My guitars are actually just bait to make learning music how music works a little more fun and interesting. Notice I said "how music works" and not music theory. What I've discovered is music theory is exactly as dry and complicated as trying to put feeling into mathematical equations, because that's really where it comes from.
Our natural form of communication is direct heart to heart feeling. Our brains block that communication and convert it to sensory input and empirical data. If it didn't none of the objective reality we're in would even be possible, being an individual amongst other individuals wouldn't be possible.
Reality is a moving scene entirely staged and produced by our subconscious. It converts feeling into harmonics and harmonics into music and then music into geometry. Everything in physical reality can be put on a scale between two opposing polarities. This means that everything we have ever known in this world is a composition of notes and intervals arranged in a pattern... including us.
Life is a song, a composition of harmonically arranged notes. Death is when you decompose the song into a just a bunch of notes. First you have to separate the notes, that's what hell is for, it creates the divisions among and within us to establish and maintain our individuality. Death or hell is the "origin of species" or how one thing becomes many things.
Time is music, space is geometry and gravity is the harmonic function that splits us apart. We measure time by notes and intervals, significant events and the "time" between them. Space is the same way, objects and the space between them.
What is music? Tension and release for one thing. The scale begins at zero tension, unison, perfect harmony. This is the subjective state where we all exist as one. There is no tension between us because there is no differentiation. It's also the state we were in prior to our conception. Genesis is the beginning of division or decomposition. "Looks like life but feels like death" as Leonard Cohen so eloquently put it.
What's going on here isn't life, it's a roller coaster ride thru a three ring circus. All the ups and downs we experience are a cascading series of tension and release cycles. We build tension in our waking day and it's released in our sleep only to wake up and repeat the cycle all over again. Even sex is a build up and release of tension.
What "decomposes" us is entropy. It's the law of the fall and the reason no life can escape death. It's two thirds disharmony against one third harmony, one third creation vs two thirds destruction. With two thirds of our day (die) spent creating tension and only one third in relief of that tension life doesn't stand a chance in hell.
The process continues thru a spiral staircase of scales ascending thru octaves toward higher levels of energy, complexity, and tension. The level of complexity we're at now can only be maintained under extreme tension and we're all feeling that without realizing why. The tension is "in the air" so to speak.
All of our actions here are reactions, we're dancing to the music but it's full of tension and disharmony. We can relieve some of that tension by creating harmonies using the elements of disharmony but it's only temporary relief and can't prevent our eventual demise.
Music moves us thru tension and release because our souls are like harmonic detectors. Remember they exist in a state of unison or total harmony. That's where our intuitive sense of harmony comes from, because as an intelligence it's pure instinct. That's also why you need more than your intellect to create good music.
Our souls seek harmony and tend to run from disharmony. What we're doing here is trapping them in time by arranging the notes in such a way that tension is created on all sides leaving the soul with nowhere to run. The scale our current arrangement is based on is the western chromatic scale with its equal temperament.
The reason runs deeper than most people will look but we've all heard of it... the circle of fifths. This is the only way to separate time or music into heaven and hell, life and death, sleep and awake. In other words our consciousness is literally entrained on or stuck in this repeating pattern.
The zodiac is a tone circle that represents human consciousness. When you move around the circle by fifths a pattern emerges. We now have whole tones and semitones gathered together in two separate groups with all the whole tones adjacent to each other and semitones grouped the same way. This is how heaven and hell are "arranged" by our subconscious.
Another pattern that emerges is a pentagram inside a circle. Pretty much everyone knows from movies and television that this is how demons or souls are trapped. Where there is smoke there's fire, there is something to this and the key to understanding it is musical. John Coltrane drew his tone circle to demonstrate how we are trapped in time by our own musical scale. How the soul is imprisoned by the body.
My point with all this is that music isn't notation and theory, it's what moves us and moves within us. Knowing what moves people starts with knowing what moves you. Not what moves you as a feather in the wind, but what moves you as a rock that doesn't want to be moved. As Duke Ellington put it, "that's the difference between good music and everything else".
