I found this site: https://www.thejazzpianosite.com/jazz-piano-lessons/ extremely helpful, if you haven’t already seen it.
Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?
171–180 of 243 posts
Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?
#172Back 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…
Mark Levine's book is a great resource and the way he presents much of the theory behind jazz improvisation and actually ties it to practice is very useful.
Regarding ear training - I think it's worth mentioning that learning to identify intervals in isolation won't have major returns on investment unless you're main goal is to transcribe by ear 20th century music that is divorced from "common practice" harmonic approaches.
Instead, I'd recommend taking an approach of build up aural comprehension of harmonic idioms from whatever style of music you're interested in learning about - so for classical music, recognizing the difference between tonic and dominant and when we've moved from one to the other is more valuable (and easier) than knowing whether the soprano voice in an chord moved a third or a second.
Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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-f…
I just find the black and whites puzzling. Sure, the steps are the same from the prime up, but with C major you end up on all white and with others you can end up on blacks here and there.
Learn how the black keys map to sharp and flat notes, then learn the cycle of fifths. (There are also some "tricks" you can use to understand how sharp and flat key signatures relate to their keys: in a "sharp" key signature, the last sharp sign matches the leading tone for the corresponding major key (e.g. G major only has F# as a key signature sign); in a "flat" key signature the last flat sign matches the fourth, and the next to last matches the actual key. F major has a single flat sign at Bb; Bb major has two, at Bb and Eb.) Once you have internalized how all of these relate, it really becomes trivial.
Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?
#174Before I knew very much music theory, I tried building a music generator. I learned TONS of music theory along the way, and the generator project sort of served as a testing ground for new concepts that I've learned, as well as a driving force that compelled me to learn about new aspects of theory in order to make improvements to the generator.
This is definitely not the most efficient way to learn music theory, but for me it always helps to have a project running alongside whatever I'm studying in order to immediately reap the benefits of new knowledge.
Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?
#175My hot take: HN is probably one of the worst places to ask for advice on music theory, because it has a fairly high concentration of people who reject traditional music theory and want to come up with their own system. In general, these people haven’t gotten very far in making up their own system, so their advice is pretty worthless! My other hot take is that the existing system of musical notation and terminology that we have is actually pretty good, and it’s hard to figure out ways to improve it.
Music theory is a pretty broad subject and there are a ton of pathways through music theory that take you to different parts of it. I would start by trying to figure out a “map” of the different parts you are interested in.
Almost any course will start with major/minor diatonic scales, then intervals, and then chords. If you combine notes with rhythm, you get a melody. If you combine chords together, you get harmony. Figuring out how harmony works usually starts with “functional harmony” which is where you learn about tonic/dominant/subdominant chords and cadences. The main gotcha here is that there are a couple competing systems for writing names of chords, and you should at least be aware of them so you’re not surprised by a “V6 chord” because that name means two different things depending on which system you use.
This gives you a pretty good foundation for understanding music or writing your own. It’s also not too hard to get this far on your own. Music will still seem mysterious and weird, but that’s normal.
From there you can go in a bunch of directions—there’s atonal music, jazz, traditional counterpoint, nonfunctional harmony, modes, alternative scales, alternative tunings, etc.
I recommend the book The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis. Personally, I would go through the first chapters until it introduces strict counterpoint, and then consider the rest of the book as a “menu” that you can read in any order (kind of). For the second edition, that means doing chapters 1-8, and then you can feel free to skip around chapters 9+. Don’t just follow the book with pencil and paper, actually play the exercises on a real instrument and train your ear (and get an ear training app, if you think it will help).
Finally, I recommend buying a stack of staff paper from the local stationary store. It shouldn’t be hard to find. Alternatively, you can use a computer program to write music, but the choices are a bit intimidating. I’m using Dorico these days but it’s $100. Don’t rely on tabs if you want to improve theory. Tabs are cheat sheets for performance, they make theory and analysis harder.
Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?
#176For this, I would highly recommend the music theorist/composer Dimitri Tymoczko. His career project is to rebuild the basics of harmony from the ground up from (mostly simple) rules, closely based on how people hear. A catchphrase he uses a lot is "why does music sound good?" He teaches a set of 2 comprehensive introductory music theory classes at Princeton, and he makes the lecture notes public: https://dmitri.mycpa…
Thanks a lot for pointing to these lectures !
Sometimes even freely available quality material doesn't serve its intended purpose due to lack of awareness among those who want/need it
Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?
#177Back 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…
Thank you for introducing me to EarMaster :) I never knew such a software existed.
Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?
#178My hot take: HN is probably one of the worst places to ask for advice on music theory, because it has a fairly high concentration of people who reject traditional music theory and want to come up with their own system. In general, these people haven’t gotten very far in making up their own system, so their advice is pretty worthless! My other hot take is that the existing system of musical notation and terminology th…
> Alternatively, you can use a computer program to write music, but the choices are a bit intimidating.
MuseScore is free and open source. Totally fine for casual use.
Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?
#179I would highly recommend How Music Works by John Powell. I've been playing piano since I was a kid, but, being technical, having music explained in scientific terms was the one thing that really upped my game. Everything before this book always seemed like religious teaching and I could never really find a place for the knowledge to hang on to in my mind. There's also a book with the same name by David Byrne, but I c…
The David Byrne book is great but it doesn't cover music theory. It covers music in general with a focus on how the music industry works. I highly recommend it but it will not teach music theory.
Re: Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?
#180Oh 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:
- Scales
- Modes
- Rhythm and time signatures
- Musical notation
- Chord Progressions / Regressions (this is extremely high value to learn)
- Chord Voicing (using the same notes in different octaves)
- Song Forms / Structure
- Harmonics, resonance, and dissonance (this is all about ratios, and typically very interesting to those who enjoy maths and physics)
- Instrumentation, including the practical range of each instrument and voice.
- Writing and arranging music.
- Non-western approaches to all of the above
In terms of the course of learning, I recommend: - Get lessons from somebody you respect and enjoy working with. They should be able to help with theory.
- Learn multiple instruments. Just like learning additional programming languages, adding another instrument furthers your enlightenment significantly.
- Play lots of music with consistent daily frequency.
- Listen to LOTS of different kinds of music. Listen actively, picking apart melody, rhythm, chords, and structure. It really helps to transcribe songs you like to develop a critical ear.
- Hang out with lots of different musicians.
- Spend time in a good DAW / digital audio workstation. Like your IDE, it can help you create music while giving you the power of a good linter and test suite. Record simple melodies then practice editing them in a Piano Roll view.
- Music doesn't move fast like programming. Some of the best educational materials available today are 75+ years old.
- Improvisation is one of the best paths towards discovery IMHO, but you have to be learning other musical idioms to expand your own improvisational pallet.
Have fun. Music theory is very enjoyable to study, and any work in that direction will improve your performance abilities far beyond what you might expect!