funken wrote:Yes, I was thinking before, surely this 'WhW' business, and 'up 3 up 4' is just shapes really. Its just different on a keyboard. Stringtapper recommended musictheory.net and that's exactly how these sites teach you.
What distinguishes the two is one is thinking in patterns that are applicable to one instrument while the other is thinking in patterns that are applicable to the entire system of music, regardless of the instrument. In other words, "white-white-black" only applies to the piano, but C-D-Eb, or 1-2-b3 applies to all music on any instrument.
I noticed in your tutorial that you talked about thinking of the minor scale as 0-2-3-5-7-8-10-12 instead of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7. Well that's pretty much the system we use in atonal and twelve-tone theory and it's totally legit. However, if you're gearing towards more pop oriented music that's about as far away as you can get! If you're making generative music in MaxMSP then it's the only way to go—mod12 baby!
funken wrote:What is theory? Wikipedia says that theory can be independent of practice. But good theory is when the ideal image corresponds to practice and guides it, practice being activity with a purpose and a means.. So yes, my friend probably uses theory without being conscious of it, or more accurately, theory could explain his practice.
Most people might be surprised by how difficult a question this is to answer. The definitions of "music theory" have changed throughout history and haven't always even been completely consistent among musicians and scholars living at the same time! I can say that for the most part music theory has always dealt with both practical matters (what people are doing musically at the time) and speculative matters (questioning what's going on and asking what could be). While its probably a good bet that musicians were making music without any "theory" behind it we don't have a lot of historical evidence of what it was like. We do have quite a bit of historical evidence of people theorizing about music from the time of the early Greeks. It's actually not until around the 14th or 15th century that we get a lot of musicians really start writing treatises that deal with how to make music (there were some earlier). Before that it was all about how to derive scales from dividing a string and how the intervals were made up of "desirable" ratios (e.g. superparticular). Once people started writing manuals on the best practices for performing and composing music then we start to get a different kind of "music theory," one based on practice. Ever since then (one aspect of ) "music theory" has been a way to teach "rules" of composition, but always based on what the composers of the time were doing. So yes, theory does explain practice, but it hasn't always been so. More to the point, to say any theory is "good" or "bad" may be just as dangerous as saying any music is "good" or "bad."
funken wrote:How much do you need to actually consciously learn? I would say it varies on the individual and the style of music they want to do. I wanted to include a bit that simply makes getting started as easy as possible. It was more of a trick with shapes than any theory. I don't even know what music theory is. I guess you would have to start with some physics. Maybe once I've done a bit more on the shapes side of things, a few more chords, I could start on the theory. To learn music theory fully you would have to understand the physics of sound. This would be useful for sound design and production in general. It all comes down to waves in the end.
It's a good question. What do you think is important to understand about music? My whole point in criticizing you has only been that Western tonal music has certain conventions that have been in place for a long time and really don't need much revision; they work just fine even with the most modern pop harmony. If you're trying to go somewhere completely different like into atonal theory then by all means, give it a go, but I would encourage you to thoroughly learn the basics of "tonal" harmony if that's what you're really talking about doing.
As far as starting with physics goes, I'm all for this, mostly because I'm writing a dissertation on this very thing: the fact that most music theorists and educators don't touch electronic music and my hypothesis is that they just can't be arsed to put the time into learning all the things that go into doing audio engineering, sound design, digital signal processing, etc.
in addition to all of the intensive traditional study of music performance and theory that goes into a real professional musician's makeup.
Do you need to know why a square wave sounds like a square wave in order to understand how to write a melody that has direction and implied harmony? No, not really. Do you need to know how to write an interesting harmonic modulation in order to understand how compression works? Certainly not.
But I'll be damned if the most impressive motherfuckers I know aren't able to do all of those things and it's a real wonder I tell you.
So what do we mere mortals do? As much as we can I guess. But my point is we can choose our battles. Knowing the physics of sound isn't completely necessary in order to learn harmony, and knowing how to score for a wind quintet isn't entirely necessary in order to mix a hip hop record. I suspect that one will always suffer because of the other but I would like to see a time when we have a lot of badasses for which this isn't true.
funken wrote:I disagree with those on here who say you have to be an expert to teach. The way I look at it is you can learn and teach at the same time. My sister wrote a text book. Do you think she knew everything in the book before she started? I went to her flat and her floor was a horizontal library of dozens of open books being used in writing her book, which still sells years later.
I would never say that one would have to be an "expert" to teach, only that they should be thoroughly competent enough in order to teach a certain subject.
funken wrote:Regarding me not knowing what 'degrees of scale' are, I always called them notes, all these years. Well in musictheory.net there are 177 references to notes and just 8 to scale degrees. Their article talks about the different names for notes in a scale, and contradicts some sites, I think, by saying that only a minor scale has a leading tone. But apart from a couple of words about the leading tone it didnt say anything about why they had these special names.
The special names are there in order to correlate the scale degrees with the chords built upon them. So scale degree 1 is the root of the I chord, or the Tonic. Scale degree 2 is the root of the ii chord, or the Supertonic, etc. It's just a way of organizing the chords in a key and to easily identify which notes of the scale are their roots. The names themselves are mostly descriptive in relation to the tonic (supertonic = "above tonic") although some are somewhat historically arbitrary in their naming (see below).
funken wrote:If I'm gonna cover theory I need to start from the beginning, and understand the basics. Why is a note a particular frequency? Why is a dominant called a dominant?
Only delving into history will answer those questions. As to the question of the why the dominant is called the dominant I can tell you that as of some recent SMT list discussions, it's still up for debate. Some say it's because the V chord "dominates" the tonic by "falling down" upon it when it resolves; others say it's because it is the "dominant" chord above all others in the key besides the tonic which is accepted as not merely a chord but rather the nucleus around which all chords of a key revolve. Most likely it goes back to the medieval "reciting tones" that were used in chant and were always *above* the final tone.
As to the history of frequency, I'm not up on that particular history of why the exact frequency ranges fell on those particular note names, but I know that the earliest measurements were done by Mersenne and Sauveur, who compared the motion of large strings compared to the ticking of timekeeping devices we would liken to a pendulum metronome.
