Guitar Lessons in Plano

Is music theory really necessary to my development as an instrumental musician?

The answer depends on what exactly you as a student are trying to accomplish. For instance, while it is always a good thing to have rudimentary knowledge and skill set, intense and complex music theory (namely modal scalability) is not quite as paramount when considering most mainstream popular genres today. Rock/Pop are typically either Major or Minor in characteristic at best, (Ionian and Aeolian respectively) sometimes they aren’t even based on a Diatonic (7 note scale) mode but rather a blues based Pentatonic (5 note scale) one.

At the very least the “modes,” (something that many young students marvel at the concept of) are Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian. These different scales arrive by transitioning the sequence of Whole and Half steps from the Major fundamental W-W-H-W-W-W-H. This is accomplished by moving the first Half step down towards the root.