In music theory we use the term ‘equivalent instruments’ to describe different kinds of musical instruments: guitar is just one example, but there are several others which fall in this category: drums are an even wider category, and there are bass guitars as well; keyboards are a separate, more narrow category; and finally, there are synthesizers, which are a further category on their own.
These categories work very nicely for describing the relationships between instruments, but are not very good at describing how they fit into a larger musical system. So what has our system actually been doing? Since very early in our musical development, the first musical instruments were obviously drums and guitar – but from there we’ve gone from drums to piano, guitar to guitar again, and even a few more instruments later on.
It’s always an interesting question how this sort of pattern might occur if it weren’t for the fact that for most of human history, music was played a lot more like the piano than the guitar – that the whole musical tradition was built by players just learning the instrument to play it for the first time.
As a result, the instruments we refer to as ‘equivalent instruments’ were very common in music well before piano was invented – guitar and piano came from the same root, that being the same instruments played in the same order on the same strings in a specific way over the course of a period of a thousand years!
But what has this got to do with music theory? Well, when it comes to figuring out the order of ideas and how they fit together, the analogy between instruments is a useful one – it allows us to see that they have common underlying principles, which have emerged from years of development as well as from personal practice!
So if we consider that there was at a time when every musician was playing each instrument in its own unique, distinct way and there was nowhere where there were a sufficient number of similar instruments to describe the structure of music, the only possible answer we can come up with is for a music theorist to take a musical system – which was in fact built using the same tools and procedures the music theorist now uses to discuss different aspects of music theory – and say ‘look, I’m going to use this same musical instrument, from which I’m going to derive all of the rules used to describe how the different elements fit together’ – and to come up with a way to represent all this that makes sense, as a group. The end result of doing this though, is that it
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