Almost everything in life that gives us pleasure: Drama, sports, sex, roller-coasters, you-name-it... all operate on our nervous system with the same basic mechanism.
1. Build tension.
2. Release that tension.
Music interacts with us the same way. Is your guitar in tune? Then allow me to demonstrate.
Turn your amp up nice and loud*, and play your low E string (that's the fattest one.) Let it ring out. It's a nice sound, but it's just a sound. It's not really "music" yet, is it?
* Don't turn the amp up so far that it hurts your ears or gets you evicted. Just about where a really loud singer or a soft trumpet player would be is probably about perfect. I want you to FEEL this note as well as hear it.
Okay, now on the next string up (the A string) I want you to play the note on the 7th fret. You are now playing another "E", except one octave higher.
Now play both notes at once, and let them ring out together.
They just sort of blend together perfectly, right? This is why they are both called "E." In Western music theory, they are considered the same note, just in different "registers."
When two or more notes blend together this perfectly, theorists call it a "consonant" interval. Octaves* are the most consonant sounds there are.
* Okay, technically a "unison" (two of the same note played in the SAME register) is more consonant than an octave, but that's not really an interval between two different pitches, so I'm not counting it in this case.
Okay, now I want you to play the open E again, but this time I want you to play the sixth fret on the A string (E-flat), and let both notes ring out together. Hold them good and long and a good and loud volume.
Kinda sounds awful, right? It grabs the ear and you feel that something is not quite right and a deep unconscious level. Okay okay, stop.
When notes clash with each other, this is what theorists call "dissonance." The interval you just played is called a Major 7th, and while it's not the most-dissonant sound, it's certainly right up there.
Okay, now we're really going to get somewhere. I want you to play that same ugly two-note chord you just played, and hold it for a couple seconds... then SLIDE your finger from the 6th fret of the A string to the 7th and hold there.
Ahhhh.... It's almost like exhaling after holding your breath, right? The way the dissonance "resolves" to consonance almost makes it feel like that note wanted to go up that one fret, didn't it?
Congratulations. You have now just played an extremely short work of music: A two-note chord, followed by another two-note chord. More importantly, you now grok the basic principle of music theory. That's all it is. That's all any of it is. Having completed this lesson, you could actually start writing songs & accompaniments NOW just by trial-and-error experimentation, using nothing more than your ear as your guide.
Of course, delving deeper into what three Millennia or so of civilization has already discovered about these notes & chords will save you the trouble of re-inventing the wheel, but there's no law that says you have to do things the easy way.
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