In this quick one, I’m breaking down the basic music theory fundamentals I make every student memorize on day one—because if you don’t have this stuff locked in, everything else is harder than it needs to be. We start with the major scale, using C major as the clean example: C D E F G A B C. No sharps, no flats—just memorize the notes and get them burned into your brain. From there, I want you to internalize intervals: root, 2, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, root. Same idea across octaves too—8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 back to 1—because it’s all the same relationships, just higher. Then we stack thirds to build chords straight out of the scale: take a note, skip a note, land on the next one. That’s how you get triads like C–E–G, and why a “three-note chord” still works across six strings (it’s just those notes repeated in different octaves). Finally, I run through the diatonic chord order in a major key—major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished—and show how extending to 7th chords changes the flavor (major 7, minor 7, dominant 7 on the V, and that half-diminished vibe on the VII). Memorize this, and your fretboard starts making sense fast.