Introduction to Music Theory

I've heard the same thing repeated over and over." Music theory is a pain in the butt." "It's useless, it doesn't do nothing for me", and so on... This is a big lie. Honestly, there is are a small percentage of people who are so gifted that they don't need theory to make great music, but even then, those people have a TON of problems trying to communicate their ideas because all they can do is play but don't really understand what they're doing. This course is going to hopefully destroy this mentality of "I hate Theory" because I'm going to show you how music theory can, although usually isn't, be practical. I'm going to teach you what I believe to be the core theory that I feel everyone should know.

Before you start the course, let's discuss what music theory can do for you. For starters, music theory is basically "Explaining what sounds good and why" This means that theory came AFTER music, music was first. Theory is there to explain how we can arrive at the good sounds and how we can get similar results over and over. Put blatantly, Music theory is repeat-ability. So does this mean that using will make the music seem lifeless and overdone? Of course not, Music theory, at it's roots, was designed to explain HOW composers did what they did. However, over time it has evolved into what I call "Musical Perception" or "Musical Science". In this, I'm stating that the music theory I use and am teaching here isn't what you might think of music theory because rather than just understanding the ideas behind good sounding music, I want you to understand music at it's core and be able to mold it into anything you'd like.  Music theory has become more of a "Science" rather than a "Theory." Why? Because, a theory is "A supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, esp. one based on general principles independent of the thing to be" _ Google.

Put in simple terms, it's something people come up with that is used to explain something that wasn't done on purpose. Such as some people played some cool music and said "Oh yeah, I like that" then later, someone came along and through observation, concluded that there were basic principles behind the great sound that the player got. Although the player may have not been aware of exactly how or why the music sounded the way it did, another guy came up with a "Theory" to why it worked the way it did and how a similar result could be achieved later. However, nowadays, music theory is no longer like this. Nope, rather than explaining why something works the way it sounds, players are more interested in how they can relate ALL the ideas into one giant understanding I call "Musical Understanding".

Simply put, it's the ability to see patterns, structure and logical reasoning by a network of different ideas, sort of like physics or math but in music. Although, I'm in no way bragging, just as not everyone is talented in math or physics, not everyone is talented in music theory. BUT Everyone can reach some degree of fluency in any math or physics if given proper teaching, so the same can be said with music theory. This brings me to the point that music theory can be thought of as a subject of it's own. The difference is unlike math and physics which are based on actual occurring instances, music theory is based on "Hey that sounds cool!"
In other words, Music Theory is limited to Human perception.

This Course is going to give you a solid grounding in Theory and will prepare you for the second course which goes towards attaining music theory fluency and understanding the system as a whole.

Now that I've blabbed on about What Music Theory is, let's talk about what makes it so useful!

1. Using theory makes my music sound boring and repeated, no no no... Although it is possible for this to happen if you try to use theory as a crutch, generally, a good understanding of theory will help you to break the rules. How can you break the rules if you don't know what they are in the first place?

2. Music theory is too complicated and doesn't make sense, again, this is mostly due to bad experiences of trying to learn theory. Keep in mind that outside of a college degree, music theory is usually not intended to be fully comprehensive, as it is here.

3. Music theory is boring and takes too much time to learn, I just wanna play! Oh gosh, may'be if you would take the time to read the course, you might be surprised at how intriguing things can get. At some point you'll hit an Eye opening statement and be like "Oh my gosh, so that's why that works!" Knowing theory can make you very skilled.

Enough of this, let's get started learning some theory!
Head on to:  The Musical Alphabet