johnnyseven wrote:BacchusPaul wrote:
Major third: play a note, play another one string up and one fret down (like at the bottom of a G chord)
Fourth: Play two notes on consecutive strings on the same fret, like the top half of a power chord.
Fifth: Play a note, play another one string up and two frets up (like at the bottom of a power (or 5th) chord).
As you can see, the distance between the notes gets bigger as you go from third to fourth to fifth.
EDIT: Obviously this won't work if the strings are the G and B strings, because those are a different distance apart.
Thanks Paul. I did know these, and I use them, just didn't know what they were.
To be honest, this is something that fucks me off a bit. Most guitarists know a fair bit of theory, they maybe just aren't confident with terminology, which isn't surprising because if you read guitar magazines. Terms or phrases that have quite exact meanings get thrown around all over the place to mean different things to what they were supposed to mean originally. Also, I think that a lot of teachers and sort of, pro-style, shredder type guitarists use terms to make themselves sound like they know more than they do about what they're doing, or that what they're doing is more complicated than it actually is. It's like they're priests speaking Latin or something, and it's all hocus pocus.
It's the same with written music to an extent. Musical notation as it has evolved in Europe (and every else now too, I suppose, but it was based on those European standards) is a powerful tool to record on paper a sound that is produced by an instrument. It is designed to be communicative and quite easy to read, but when you see the way the musical score part of a a guitar piece appears along side the tab in the average guitar magazine, it's usually written in a really confusing way that must be willfully difficult to understand. One of the things we were always taught at uni was to make it easy to read, that's why you're writing it, because someone has to read it.
I'd love to write a book (and keep talking about it) of music theory for guitarists. I'd love to see a change of attitude so that people weren't intimidated by music theory. After all, you only have to look at the pages and pages of threads about fairly complicated technical stuff relating to valves, transistors, strings, springs, woods, construction techniques, voltages, impedances, wattages, etc. that we are all fairly comfortable with.
These terms are intended to be used so that two people talking about music can more quickly express a musical concept to each other. They shouldn't be scary, they should be useful. And if someone else doesn't know the term you're using or what it means, you should be able to explain it a different way. If you can't, then maybe you don't understand it. It should be a set of tools, and people shouldn't be made to feel stupid or less competent because they don't know the same terminology as someone else.
Like, I still don't understand jazz chords or how they're written but that's never been a problem because I know dozens of other ways of describing chords and intervals.
. On my board i've got A Boss SD-2, V3 Big Muff or a Deluxe depending on how i feel that day and a Dunlop Hendrix Octave Fuzz (the black MXR sized one). 
