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Recently, I wrote https://www.jampea.com/learn , which is the music theory for "technical people". I believe it is the fastest way to get to understand the theory behind music (will take you 2 to 5 hours in total, 10% will be reading and 90% will be thinking about what you just read).
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> How much do you see a path from A(rticle) to S(ound in your ear). Very clearly. The author constructed a melody from first principles in the article. You can take any song, deconstruct it using the information in there and begin to see why it sounds nice. > This article is trivializing music down to a few not-so-important facts This is a music theory lecture with code examples. Hardly “not-so-important”. > mistakin…
Sure. It is a trope amongst gigging musicians that over-intellectualizing the feels is a massive no-no. Hence the joke about Db being the saddest chord... also Phil Collins said that, he would know :-D... ...and C# being the most evil chord. Hilarious. I persist: "before you can be good, you first have to be bad" is more helpful music theory than that whole JavaScript visuals page.
But personally, I couldn’t handle not knowing why the clutch needed to be pressed, or why a chord shapes is the why it is.
This is (mostly) not music theory and what is music theory is mostly wrong or incomplete to the point of being wildly misleading. Source: have degree and postgrad in music, was a professional musician until RSI put paid to that career, wife is a professional musician and teaches to postgrad level at 2 conservertoires, most of our friends are professional musicians, have a house full of scores and music books. If you…
However I've realised that "Music Theory" is a strictly defined term. If someone made an article called "Intro to Algebraic Geometry", and it was actually about geometric algebra, it'd be really annoying, even if to a uninformed person the meaning behind those terms would seem interchangeable.
I would write songs on my guitar when I was in college. A friend who was a guitar theoretician stopped by and listened. He said something like, "Odd, you went with a G7 instead of an Am. In that triad you should have played the Am." (Or, you know, some kind of foreign language like that.)
I mean, it sounded fine my way. Although for a moment I questioned why thew G7 and tried an Am… briefly. I was afraid suddenly though that if I learned music theory I would have to start writing songs the right way.
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> we tolerate them being slightly out of tune And in many cases we don't need to tolerate this because most instruments barring guitar and piano allow musicians to tune chords to just temperament, and players will do this automatically and completely subconsciously.
I’m convinced that “Safe and Sound” by Capital Cities became a major hit because it uses an actual trumpet for the lead, causing the perfect intervals to be exact instead of the every so slightly off intervals 12-tone equal temperament has. The linked article makes the case for equal temperament by showing that 12 just fifths played in sequence is flat compared to seven octaves.
Attributing it's hit status to the perfect intervals is ignoring all of the other choices (and supporting infrastructure) that go into making a hit. It's like saying that the Dodge Charger was a successful car because the windshield wipers are of a certain make.
Side note: It may very well be a sampled trumpet.
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I thought the same for a long long time. At least for me the solution was to grind ear training for a few weeks/ months 10 minutes a day. I'll certainly never reach the heights of this skill but a bit of persistence to overcome lack of natural talent did propell me forward.
What method/software did you use for the ear training?
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Music theory is a way of describing that cool thing you played, not the other way around
Music theory is absolutely an indispensable tool for musicians and composers. You can play music without it, but that’s just putting an unnecessary upper bound on what you can achieve. More than anything, it’s a vocabulary to talk about the thing you’re doing with others.
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I’m convinced that “Safe and Sound” by Capital Cities became a major hit because it uses an actual trumpet for the lead, causing the perfect intervals to be exact instead of the every so slightly off intervals 12-tone equal temperament has. The linked article makes the case for equal temperament by showing that 12 just fifths played in sequence is flat compared to seven octaves.
I'm not saying a real, recorded trumpet doesn't make an appreciable sonic difference, but if it were a sampled trumpet "Safe and Sound" would most likely still be a hit. Attributing it's hit status to the perfect intervals is ignoring all of the other choices (and supporting infrastructure) that go into making a hit. It's like saying that the Dodge Charger was a successful car because the windshield wipers are of a c…
“"Safe and Sound's" trumpet line is partly responsible for the popularity Capital Cities is currently enjoying”
>>>The trumpet line in ‘Safe and Sound’, for example, didn’t appear in the production until nine versions into the song. The final version, on a whim, we decided to try using a trumpet, a live trumpet, to play that line and it stuck. We ended up actually using the trumpet a lot throughout the album after we included it in ‘Safe and Sound’.
"It was trial and error, right? We felt like that line was an epic line and we thought about different instruments that sounded epic, and the trumpet is obviously one of them,The thing about trumpets is this: Their fifth is a little “sharp” because it’s a perfect just intonated fifth (i.e. a perfect 3/2 ratio).
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It's funny though how different people respond to learning music theory differently. I started on guitar when I was 19. I played for a long time at campfire level. When my kids started learning music I also learnt a lot, and now I know scale shapes and modes on guitar, so I can reasonably play to a song I'm hearing for the first time, then figure it out by ear. But I just cannot make the leap to knowing the notes at…
I think it gets significantly harder to learn new things as you age. It could make sense though like its significantly easier to learn a new language as a child than an adult, something simillar could apply to sheet music also i guess where they are naturally more intuined with its language vrs you who has to kinda use a dictionary for time to time because the "normal" way for you to speak has been so different for s…
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Re: not knowing how to play because author doesn’t get the why Quite a lot of people learn by imitation without knowing the underlying theory. Some people need a theoretical framework so that they have a mental model with which to understand everything else. Fundamentally, you’re arguing against learning theory. Not everyone learns the same way. If you have a problem with that, then you have a problem with a basic fa…
No I don't have a "problem with that". And yes, people learn by imitation, which is what I meant by practice. Playing the guitar is a fundamentally different activity than knowing music theory. Becoming good at one doesn't make you good at the other naturally (since you are practicing two different things) and I am worried some people think its the same thing. Furthermore, in real life, I have seen the same approach…