Reading Library
Deep dives that pair with the lessons. Read whenever you want to understand why something works.
Foundations
Why music has 12 notes
Where the 12-note system comes from, why the piano keyboard looks the way it does, and how this all maps to the guitar fretboard.
Intervals — the complete map
Every interval from unison to octave: what it is, what it sounds like, what song it lives in, and how to find it on the fretboard.
Keys, scales, and chord families
A key is a family of 7 notes plus the 7 chords built from them. Once you see how the family is assembled, every progression in pop, rock, folk, and jazz starts to look familiar.
The Circle of Fifths, explained slowly
The most useful diagram in music — what it shows, what it doesn't, and how to use it daily.
Scales
The major scale, end to end
The single most important scale in Western music — its formula, its degrees, its tendency tones, and the way every other scale and chord is measured against it.
Pentatonic scales and the 5 boxes
Why 5-note scales sound 'safe', how the 5 box shapes cover the whole neck, and the trick that makes one shape work for both major and minor.
Chords
Open chords — a tour
The eight shapes every guitarist learns first, how they work physically, why some feel impossible at first, and how to fix the buzzing.
The CAGED system, end to end
How five open chord shapes, treated as movable blueprints, unlock every chord on every fret — and bring the scales right along with them.
7th chords and their function
Triads with one more note — and a whole world of new color.
Drop 2 and drop 3 voicings
How jazz guitarists turn close-position chords into playable shapes.
Harmony
Cadences — how phrases end
Cadences are the punctuation marks of music. Authentic, plagal, deceptive, and half cadences each create a different kind of 'pause' at the end of a phrase.
Roman numerals in practice
Why thinking in numerals (not chord names) is the secret of every working musician — and how to read, write, and transpose them.
12-bar blues and its variations
The most influential 12-measure form in popular music — its standard layout, its quick-change and jazz variations, and how the same 12 bars become rock, soul, jazz, and metal.
Secondary dominants
How to tonicize any chord in a key — the 'V of...' trick.
Modal interchange (borrowed chords)
Borrow from the parallel minor (or any parallel mode) to color a major key.
The tritone substitution
Replace any dominant 7 with another dominant 7 a tritone away.
Voice leading principles
Move each note of a chord as little as possible — the engine of smooth comping.
Jazz harmony — the language
An overview of what makes jazz sound like jazz.