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As I get more into playing jazz guitar, I found that I am missing a lot of foundational music theory. Apparently, I never carried over any notation/sightreading that I may have had in school band, or any intellectually-aware-of-how-the-piano-keys-relate-to-major-scale, etc., and I mostly played guitar by "feel"/ear and some learned scale shapes and relative positions for chords.. but I never really put it all together or learned the ideas behind it.

Learning some music theory (like what the circle of fifths diagram on the cover of the Guitar Grimoire shows) has been like getting into a secret society. It all has a nasty learning curve (thanks western history for being confusing), but is paying off so far.

So, discussion time: What's been the most interesting thing you've learned? The most useful? What do you use all the time? What is useless?

I was really reluctant to learn any theory for a while because I thought it would inhibit creativity by restricting you to "rules". I was really, really wrong. All of it is pretty helpful, learning a bunch of different scales is easy to do and opens up a few doors. I think the most interesting thing for me was reading about composition techniques; it was reading about mensuration canon's which got me into wanting to know more about theory.

I haven't found yet a theory lesson that helped me to improve my skills as a musician or something as simple like writing a song. I'm all about listening/watching and stealing, and this has been working fine for me since I started with drums like 15 years ago and then moved to guitar, bass and now synths. I may not know the concepts of everything I do, but I can easily play anything to a certain level that works for the musicians I used to play
with, which were from "what's a major scale" crust dudes to nerds with music bachelor's degree and some hippies.

If it sounds good, good! If it doesn't, great!

However.......

I really wish I could start over, this time learning the basics, with books, teachers, a school, with piano!

Not that I use this as most synths are calibrated to a certain range but...learning about scales greater than 12 tones has been a eye opener.

I agree with tremolo. I don't think it helps "improve" but knowing theory maybe helps "expedite" the process? I have two examples.

1. Understanding how a certain modulation works (see Bach) just because of something as simple as tuning and a frequency. 2. For beginner guitar players A. Use a C major scale B. Pick a note C. Pick two more notes i. of these two notes only one can be 1 tone (a half step up or down from the initial note) away from the initial note ii. and the other has to be at least 1 and 1/2 steps (three tones) down from the secondary note, or 1 step (two tones) up. Congratulations you have the bearings of a punk song. You could always pick three notes that are two tones (each) away from each other.

I use the first example more both guitars and synths. You get a long of flexibility with tuning the MS-20 Mini and KRAP Oddy. Believe it or not, I think, my GAIA allows you to tune in microtones.

Patterns are cool though. I have a book called "SHRED IS NOT DEAD" and it gives a couple of odd scales. I don't necessarily use the actual scale but I use the fingers and go to town on my tuning.

I learned a lot of theory within two years of starting to play guitar. Modes were super handy for getting around and knowing where all the notes I'd need in any particular key were. But I think they probably slowed me down a little in terms of getting to the music I wanted to make, which is more dissonant.

Maybe try some stuff and see if it help you make music you like. It was 50/50 for me, but it made it way easier to play nice with others.

In this weekend:



Time to get jazzy..

I'm not a hardcore music theorist, my biggest takeaway was the fundamental relationship between chords and scales. I'm also obsessed with Phrygian mode and Phrygian dominant. The flattened second creates a very exotic sound that invokes an Arabian Nights feel, at least in my warped mind.

Pretty basic but I think the most interesting theory thing I learned was starting to understand why the ear wants certain sequences of notes to resolve with other ones.

^^^that's all I care to remember. Modes, basically. Sometimes use mean and median.

Invisible Man wrote:^^^that's all I care to remember. Modes, basically. Sometimes use mean and median.

You tell a mean joke, sir, but you might want to put a little more variance in your humor.

Actually curious now: When music theory comes up, a lot of people get defensive. Is that one of those things like "if I'm not 100% into it, then I must be 100% against it" sort of things?

mathias wrote:Actually curious now: When music theory comes up, a lot of people get defensive. Is that one of those things like "if I'm not 100% into it, then I must be 100% against it" sort of things?

Not in my case, but I can't speak for other people. I read a book on music theory once, but I only found some of it applicable to what I was trying to achieve. Speaking of which, I forgot to mention 'call and response' before. That can definitely be an ingredient of a good song.

I used the weasel word 'can' in that last sentence because nothing should be formulaic. You don't have to use call and response to write a killer song, it's just one more technique to think about. The age old advice to artists of all kinds is "Learn all the rules, and then forget them".

Same as above, no strong opinions one way or the other, different musicians make different music and caring about how much theory someone should know is so enormously contextual that it seems a bit silly to have a strong opinion on it.

Unless you're Lou Reed, who joked about being overly simplistic but actually had a pretty extensive knowledge of music theory. (Not a criticism of Lou Reed)

In addition to "Getting Ready for the Real Book" and Andres Segovia's Scales book (classical guitar), I just started reading Zen Guitar by Philip Toshio Sudo today. It isn't really about music theory, or even necessarily about guitar technique, but this thread seemed to be the most appropriate place to document my ongoing learning and discovery.

Zen Guitar is, it turns out, about a philosophy of making music drawn from Zen Buddhism. I am digging it so far.

With music my "rules" have always been, in order of importance:
1: How do I make the sound(s) I want?
2: What is the best and most comfortable way for me to make that sound?
Everything beyond that I only pay attention to once those conditions have been met.

In learning to play guitar left handed, I have been thinking about what kinds of music I want to write the most (black metal/noise/doom) so I honestly haven't spent a lot of time practicing complex chords ( I mostly just practice tremolo picking and palm muting )
Anyway, I have only ever learned enough theory to write the sounds I want to make...err...write, and/or to break out of creative slumps or look for sounds/melodies/tones I maybe will like but haven't really encountered yet.

My go-to has been this page:
http://www.all-guitar-chords.com/guitar_scales.php

You select the "chord" (I think it basically also translate as the key) and then the scale you want. You can change tunings (awesome) as well as isolate chunks of the fretboard at a time, which is cool because you can learn scales by breaking them up into their modes..... All in all the website is super cool and easy to use. It even has a lefty fretboard