This Music Theory primer is meant to introduce you to the fundamental principles of chord and scale construction. This will allow you to understand what the Universal Chord Book is doing for you when it searches for chords and scales on the guitar.

Music Theory is based on a series of twelve notes;

The scale that includes all of the notes is called the chromatic scale.

Each note in the chromatic scale is seperated by a semi-tone. A semi-tone is one note. The next step up from a semi-tone is a whole tone, which is two notes.

If we look at the distances between the natural (not sharp or flat) notes in this scale above in terms of semi-tones and whole tones we get this sequence: