12 Notes on the Guitar
As most of you may already know, a “normal” scale, in contrast to the 12-tone scale, contains only 7 notes. There are also scales like the pentatonic or the hexatonic, but also many other funny names for funny scales.
The major scale, which we all know from “My Little Ducklings”, has its normal 7 notes. Which sounds quite normal and logical to us.
But there are actually many other scales. Besides the pentatonic, there are a whole bunch of modes and many more.
What we are looking at today, however, has nothing to do with good and evil and is called: The 12-tone scale.
12-Tone Scale
Strictly speaking, chromatic is not a scale, but simply all possible notes that exist (within an octave). So simply a way of playing 12 notes in a row. On the other hand, 12 notes in a row are also somehow a scale, so let’s just leave it at “scale” 🙂
The approach back then was that all 12 notes that exist in music are played before we start again. So we need all the chromatic notes within half an octave and arrange them in a way that somehow makes sense.
Sounds kind of wrong?
Don’t worry. At first, it sounds wrong to everyone. It is said that the better your ear, the more sounds right to you.
For example, you can play the biggest junk together and the jazz musician will find a logical explanation for your playing while the beginner would simply label you as “wrong cat music”.
That’s why I always recommend ear training. It can help tremendously and doesn’t require any theory. It’s simply about training your ear. Because music has no “wrong” notes. There are only passing notes that eventually reach their destination (hopefully) and resolve the whole spook.
Of course, many will now think that there are probably wrong notes. That’s true, too. Because wrong notes can actually only be played by someone who knows the right notes very well. But that’s a whole other topic and we’re digressing a bit. 🙂
12 Tone
Arnold Schoenberg was, so to speak, the creator of 12-tone music and established its formulas and rules. Actually, he broke the rules of music to establish new rules (no one has to understand!). The next thing you could read would be serial music. But it is a bit far-fetched here and another topic which we might look at sometime.
Here is an example of a song using the 12-tone principle.
So it sounds either very right or very wrong, doesn’t it?
For us, it’s not even about writing classical songs or any weird 12-tone melodies. It’s much more about gaining understanding and knowing that there’s more to the guitar than just the major scale and the pentatonic.
“Scale”
There is no “scale” in this sense. If there were one, it would be called the “chromatic scale”. So all the notes within an octave.
But playing these in a solo would be more than just “shabby” and wouldn’t sound too special either.
Although, here they also simply play a chromatic scale up and it’s anything but cheap. Maybe I’ll just take that back! 🙂
Anyway, the goal is to try to generate exciting lines, licks or whatever.
There are simple techniques for this that you can easily remember.
The 12 Tone Formula
Let’s look at the chromatic scale within an octave.
If we were to take these chromatic notes apart in a structured way so that it somehow makes sense, we would end up with either four triads (4x 3 notes) or three tetrads (3x 4 notes).
So if we were to play the tetrads in purely theoretical terms; C Maj7, D Maj7 and Bb7sus4, we would cover every note in the chromatic scale. You can see “proof” of this in the following list:
But we can do exactly the same thing with triads: Gsus2, Dbsus2, Bbsus2 and Ebsus2 make this possible.
A PDF of all the triads and 7th Chords Arpeggios you need for this can be downloaded here.
Writing Lines
The best way to write such lines is to first try to play all 12 notes one after the other before playing one twice.
In practice, it doesn’t matter how often the same note occurs, but it helps a lot when practicing, because you have some limitations and the ideas can’t grow wildly.
In the example at the very beginning, I simply wrote down all the notes randomly without any of them repeating.
Crab Formation
So that you don’t have to do the whole thing for an infinitely long time, there is the so-called “crab”.
The crab means nothing more than that the line you just played is played again, but this time starting from the end. So the last note would then be the first note again.
