Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?

all great channels, I love them all.

However I kind of feel like you can only really learn from them if you have a solid foundation of music theory already. If you don't, then you will be surely be entertained by these videos, but I doubt that you will come out of it with real knowledge.

It's like... you can watch anime with subtitles all day but you are very unlikely to learn Japanese this way.

Historically, they sounded different, so they wouldn't even be acoustically in-tune w/ the same notes. Each would only be in tune with its nearby notes on the "extended" cycle of fifths.

Others have posted some good resources like Lightnote which I also recommend as an introduction. The only one I've gone all the way through, though, has been Audible Genius (https://www.audiblegenius.com/). It's similarly hands-on and only an introduction to the very basics (more material coming at some point), but it will get you comfortable putting drum, bass, and lead together for a simple progression over a single root note. Its primary focus is training your ear to recognize rhythm and intervals and understand them at an intuitive rather than theoretical level (although the theoretical stuff will make more sense once you have the basic intuitive sense).

Although it is billed on a monthly basis which I'm not a fan of, I comfortably completed all the current material in under a month so I found the value very good and plan to resubscribe once more material is released.

(Tangentially, Audible Genius is from the same guy as Syntorial, which is a very well-regarded hands-on course in subtractive synthesizer programming which I also recommend if that's of interest, but that's not directly related to music theory)

From there, there are tons of other courses that discuss things like chord progressions which you can combine with this experience to be more deliberate with your melody and harmony to communicate what you're trying to communicate with your music.

The Signals Music Studio Youtube channel in particular I find to be approachable for a theory novice but also inspiring to try new things and stretch beyond the basics (for instance, dabbling in modes).

> Only keyboards seem to favor C major with their layout

Once you're familiar with the cycle of fifths, modulation becomes fairly trivial. You start to apply the appropriate corrections "sharpen this, flatten that" simply as a matter of habit.

In fact, this is precisely how modulation arose historically; it used to be the case that all music was notated diatonically or nearly so (only distinguishing between B and B-flat!), but performers would implicitly "add" sharps and flats to make it sound good depending on the context - a practice known as "musica ficta". You're right though that on a plucked string instrument everything looks the same - and historical intabulations (i.e. tablatures!) meant for plucked string instruments are actually an important source that gives us info about how musica ficta was played in many cases.

Can you play your instrument? By that, I mean can you think up your own song (perhaps by hearing it on the net or something) and then sit down and play? If you're a pianist, at least at first, that'll probably involve some sort of arpeggio in the left hand (that's the rolling or rhythmic motion that underpins a lot of music)

If you can do that, you have an entry into music theory that will resonate much better. In our piano example, what are the cords you're playing? Learn how to chart them out.

Then keep playing.

Over time, you'll develop a feel for how chords and notes work together. As you develop that feel, go back to music theory and see what the official names for what you're doing. Then you get to learn tonics, and how V7s "feel right" resolving into tonics, and so forth. But you really need to already know it, in your bones. Otherwise it's just so much math.

As I was learning piano, I was required to read a lot of music theory. I guess I got it, but I didn't really get it. It was just a bunch of patterns. When I stopped playing for other people, relaxed and started just playing for myself, I got it. I understood the material in such a fashion as not to think about it. Now if I'm riffing on some stuff, I might feel for an augmented minor II or something, and I'll recognize that's what I'm doing. I can tell you the name. But unless I'm in a weird key (perhaps doing realtime key transposition) I don't sit back and do the math in my head as I play. I have a subconscious mastery. Note: although I took lessons for 12 years, I'm no expert. I don't even play the piano anymore. I play _at_ the piano, that is, I use the piano to sing. But it was that mental relaxation that was necessary for me to have all of the pieces come into place.

The wrong way, for me at least, was thinking that music theory was some kind of programming language, where you start with patterns and work towards songs. If I had mastered my instrument, yeah, but that would be after many more years of playing. You don't construct music, you feel it. If you're Beethoven, you can do both. I'm not Beethoven.

Hope that helps!