Just out of idle curiosity. I went to music school and teach at a local music shop, so I’m very familiar with music theory but I’m aware that my experience is most likely not the norm.

If you are familiar with any theory (even just scales and keys), where did you pick it up? Lots of the resources I’ve seen both in and outside of formal education can be both confusing, and it’s often hard to see the application of what you learn in the short term.

  • Lorindól@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    9 days ago

    I taught myself to play the guitar and electric bass by learning the chords and reading tabulatures, I got good enough to play decent bass in a rock band. I also learned the basics of playing the piano. For the first ten years I had only a very basic understanding of the underlying theory and I never felt the need to learn more. I didn’t know the names of the scales and modes I could play and I just knew in which order chords worked or didn’t, I just couldn’t explain why. Nor I needed to do so.

    Then I chose music pedagogy as one of my university minors and suddenly I had to learn the theory and reading/writing notation in just a few months - it was not easy but in the end it paid off big time. I finally understood why things worked the way they did and it opened up a world of new ideas for me.

    I’m happy that I learned the theory after I had already learned to play an instrument. Knowing the theory backs me up, it does not constrain me. Few of my friends went through the formal music education and some - not all - are really bound by “the rules”, breaking them in any way is a big NO when we play together. One can play almost anything with the piano if you hand him the notes, but he’s totally unable to improvise or pick tunes by ear. Which is quite baffling to me.

    And I’m not saying that the route I took to learn music is better, it just worked for me.

    EDIT: Typos.