Lesson 2: Music on the Guitar
Lesson 3: Tonality and the major scale (Incomplete)
When I head back to school this fall, I'm going to be teaching guitar lessons again, this time for several more students (around a dozen have expressed interest). That, along with my hope that I can get a decent 20-50 page lesson book together to Kinkos-publish and sell to students, makes me want to be as effective a guitar teacher as possible *and* have some good starter material for any book project I might try and get together this fall. So, I'm going to start posting guitar-based music lessons in the hopes that at least a few dmbtabs homies might get something out of them, and at least I'll have practiced and generated some material. If a bunch of people seem to enjoy reading them, I'll post more, hopefully one every few days depending on how much information is covered.
Lesson 1: Important Concepts
Covers: Some basic material that you should be familiar with while beginning to study either music or guitar.
The science behind music.
First, sound is energy that moves through materials in the form of waves. For our purposes, waves have two important characteristics, wavelength and frequency. Wavelength and frequency are inversely proportional; as one increases, the other decreases. As a sound wave's frequency increases, we hear it at a higher pitch. To ground this theory in the real world, imagine a man's voice vs. a girl's. The man's voice is lower in pitch, the girl's voice is higher. (Unless the girl happens to be my friend Ryan's girlfriend.) This comparison of two sounds of different pitches begins the development of one's sense of 'relative pitch', more about that (much) later.
In order to effectively communicate the idea of playing notes at different pitches to make music, we (Western culture) had to first define certain desired pitches, and then create a way to write them in some musical order. Enter modern-day music theory.
We have defined 7 important pitches as the notes which are the foundation of our music system; A, B, C, D, E, F, G. In case you're a fucking tard dick those are the first 7 letters of the alphabet. The note A is assigned to the pitch whose sound waves have a frequency of 440 Hz. The note B is assigned to the pitch at 495 Hz, C is assigned to 528 Hz, etc. etc. etc. If this isn't making sense, remember, as a pitch's frequency increases, we hear it as sounding higher. So, as the notes progress; A, B, C, D....they have successively higher pitches.
Also, there are more than just 7 notes; after the original 7 the musical alphabet repeats; A B C D E F G A B C D E F G..... There are also notes lower in pitch than the original A (at 440 Hz).
(Skip this if you haven't taken physics b/c it will mean nothing.) As the musical alphabet repeats and a specific note is reached again at a higher pitch, it is because the pitch's frequency is at a higher harmonic. For example, the original A has a frequency of 440 Hz...counting up A B C D E F G A, the second A has a frequency of 880 Hz.)
Remember, all of these letters and pitches and frequencies are all just parts of our system to describe sounds that sound higher than/lower then each other. If you're having trouble understanding this stuff-and lots of people do- read over it again with that in mind. It's important to understand these concepts because they are the logic behind every idea that music theory envelops, but to do so can be difficult without remembering the simple purpose of all the theory.
my approach to teaching complete beginners is usually to introduce basic ideas of playing guitar and music theory as two separate trains of thought for the first few weeks. as a student's capacity in both areas improves, the two are gradually linked. so, by the end of this lesson, the student would probably already know most of these chords; C, D, E, Em, G, A, Am in open position, and be developing dexterity in both hands. after the chords were learned and the material up to the end of this lesson was covered, i'd ask the student to tell me the names of each note in a few of the chords they're familiar with. this would begin their recognition of certain notes relating to each other in aurally-recognizable ways, which is a very important connection to make. well anyways here is lesson 2. 
