Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 243 posts

Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?

#181

Post by ionent »

karlstanley wrote: post #78

Back in the early 2000s I quit my engineering job and went to music school for a few years. We used Mark Levine's excellent "Jazz Theory Book" to cover the theoretical aspects. It presents theory in the context of trying to understand how to improvise over jazz harmonies - I found it very useful. It's a textbook though: you're going to have to invest some time in it to get the most out of it. https://www.amazon.co.uk…

Similarly, I quit my IT job a few years ago to go to music school. I also found that book and ear training very useful, especially if you're interested in improvisation. One thing I'd add (for improvisation) is to not only be able to identify, but to sing those intervals, triads, and 7th chords as well (ascending, descending, all inversions), and also do the same thing with scales/modes. If you can sing them, you know you have the sound internalized.

Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?

#182

Post by djtango »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #155
karlstanley wrote: post #78

Back in the early 2000s I quit my engineering job and went to music school for a few years. We used Mark Levine's excellent "Jazz Theory Book" to cover the theoretical aspects. It presents theory in the context of trying to understand how to improvise over jazz harmonies - I found it very useful. It's a textbook though: you're going to have to invest some time in it to get the most out of it. https://www.amazon.co.uk…

> #1 thing you can do to help your music theory understanding is to train your ear I live down the road from a custom guitar builder Patrick Cummings, he also offers private lessons, we were talking about learning guitar, and he was telling me the exact same thing. He said something like, "If you can't hear the music, you will never understand the music." He apparently focuses the first few weeks of lessons on ear tr…

Just chiming in to say I agree with ear-training!

I've played/learned piano for ~25 years and I've decided that not taking the time to actually sit down and level up my ear training has held me back quite a bit in some ways:

- I can't improvise to save my life

- I can't accompany a melody by ear

- I really struggle to transcribe music

- Sightreading is hard because I don't have a good handle on being able to anticipate harmony

And yet I've had friends who were far less able than me in terms of raw technique be able to play pretty much any pop song on request just from memory - something I've always envied!

Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?

#183

Post by fxtentacle »

Timpy wrote: post #81
zozbot234 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tuning is a very messy subject, though. For instance, I think you're not strictly correct in your third paragraph - pythagorean tuning does theoretically admit of modulating to a different (at least "nearby") scale, since it is based on repeatedly applying the 3:2 perfect fifth interval! The actual problem is that it has bad thirds - hence "tempering", where basically, some of the 3:2 intervals are adjusted to move s…

I agree, discussing the benefits of Just Intonation when somebody asks for an intro to music theory is like starting a programming student off with building their own compiler.

Coincidentally, one of the first things I tried to build while learning to code was a C compiler ^_^ It took a long time, but I learned many valuable lessons about how Windows and CPUs work.

But I brought up Just Intonation here because people tend to use that when they sing freely. So I would see this as a way to first understand why people (and famous composers) act the way they do before one tries to categorize things scientifically.

Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?

#184

Post by zozbot234 »

reilly3000 wrote: post #180

Oh man I've been waiting SO long to say this: get a music degree. I chose to get a BA in Music instead of a CS degree. I've had many regrets around doing so for the purposes of getting engineering jobs, but 15 years later I still have a deep understanding of music theory, history, and acoustics. That said, self-learning music is both viable and highly enjoyable. Here are some topics you should probably cover: - Scale…

> Oh man I've been waiting SO long to say this: get a music degree. I chose to get a BA in Music instead of a CS degree

Most people will not be well-served by this suggestion - even people with some serious interest in music. Music education is a tiny, tiny niche, and the amount of effort that you're asked to put in at a serious college level is not obviously worth it. Maybe get someone to teach you in your spare time instead. There's enough people around who have pursued undergrad or even grad studies in music (also theory), and have yet to land a satisfactory position.

Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?

#185

Post by fxtentacle »

zozbot234 wrote: post #58
fxtentacle wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree with this approach for pop music, but strongly disagree for classical music. In the context of an electronic synth or keyboard, C# and Db are perfectly the same. In almost all traditional music, though, instruments are almost never tuned to equal temperament, so that C# and Db then mean different things. As a famous example, Bach was very fond of his well-tempered clavier, which was a tuning method that…

Tuning is a very messy subject, though. For instance, I think you're not strictly correct in your third paragraph - pythagorean tuning does theoretically admit of modulating to a different (at least "nearby") scale, since it is based on repeatedly applying the 3:2 perfect fifth interval! The actual problem is that it has bad thirds - hence "tempering", where basically, some of the 3:2 intervals are adjusted to move s…

Yeah I described the Pythagorean tuning badly.

But in my opinion, how the notes that you play simultaneously sound together is the core of music theory. A good chord progression can feel like a journey and it will set the mood of the entire song. Therefore, I would argue that note frequencies and the reasons why certain tuning systems are preferred in certain situations are the key concept to understand if one wants to elicit a chosen mood in the listener.

Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?

#186

Post by jermaustin1 »

djtango wrote: post #182
jermaustin1 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> #1 thing you can do to help your music theory understanding is to train your ear I live down the road from a custom guitar builder Patrick Cummings, he also offers private lessons, we were talking about learning guitar, and he was telling me the exact same thing. He said something like, "If you can't hear the music, you will never understand the music." He apparently focuses the first few weeks of lessons on ear tr…

Just chiming in to say I agree with ear-training! I've played/learned piano for ~25 years and I've decided that not taking the time to actually sit down and level up my ear training has held me back quite a bit in some ways: - I can't improvise to save my life - I can't accompany a melody by ear - I really struggle to transcribe music - Sightreading is hard because I don't have a good handle on being able to anticipa…

Learning a handful of scales got me a long way toward sounding like I was good guitar/music. Then the progressions on top of that allowed me to make songs that sounded like songs.

But just knowing a scale is worthless unless you know the key a song is in, so I can not play with others really.

Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?

#187

Post by hsitz »

karlstanley wrote: post #78

Back in the early 2000s I quit my engineering job and went to music school for a few years. We used Mark Levine's excellent "Jazz Theory Book" to cover the theoretical aspects. It presents theory in the context of trying to understand how to improvise over jazz harmonies - I found it very useful. It's a textbook though: you're going to have to invest some time in it to get the most out of it. https://www.amazon.co.uk…

"Jazz Theory" is a good book, but I think the average person wanting to "learn music theory" would find the excellent "Jazz Harmony Book" by the same publisher much more accessible, certainly not easy, but by no means the slog/reference-style-book that "Jazz Theory" is. Link is here: https://www.shermusic.com/1883217792.php

Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?

#188

Post by tunesmith »

reilly3000 wrote: post #180

Oh man I've been waiting SO long to say this: get a music degree. I chose to get a BA in Music instead of a CS degree. I've had many regrets around doing so for the purposes of getting engineering jobs, but 15 years later I still have a deep understanding of music theory, history, and acoustics. That said, self-learning music is both viable and highly enjoyable. Here are some topics you should probably cover: - Scale…

It might be different now, but I actually found my music degree a net positive in terms of getting computer jobs. It's probably only true when the job market is hot, but hiring people tend to respond well - I've gotten lots of comments from people over the years indicating they've seen a good correlation between being a musician and being a good programmer.

Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?

#189

Post by samirm »

LessDmesg wrote: post #33

Here's how I approach it: forget about all the historic naming like "perfect fifths" and just think in terms of the modern 12-note equal temperament. Every note is a number, e.g. 440 Herz = 69, the standard guitar tuning has strings from 40 to 64, etc. Every interval is an integer, up an octave is +12, major chord is a triple of {x, x+4, x+7}, minor seventh chord is {x, x+3, x+7, x+10} etc. Then, as a the second game…

To someone with 0 knowledge of music theory and the desire to learn it, this is kind of useless tbh. You're making a lot of assumptions in this post that aren't very helpful :/

Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?

#190

Post by bodeadly »

The simplified method: Take a guitar and transpose each mode to E. So start with Phrygian since it's natrual key is E. But then transpose Dorian from D down to E. Forget the key. Just learn the modes but from E. THEN, make up chords for each note of each mode. For example, for Mixolydian you can make E, F#m, A, Bm, C#m and D (and a weird G# - there's always a weird chord). Once you memorize the 7 modes, you can deconstruct pretty much any song. Fool around playing chords of a mode and you'll start to hear familiar note patterns. Switch modes (especially for the "weird" chord) and things get very interesting. You don't even have to learn all of the modes. I used 4-5 almost exclusively. Of course it does create a communication problem if you normalize everything to 5 modes and de-emphasize the key.
Post reply on HN