Chapotony Chatano here, internet's busiest hogposter, and it's time for another edition of "Let's Argue", where we're on the internet, we accept your hot takes, unpopular opinions, and tough questions, and we struggle sesh over all of them. Leeeeet's, GO!
Also learn some fucking music theory dorks. It helps a lot. It's boring sometimes, but man it helps. https://www.musictheory.net/
I had a real problem overthinking shit when I first started writing music and went into it 'theory first' and made really sterile sounding crap. But now I've kind of fell into a system where I go with my intuition, noodle around, and find a melody or chord progression that sounds nice. Then I apply theory and figure out what key my noodling is in so I can further expand the idea by adding harmonies over a melody, or fit a melody over a chord progression, etc. It just really expedites the process and gives you a base understanding of how music operates so you can kind of "guess in the right area" instead of being completely fucking aimless.
I "learned" guitar on my own. Eventually I got to place where I got frustrated because I wasn't progressing. I quit about 10 years ago. After watching the Adam Neely post and finding 12 Tone on Youtube I decided to give it another try. I'm actually enjoying relearning how to play and how to think about what I'm playing.
Sorry for this, but I grew up as a sports guy. I taught myself how to golf. I generated a technique that allowed my to hit the ball in the air and land around the green. I had to take a PE course to get into to university so I chose golf. The instructor pretty much told me everything I was doing was wrong. So he started me from the beginning; this is how you grip a club, don't sway, twist, pretend you're tossing a watermelon on your backswing... I still suck at golf but at least I can more or less know where my shot's going. Same with guitar, I have an idea why I hit a certain note.
Golf probably isn't going to go over well here, but I'll take the heat. (I only play 3 par btw)
Nah, that analogy is pretty much right on the money. Intuition can get you incredibly far with music, but understanding WHY something works when it does work just makes life so much easier.
It's funny, I kind of had the same experience but backwards. I started learning music by taking Bass lessons, went to school for music, and got to the point where I could sight read music pretty damn well... but I was absolutely horrible at improvising or coming up with my own material and was petrified whenever anyone from class asked me to 'jam'. It's only the past couple of years that I've really dived into being creative and coming up with my own stuff, and ironically enough a ton of music theory stuff that I had learned in the past makes way more sense now that I actually have to apply it. I'm still crap, but it's getting better!
I always oscilate between loving and hating the theoretical framework. I think the healthiest approach towards it is as a tool to understand why some progressions work, but not why they should be there. Ultimately it's more like grammar to a language, and true poetry is never grounded in a search for the best application of grammar rules.
For me, if we stick to harmony, a lot of times it's an incidental result of chromatic movement. You can then circlejerk over how I just played an Eb9dim5 and it's functioning like a subdominant tritone-replacement. But, more likely, I just moved this way with the bass, and moved the voicing a bit from what was already there, thinking about where I want to land, and complicated chord machine goes brrr.
That is way better put then I ever could, but that's pretty much exactly how I try to think about it. In my eyes, if something works and sounds good in music, then you don't really need to question it too much even if it doesn't "make sense" when you try to apply the amount of music theory that you do know to it. I always figure it would probably make sense in someone elses eyes that knows more theory than I do, haha.
Make sure to learn broad and modern music theory, and not fall into the trap of ""music theory"" just being "european classical theory from the 17th century", as it very often is in academia. Most people never learn outside of the very narrow world of western theory, or even narrower european theory.
Good ref : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA (Music Theory and White Supremacy)
That's a good suggestion. I never meant to imply that western music theory is the only way to view and analyze music. It's just the way that I was taught to view it and what has worked for me so far. It's also the more widespread and available resource when you're trying to teach yourself how to understand music.
Oh yea didn't mean to imply you were being narrow-minded, it's something i've realized recently myself about a lot of academic music theory. It's not the end-all be-all, and even just a nice dose of jazz theory is a lot better than just the pure classic western theory books.
No offense taken! I enjoyed that video and the response from Adam Neely.
Oh FUCK i linked the response and not the actual video, dammiiiitttttt
haha, it's all good. I found the OG video through context.
Thanks tho, I fixed it. I didn't even watch that response video it's just what came up when I searched for it to link it :p
Well hey, it was good enough to warrant a response from Neely himself, so it must not have been too bad.