 Guitar and Excel. Open chords, C major scale, B diminished, 7th chord, intervals. Get ready because it's time for our guitar scales to excel. Here we are in Excel. If you don't have access to this workbook that's okay because we basically built this from a blank worksheet but we did so in a prior section so if you want to build this from a blank worksheet you may want to begin back there. However, you don't necessarily need access to this workbook if looking at this from a music theory standpoint because we'll simply use it as a tool to map out the fretboard, give us the notes, the scale, the chords that we're focused in on. If you do have access to this workbook though there's currently like nine tabs down below. We've got seven of these example tabs, an OG orange tab and the practice tab. The OG orange tab represent in the original worksheet we put together in a prior section. It now acting as our starting point going forward mapping out the entire fretboard, giving us our entire musical alphabet in letters, numbers and both having a key that can be adjusted with this green cell which adjusts the worksheets on the right hand side providing us the scale that we're in, the notes in that scale and the chord constructions from the notes that are in that scale. We then wanted to focus in on open position in the key of C and look at all the chord constructions from each of the notes in that scale starting of course with the C major chord which we did in the first tab mapping out the fretboard from fret one to three open position. We looked at the one, two, three notes in the chord, mapped them out, fingered them, discussed them in detail. We then moved to the four chord. We skipped the two and the three because we wanted the first look at the major chords which are the one, four, five chords. So we looked at the F, mapped it out in the open position defined as frets one through three, discussed it in detail. We went to the five chord, the G chord, also a major chord, mapped it out, discussed it in detail. Back to the minors then we went to the D minor, the two chord, mapped it out, discussed it in detail. Then to the three chord, another minor chord, the E minor chord this time, mapped it out. Then we went to the A minor chord, dropping down to the six where that is located, mapped out the A minor chord and now we're looking at the seventh chord construction which is going to be the diminished one, the strange one that often people ignore but we're not going to ignore it here. I used to do that. I used to ignore it but I'm not doing that now because it's important. This is important and it's pretty easy to look at and there's uses for it so don't just skip over it. Let's check it out. So we talked about last time, we mapped it out on frets one through three and then we mapped out some fingerings that we can use to finger it there and we also discussed how you might basically move the shape or use the shape. Now we're going to get into some more detail in terms of the intervals which is really interesting here because this is the reason why the diminished chord is different from the major chords and the minor chords and can give us some insights in terms of how we might use them. I also think that whenever we have just these simple chords and this one's a simple chord to finger as well then it's useful to just finger it and then think about it in some detail possibly in the morning when your mind is still working and that'll help you to get straight all these different kind of relative things that we're looking at because all this stuff kind of mushes together and what we want to do is be able to think of them in their own think of them so that all the concepts don't mush together such as the numbering systems. So let's look at the numbering systems we'll just list them first. First, we need some kind of system to label all the individual notes in the musical alphabet. We could do that with letters but we can also do that with numbers. We then are going to have a numbering system that's going to be mapping out the relative positions of the notes in the scale in this case the C major scale seven of the twelve notes then being mapped out. We can use a Roman numeral system. Roman numerals those crazy Romans have very difficult numbers to write but you can capitalize them and make them lowercase which is kind of cool given you another level of meaning which can allow us to make the capital numbers the major chords and the small numbers or lowercase the minor chords and then the little dot means it's kind of like a minor chord with a third but then it has the diminished on it and then we have a numbering system with regards to the placement of the notes relative to the first note in the chord not relative to the scale and we'll focus on that numbering system and then we can talk about the intervals between the first note in the scale and the other notes that are in the scale which is important because those intervals are what is causing the differences between major minor diminished and so on so first let's just give a quick recap of this system in terms of how we're naming the notes back to the og tab we're going to go to the og tab and this is our musical alphabet in letters we can see that if you count up in letters and you just look at the key of c it's pretty easy to go one way a b c d e f g but when you go backwards it's a little bit difficult just to do a try and go to g f e d c b a you could do that but it's a little bit difficult to do just that if you add the sharps and the flats when you go up the musical alphabet you're usually going up and sharpening things so you got a a sharp b c c sharp d d sharp e f sharp g g sharp and then when you go down you'd have to flat it a flat g g uh g flat f e d e flat d d flat you got to remember where there's not a sharp and a flat and whatnot that gets difficult it's also difficult to look at the intervals when i'm trying to say how far of an absolute distance and you can think of these as basically distances how far in distances if i'm if i'm comparing it to like miles is the e from the a well it's it's kind of difficult to do that if i have to count it on my fingers and then remember where the sharps and flats are and whatnot if you number them however it's pretty easy to do we can just do some subtraction there and we can find the difference so i highly i really think it's useful to number them and so i'm going to uh emphasize that here i know that so how would you do that we'll just number them these are absolute numbers so the a is a one the a sharp or b flat is a two i'm not going to distinguish between sharps and flats because we're trying to get an easy numbering system that we can then just use some simple math with which could be useful so you want to learn the letters too i'm not saying this replaces the letters i'm just saying it would be an an added thing that would be useful a b is a three c is a four uh c sharp five uh d is a six d sharp or e flat seven e is an f i'm sorry e is an f e is an eight uh f is a nine f sharp or g flat 10 uh g is 11 and then the g sharp or a flat is going to be the 12 and then it goes back to the one so then we used that numbering system to construct our worksheet on the right hand side using the formula of whole step whole step two notes two notes half step one note whole step whole step whole step whole step half step so that's going to be our formula here you can see that with numbers how easy it is to do you could just say if i had numbers i don't have to count on my fingers i don't have to go like c like okay c uh d you know i i could just say well it's at a it's at a four and then it's going to go to a five six right instead of going c c sharp uh d right on my fingers and then i can know that a six is a d obviously to do that you have to memorize that a six is a d six plus two is eight eight is an e eight plus one is nine nine is an f nine plus two is 11 11 is a g 11 plus two around the horn because there's only 12 notes in the musical alphabets 12 back to one one is an a one plus two is three uh three is a b three plus one is four four is a c and we're back home again those now being the notes in our construction over here there we have them then we're going to number these notes in terms of the relative positions in the scale being seven notes out of the 12 so let's go back over here that's where we are here we've got our numbering system that we have created from the 12 notes that are now uh the seven notes then we numbered them over here with the capital and lowercase the capitals representing the upper case are representing the major chord constructions and it just so happens that if you start on the c and you take every other note that's how we construct the chord c e g then it ends up to be a major chord construction why because of the intervals so that's what we'll get into now if you do that starting with an f this this this every other note happens to end up with a major construction why because of the intervals that we'll talk about now same with the g and we talked about the minors same chord construction we start with the d every other note boom boom boom d f a but it ends up to be a minor chord construction indicated by the lower case why because of the intervals now note down here we have the the the third circle so this is just taking every other note uh in the circle up top circle of thirds you could call it or something like that and that actually makes a little bit easier because now I could say okay I'm I'm just going to take this these three that are closest to each other and that's my c c uh e g so I don't have to go c e g I could just take my circle of thirds I could start on the b over here and I can go there's my b there's my d there's my f right I go b d f so I'm trying to add that into my worksheet I haven't put it everywhere but I think I might put that into the master worksheet over here I kind of squeezed it in there as you can see so now what we would like to do is concentrate on the interval so this is something I would kind of just practice doing whenever you learn a new chord and just think okay if I finger that chord and we're going to finger it on the one uh three five right so here's the one three five remember that these positions mean the the one relative to the chord so it's so it's not one relative to the scale that would be a c it's one relative to the chord which is a b and you can think of that chord as as what's the relative scale to that chord which would be over here the locum so there's your b and uh then the third if I went to the to the relative mode of locum would be a d right and then and then if I go to the fifth the relative is the locum of an f but I don't want to have to remember the locum scale which is kind of a weird scale that most people don't memorize but it would be cool if you could what I want to do is know by the intervals which is what we're talking about here what the difference is between the the majors the minors and the diminished so we can just finger this out and then look at those intervals so here's the b in green that's going to be the root and then we have the third right here and then we have the fifth here so this is one way that you can play it and this is a nice movable shape and you can mute that g pretty easily if you didn't want to ring it out although you could ring it out if you're playing in the key of c because it would kind of fit at least in the key all right so then I would go through each of these and first just think about the 135 which is the 135 of this diminished chord and so I could say okay the first finger if I look at it here I'm going to copy this see if I could focus in on it it's going to be a boom with the yellow that's my focusing color so then I'm going to say that that one is uh the root so that's going to be the root or the one and then I'm going to go okay down one string and over one string is going to be the fifth so I'm going to say that's the fifth now that is the important interval that kind of distinguishes or one of them that distinguishes the main one that distinguishes that's different between both the majors and the minor that's not either a minor or a major interval that's going to be this diminished kind of interval and remember you can kind of see that like if I looked at an a this would be the power chord a lot of our constructions you're going to see that shape because that's the the fifth interval with a with a diminished we flat the fifth you can think that's one way that you can think of it why do we flat the fifth because that's just how it happens to work out when we build our major construction and take every other note from the seventh note it ends up with a flat fifth so we're not really flatting the fifth it's not like we're flatting the fifth in order to make it we're we're flatting the fifth because that's what happens when you construct our normal chord based on the seventh note it ends up with an interval of not seven notes but six notes so from a from our standpoint it would be okay that would be for both major and minor and then I'm going to flat the fifth flatting just means I'm going to go back a step so it's not it doesn't and remember the flatting when I say flat we use the sharps and flats to name chords so you could say like again if there were two D's for example if there was a D flat and a D in the scale we didn't want we don't want two D's so so we might then call one of those D's a C sharp right so that's one reason you have sharps and flats and then if I use it as a verb to flat something or to sharp something the flat just means I'm taking it back and the sharpen means I'm going to take it up right so I'm flatting it so I'm going to take it take this back so that's going to be our characteristic shape that you want to basically see anytime you see that interval except between these two strings because of the funny relationship in which case it would be those two strings the anytime you see that relationship that's going to give you that kind of distinctive sound which isn't bad necessarily right although it's kind of strange right and then but it does have that it has a lot of potential for resolution so that's the big one and then we're going to go down here and then I'm like okay and there's the the the third so there's the third and boom so that's going to be my chord construction now you might try to compare this like if I was to make a normal minor type of chord because you're saying let's like okay it's kind of a lowercase thing maybe that means it's close to like a minor so if I did like a minor chord construction it would look like this right on this string in other words here's remember this is my a minor and then I can make that into a bar chord by changing these fingers so it would look like that if I had to borrow this off if I just move this up to a b it would look like that that would be my minor bar chord construction off of this string the b being my root and so what is happening here well I still have my third is is right here so there's my my third is this one right and so but now and this this note right here is a duplicate note so I have two of the b's so I can remove that and then I'm flatting the fifth so I'm flatting the fifth so it looks kind of like that but it might be easier to play you could play it like that but it might be easier to play switching these two fingers up and playing it like that actually you might want to experiment with both of those ways of playing it because then if you play it this way you could pick up that added note of here if you wanted to do that but I usually think that's an easier one to to see this relationship between these two strings so in any case so it's kind of like the minor we kind of converted the minor and then flatted the fifth because if it was a major construction it would look like it would look like this right whereas the third the third would be different so this is the third is similar to the minor and then you got the funny thing going on with the fifth all right so then the next thing I would do is is actually map out the intervals of each of the notes so if I start on the one note over here and I'm going to use a little bit of math and this is why it's I think it's useful to name the notes as numbers name the notes as numbers all right so then we can say because then we can say like this is I'll go through each of these and I would do this with the worksheet and then try to do it without the worksheet right I'm going to say well this is relative position one why do I say it's relative it's relative not to the scale that it's in it's relative to the one note of the chord which you can think of as relative to the related mode but I'm just going to say it's relative to the one note it's relative position one of note three which is a b uh which is of course note three or a b so then I'm going to go to this one and say okay there's my fifth so that's going to be over here and now you'll this these numbers up here represent the intervals between the one note and all of the other notes for the first chord in the worksheet so that means this is for a c major chord so I didn't put an interval for seven intervals because it would make a long worksheet what I'm going to do instead is try to say I'm going to compare everything to the the one chord so I'm going to say over here these notes are what the intervals are for the one chord which chords are different if I was to look at the minor chords it would be only the three out of these three the one three five only the three would be different instead of four notes away it would be three notes away over here with the diminished I also made it yellow because it's going to be different as well it's not going to be seven notes away as has been all other fifths up until this point whether they be major or minor but instead it's going to be six notes away so now I'm going to say okay there's there's my not my seven note away but there's my flattened six note away and you can call it a diminished fifth if you want because now I'm going to try to name that uh specifically as a diminished chord and name it that it's a different interval six note away interval of note three which is a b so I'm going to say okay three plus six is going to give us nine note number nine is an f so that's going to be uh that one and then I can go down to this one which is going to be the and then this is going to be a D and the D is not four notes away that's what it would be if it was a major chord construction on chord one it's similar to the minors and that it's different it's a three note away not um you could call it a minor third because that's kind of another name for the distance three notes away or a whole step and a half step uh so you could call it a three note away minor third for the diminished so you might call it a diminished third if you want as well but that minor third you might still keep the minor third even though it's on the diminished chord because that's kind of the name of the of the interval uh of it so but you could throw on there that it's a diminished third when you're trying to map it in your mind as well and so and so of note three which is a b so it's going to be uh three of a b plus three notes away is going to be six and six is a d so notice what we're uh so so six is a d and remember what we're not doing here is i'm not saying this is the fifth of the note in this scale right this is like for example this wasn't the fifth of a g this would be the fifth of its related scale which in this case we can say the locian scale the modal same notes but starting with the one being uh the seventh right and that would that would mean the fifth and that way would be the uh f and then the third over here would be the d okay let's also think about this on one string because sometimes i think that's easier to see as well so if i was to say okay let's go back to this this one what does it mean to be a seven note away fifth so again the fifth represents its relative place and its relative scale five notes away but i can define it not by that but by its interval which is i'm sorry not seven notes away but rather six notes because that's that's the distinguishing factor so if i started on a b and i went six notes up i'd go one two three four five six boom we get here that's an f and so that's going to be an f and so that's but that doesn't help me to play it over here instead i'm going to use this f so that's an f too those are the same notes so how are they related well on the fretboard to be one two three four five strings up the fretboard and one string toward the ceiling you get to the same note so if i do the third you get a similar kind of thing this is not a four note away but rather it's a three note away like minor third so i'm starting from the root which is the b and if i went three notes away from the b one two three i would end up here which is going to be a d so so that d in this are two d's right so you can start to kind of map map out the fretboard a little bit that way when you start looking at these types of intervals that way as well so let's do that like a little bit faster if i was to finger this again i'm going to say okay let's go back to the one and then say this is going to be i'm just going to hold that down and say okay that's relative position one of note three which is a b it's right relative position one of note three b which is note three a b and then i'm going to go here and say okay then this one is going to be this one is relative position not seven notes away but because it's different it's flatted this is six notes away relative position six note away flatted diminished fifth right and then and then i could say and of note three which is a b so three plus six is going to give me nine and note number nine is an f and then i can go okay and then this one is going to be and i can say this is not four notes away but it's three notes away because it's different from note number one although it's the same as two three and six i can call it still a minor third so it's a three note away minor third even though this isn't a minor chord because i'm thinking of that minor third as a name of distance not the name of the chord it's a minor third which is three notes or a half step and a whole step whole step and a half step right so minor third of note three which is a b so then i can say okay three plus three gives me six and note number six is a d so you see how how if you if you did if you just take a little bit of time and just map that out then you'll start to practice the intervals and by distinguishing that this is a different interval than the one you're solidifying not only the diminished but you're also solidifying the intervals for the one which you're comparing it to as well this one's different and so by distinguishing the differences you're also distinguishing or defining in your mind both the major chords and the minor chord so then you can start to say well what if i added other things and you could work with you know other types of intervals here so if i added like an f up top so it looks something like that and then you can start to say well that f would be would be another not seven note away but six note away because it's flatted six note away diminished off diminished fifth of note three which is a b so that's going to be three plus six which is nine and nine is an f and then you can also start to think about these relative positions and say what way to say the fifth like if this when i was looking at the fifth before and i looked above the root note the fifth is always right above it whether it be a major or minor construction because the fifth was always seven notes away on major and minor constructions now here of course the fifth isn't going to be the same because the interval is different and therefore the fifth on the diminished if i was to go up is up a string and back a string is where you're going to find the fifth just like when you find the fifth below the fifth is not down one string and over two strings like normal on both major and minor but down one string and over one string here and so then you can you can practice that with other intervals as well you can of course also add notes to a major scale so for example you could you could take your your major scale and you can add the notes in there like we talked about before meaning for example what if i ring out this g in there and you can you know test that out ring that out now normally when you're testing this stuff out you're using it to to go back to the c right you're probably not just going to be jammin unless you're jammin and low key in right but but so you can test out what kind of things might work well as i resolve back to the c right see all i'm doing is taking my fingers often on these positions and then if you analyze that you can say okay well what am i doing there well i'm taking then i'm utilizing these strings and then i'm picking up the the 13 right here oh no what in the world that just happened excels trying to get me trying to get me upset it's trying to pick a fight with me but it's not going to happen because i'm totally calm you'd have a better chance excel of picking a booger after dinner out of the nose of the booger monster than to pick a fight with me because i'm not taking the bait man the booger monster being kind of like the cookie monster but with boogers let's copy this and put it over here so there's the g that we were talking about and then of course you could experiment with that with the other fingerings up top right and so you could experiment with this one now we kind of experimented a little bit with just the strumming of it and then if you were to analyze each of these now you could say okay that then i would be going back and forth to the a if i if i was to lift up that thing and then you can and you can look at the intervals then i'm not going to get into the intervals in here in detail right now we might dive into that later but right now i just want to note that these three intervals are fairly straightforward and they can be indicated with the roman numerals right because the uppercase roman numerals are the majors versus the lower cases of the minors and that's giving you an indication from a standpoint of intervals that the third interval is going to be is is going to be the one that is different between the two that's the major defining factor boom however when you get into these other ones when you when you get up above the seven notice that that it's not going to be the same you just can't say it's a major or a minor you're going to have to map out the intervals per position right the two even though it's a minor might have different intervals than the six the one might have different intervals than the five even though major chord constructions and that's where it gets a little bit more confusing when you start looking at the intervals up top also just want to note that when we look at these intervals up top that i basically said that these let's go up here to see this i said that that these intervals kind of relate to its related chord where you say well we saw the one we saw the three and we saw the five it's related scale but when i get up this i can see the seven right there there's the seven which is an a so that makes sense but then what are we doing with this what are we doing with this nine there's only seven notes in here so remember what's happening is it's just going around the horn again and getting back to the c which is the two so we don't we don't want to call it the two because we're trying to keep on going up from one three seven so now so you but you can think about it as the two being equivalent to the nine right the they're the same right and then if i went up two more again i end up at an e that's the 11 which is equivalent to the four right and if i went up again the 13 you get to the g that's equivalent here so so that's i don't want to dive into that in a lot of detail right now but if you want to start diving into that stuff then i just want to kind of point that out here and you can you could see that if you take every other note in in our circle here and if you just kept going around if you kept going around you would pick up then the notes that you didn't pick up last time but instead of saying it's the two you're going to say it's a nine right and you can also see that if you take our circle of thirds down here where if i was to starts on on uh the b for example so now my b is here then i could just keep going around so it's going to be uh the b there's the d there's the f there's the a there's the c there's the e there's the g so notice on this construction it's easy for me just to see you know all of the notes but just remember when we start naming the notes from nine to thirteen you're using numbers that aren't in the scale and you can think of them again as equivalent to the numbers that are in the scale right all right so we'll talk maybe more about that later