re-alphabetize it, putting whenever you want at the top. Just keep the same relationship. I hope you find this helpful. Again, thanks for writing. Best regards, Richard Lloyd
	Hello Richard, I was having a discussion with some colleagues about why it's such a pain in the ass tuning the g string and keeping it in tune. Any insight? Sincerely, Tuesday Nite Mike
	Dear Mike: This is a great question.  And first of all, you are not imagining things.   The difficulty which you are having in tuning is the result of some decisions made hundreds of years ago and it is a problem which faces all guitarists who develop a discerning ear.  I am going to offer one possible solution which you can use to make it a little better, but first I think it is important to get a little understanding of what is going on. Originally, the musical notes that we use were developed according to acoustic principles and ratios: dividing a string by 1/2, 2/3, 3/4 and so on.  Ultimately 12 separate tones were developed which slowly spiral away from one another just like the lines in a sea shell.  Nature is musical.  As a result, the octaves are slightly askew and don't meet up exactly.  The difference from one octave to the next is the smallest musical interval and is called the comma.  The same word comma that we used to separate parts of a sentence.  You don't hear the comma on a single string but only when you use separate strings for all the notes.  This is the reason why you cannot tune a piano with a machine but have to hire somebody to come in and tune by ear.   They call this tempered tuning, because you need to temper to the commas or the separate notes will begin to sound sour when played against each other. The guitar is like this on a smaller scale.  Around the time of the first orchestras, musicians faced a problem.  When they were tuned to natural acoustic principles they could really only play in one key and sound in tune.  When they attempted to play together a piece of music in a different key it would sound awful.  This meant that concerts could only be given using musical compositions written in a single key.  Musicologists began looking for alternative ways to adjust the musical intervals to get over this problem.   The formula that won out is called equal temperament.  It is an adjustment to the natural spiral of musical acoustics in order to make a circle so that the octaves meet up.  The way that this is done is simply to take the difference in frequency between a note and its natural octave and divide by 12.  This makes the difference between all the notes equal.  It means that you can play equally in tune in all keys.  Bach was an advocate of this tuning and wrote the 'Well Tempered Clavier' as a defense of it.  This is a mountainous work whereby he shows that the new tuning can allow for not only performance in all keys on the same instruments but that you can even switch key in the middle of a piece.  As a result of this and the support of other leading musicians of the day, this  temperament won out. There is a tradeoff for this ability, which is that the natural acoustic principles governing music have been violated.  Esoteric musicologists declare that this is another sign of the fallen state of man from grace and is a sign of greediness.  For our purposes, it presents real tuning problems.  When two notes are slightly askew, their vibrations produce wave interference and phase cancellation.  This is called beating.  Because the octaves are now forced to be accurately tuned to one another, all the other notes suffer the seesaw effect of being slightly out of tune with each other.  This produces beating within the chords.  Again, although it is claimed that this beating and out of tunedness is too small to be noticed, it gave rise to your question; and esoteric musicology once again declares that it is a sign of the confusion and frenzied activity connected with the dying sacred impulse within man as he estranges himself from natural principles. On the guitar this means that practically speaking, any chord played across all six strings will give rise to subtle beating.  If you tune each string perfectly to a tuning machine, then the guitar will be slightly out of tune to itself.  This is what you are finding.  The acoustic principles will result in the G string being slightly sharp and the B string being slightly flat.  There is really no way to tune the guitar harmoniously with a machine.  I am going to offer an alternative method of tuning the guitar which results in a much more pleasing and balanced tuning and which moves the open string intervals closer to their natural acoustic relationships.  This particular method was shown me by guitarist Howard Harrison.  It does however, require the use of your ear. First tune the bottom E. string to a tuning fork or tuning machine.  Next, fret the E. string at the tenth fret.  This will give you a D.  Tune the D. string to this note by ear.  Next, fret the D. string at the fifth fret.   Tune the G. string to the D. string at the fifth fret.  Now fret the G. string at the second fret.  This gives you an A.  Tune the A. string from this note.  Now fret the A. string at the second fret.  Tune the B. string from this note.  It will be an octave up.  Next, fret the D. string at the second fret.  This gives you E.  Tune your high E from this.  Again this will be an octave. Voila!  Strum the guitar.  It should sound considerably more pleasing.  If you are playing an acoustic or electric guitar by yourself this should work delightfully.  If you are playing with other instruments it can take some real effort to find a harmoniousness between all the separate instruments, but I think that if you try this approach you will begin to get a taste of the difference between tuning to a machine and tuning to natural acoustic principles. But then, what if you are in a loud rock band or a large group where everybody uses the same tuning machine and everyone is in a hurry and no one has the time or inclination to listen to you rant about acoustic principles and esoteric philosophy?  Then I will offer you this approach: Tune the guitar as usual to the machine.  Tune the G. string slightly flat by about 2 cents.  Make sure that the B. string is not flat.  The B. string can be raised ever so slightly.  Perhaps one cent or even 1/2.  Experiment with it.  If you have been using the other approach to tuning you should start to develop an ear for yourself.  In any case, this approach can help significantly.  Neither method can recover the full acoustic balance because all the frets are placed according to equal temperament.  As long as we insist on being able to play in every key at the same time we will suffer this tradeoff.  Enjoy.
	Dear richard, my name is Jerico Torres from the PhilippinesI would like to know if the solo for "See no Evil" on the Blow Up re-issue was improvised on the spot or rehearsed beforehand; personally, think that the live See No Evil solo in the Blow Up is better than its studio recorded counterpart in Marquee Moon in both timing and melodiousness, were you using a different scale or chord substitution perhaps? Thanks again and more power.
	Dear Jerico, Thanks for your question. I'm glad you like The Blow Up. In order to answer your question I need to speak about soloing in general. When I am ask to play a solo in a song, I study the melodies that are suggested by both the chordal structure and the rhythmic cadence of the entire song, the vocal line, and the instrumental section itself. I might fish around for interesting melody for a while. I don't usually follow the vocal melody but may use it as a suggestion for a counterpoint. I can usually come up with a pretty good opening gambit, followed by the close, while having a good deal more trouble with the body of the section. I actually do think structurally as if I were writing an entire orchestral piece, or, to use another analogy, as though I were writing a play needing a plot and a denuemon. The plot should have an opening statement, some plot twists, and a conclusion or a wrap up which leaves the listener satisfied (or startled). By the time the Television songs like See No Evil went to record I would know pretty much exactly what I was going to play, and I could play the same solo again note for note. Some of the solos on the Television records which I play are in fact double tracked, which is rather an unusual thing. Anyway, playing alive I would usually experiment, using the written solo as my template from which to depart. Over a course of time this would usually assure me that the written solo in fact was the best I was going to get out of myself for that particular passage, or cause me to decide to permanently change it to something else. When diverging from the written solo, I could do one of two things: either stretch or re- cast the standard or do something else entirely. An interesting facet of making records and being in a band which plays live is that you learn that the music which makes it to a record or CD, no matter how inspired or well recorded, is really only one snapshot or document of a living experience. The other thing that you find out is that what you put on a record is what counts in the brains of the majority of your listeners. Unless you've been following the band from before they made their record, it is likely that the record is the first and most influential hearing that you'll have of a particular band. It is certainly the document that will survive past the ordinary life of any particular musical grouping. As flawed as live performance recordings can be, they do provide another look into the actual living musical exchange that existed between the members of a particular group. I'm very glad that you enjoy that particular recording, and I am honored that you point out that particular solo as inspiring to you. Thanks.
	You mention in the Pythagorus piece in your "Studies" section that you have a personal style of teaching; why do you approach teaching in this way? What are the advantages?
	There are two types of musical knowledge. Inferior and superior. Inferior musical knowledge is when you learn a riff here and a riff there and then try to cobble it altogether or to adduce from those licks some other musical phrases. A superior musical knowledge is like the skeleton key which the superintendent of a building might have, fitting all the locks and opening all the doors in the building. There is also the matter of guitarists learning a little bit here and a little bit there and having all these bits stored in different parts of the brain. This would be kind of like cutting a map up into a jigsaw puzzle and then try to travel using each piece separately. For this reason, when I teach, even with guitarists who are exceptionally well versed, we nonetheless return to the absolute beginning. There is nothing more exciting for me to see than to see a guitarist become a musician. There is also the matter of the chemical approach. You know that all molecules are made of atoms and that the number of atoms which have any meeting in the natural world are really quite small. In the same way, on the Fred Board, the number of patternings which can exist on any given string or number of strings is also limited. If one can learn these patterns by themselves, without reference to any musical ideas, the learning of musical ideas becomes much easier. This is the same thing that we all did when we learned the alphabet. Now, we hardly ever think of the letters as we make up words, and we hardly even think of the words but rather as the meaning which we intend with them. Stick with me, and as we develop the lessons I think you'll find a tremendous amount of sense in it. And please feel free to ask questions and make comments as we go along.
	Dear Richard: I find your teachings about music theory interesting and enlightening. My question concerns chord progressions that don't seem to fit any mode or system but still sound good. For example, the first line of David Bowie's "After All" goes: Em, A, Am, Em, F. This may be Phrygian except for the switch from IV major to minor. Can you comment on non-diatonic chord progressions? Bill
	With respect to chord progressions, this may be a simple matter of substitution. Any chord can be replaced by any other chord who shares a tone with it. This can sometimes give very interesting results and sometimes can stink, depending upon the melody of the song and the rest of the chordal structure. Since I don't know the David Bowie song off hand, I can't say what mode it might may be in, but if you follow the lessons column here on my web site you'll see that we will get to modes in a very interesting way. It may however, take some time to build a foundation upon which to discuss the modes properly. I urge you to join us as we climb the musical mountain.
	I'm interested in finding out which modes you and Tom use in your playing? Trying to break out of a blues/rock/pentatonic/yawn style which I grew up in and could use a few clues in the right direction. Just knowing would be helpful for my ear to associate with the sounds. Thanks for any help.
	I've just been going over this with a number of my students, so I am happy to go over it with you as well, realizing that with in person students we can work "from the ground up." The major scale is like a color wheel which you can turn around the seven notes of a particular key, and thus becomes as much minor as major. It works a lot like musical chairs, which was originally a teaching tool for just this aspect of music. Lets see how: the modes follow the harmonized "chords in a key" formula, ,which is: I )major, ii)minor, iii) minor, IV) major, V) major, vi) minor, vii) diminished. This gives us three major and three minor modes, and one diminished. Of those seven, the fourth and seventh are very rare to see in rock music, and for our purposes, can be dismissed (for the moment). This leaves two major and three minor modes to contend with. Of the major modes, the Ionian contains the natural seven, which lends it its saccharine character. You are unlikely to find Ionian modes in any blues rock, although I do use Ionian for a sweet song like Misty Eyes. This leaves Mixolydian, which is the major scale with one flat, the flatted seventh. This is the major scale you will find most often in rock and blues, when one wishes to retain the dignity and majestic qualities of the major scale while blunting the perky nature of the seventh by using its secondary minor, the b7. Try this against something like See No Evil, which would be like playing melody in the key of 'C,' while the song is in the key of 'G.' This is Mixolydian. As to the minors, we have three. Aeolian is called the 'natural minor,' containing three flats, the b3, the b7, and b6th. The third determines if something is minor or not, while the seventh is our nice easy to get along with b7. We also have the b6, which moves into the orbit of the fifth, which overshadows it, and renders it less consequential. This is the mode that you will find the solo to 'Stairway to heaven', but in our case you can try it out to 'Elevation', which means that while the song is in the key of Am, you will be soloing as if you were playing in 'C', but with your tonal center of gravity shifted to the A. The next minor mode to consider would be the Dorian, which is like an Aeolian natural minor with a raised natural sixth. This mode is used a lot when one wishes to introduce a bit of the stature and dignity of the upper portion of the major scale to a minor mode. One example of a player who likes to solo in Dorian would be Carlos Santana. I'll let you try and figure out where you might hear Dorian in a Television or Richard Lloyd song. That leaves Phrygian, which is like Aeolian with an additional flat, the b2. The fact that the two moves so close to the tonic is the reason that Phrygian gets used in cultures with fuzzier familiar boundaries, like Spanish and Arabesque scales. This b2 lends Phrygian a kind of familiar 'coziness', but is not a staple of the blues rockers. You might detect some Phrygian turns in a song like 'Call Mr. Lee.' The Lydian, or fourth mode, is the major with a #4, and having the forth estrange itself from the third gives it a real aloofness and so you won't find it used too much in popular music, but rather in jazz and composition. The seventh, or Locrian, is a diminished mode, and also is not found too often, with a flatted fifth. You can imagine that I-IV-V progressions don't have much use of a scale which has a b5 in it. But ALL the modes are necessary in passing from one to another across the fretboard, and thinking intervallically can really open up your melodic structures. Good luck with it, and let us know how it goes.