alt Hacker NewsI struggle even knowing what the notes are called, but have a rudimentry knowledge of what some chords are, but not why. All that matters to me is how it sounds, and since I am singing with guitar, improvising as I go , when someone asks what note or chords I am useing , I do struggle for an answer, but it occurs to me , now, to tell them to play whichever ones they like the most, and we will MAKE it work.
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Am not sure if this is indeed what you are talking about but if it's the realisation that any song can be played in any key, and that you can mechanically 'transpose' (I think of it as shifting) any song in whichever key you want and more fundamentally, a tune is made of intervals, that was a big aha moment for me too.
The next was discovering the tonal center or 'root' of a song. A lot of gears clicked into place at that point.
take a look at this interactive course I made: https://www.gitori.com/learn/FBG-101 Once you finish that, you can start playing the accompanying games to practice what you learnt
Learn the notes on the E string, then the concept of an octave and how to find them.
If you play the open E string, the octave for this is on the D string 2nd fret.
The easiest way I found was to think of the notes on each of the strings are a repeated pattern starting in different positions.
Start with the whole notes (no sharps or flats)
EFGABCD ABCDEFG
Once you've got them down you can learn the sharps/flats
That's one way to do it. Honestly, that's the beauty of the guitar. You can just learn a handful of chord shapes and be off to the races. But it also turns into it's biggest weakness when people want to go deeper into learning and understanding the instrument.
Learning the notes helped me immensely. Like, one of the lowest effort highest leverage activities. It took a few weeks of deliberate practice and it made a lot of things easier. I just followed this: https://youtu.be/PJddQ6Q0UDo?si=DCCtH5Y6RzHNY5Nn
Highly recommend it.