Music // Music Theory

might as well just go on reddit

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All y'all with boners for Mozart. Go back to the oldest music you can find. Start with Mozart, sure, but keep going back in time. Listen to it all, and do it hi fidelity

>her
look at those hands, m8

> tfw you will never have a qt troubadour strumming a lute outside your castle window and lauding your beauty to lure you into sinful extramarital sex

Jezebels, etc.

The real question is: how do you retain what you learn? Every year i spend some time learning music theory and miserably fail.

Watch Bernstein's the Unanswered Question.
youtube.com/watch?v=Gt2zubHcER4

You need to constantly practice it.

jesus
they're almost as pseud as the pseuds on this board

even better

Are they wrong though?

yes. the question was "Best books to learn Music Theory the fastest?" not "please name the most dense, dry, niche academic works about music theory in existence". books like the ones in that post are more likely to put most people off learning music theory forever.
the answer to the question is the books mentioned here and - the "dummies" books are variable in quality but in this case the content is good.

post more feet

I need a fun book on music theory to read.

music theory is not fun

This pic makes me happy because she's not actually sitting on the piano. Play piano, pianos do not like being sat on because it's not good for them.

you're cute

Take a MOOC instead, I don't think it sinks in very well in writing.

Why not?

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is that you, user?

Be aware I love you

Gradus ad Parnassum

Without knowing why you want to learn music theory: what you want to use it for, whether you want jazz or a classical background, how much you want to know and how well internalised you want that information to be a I can't really recommend anything. Can you give us more information.

Don't listen to this. This is absolutely awful advice. Ear training happens in tandem with book theory. Without theory it is impossible to get anywhere because the point of ear training is to start hearing what you already know theory wise.

In order for music theory to be useful it is to become as natural as talking or reading. Simply knowing that you can chain dominant chords to travel to remote keys means nothing if you haven't done so many exercises that you can do it without even thinking about it.
This is why every single composer could play a keyboard instrument, perhaps not to a convert standard but well enough for the purpose of composition. What do you do on the piano, you practice something a lot in every single key. If you do jazz piano the drill the fuck out of their ii-V-I so that regardless of what happens in any circumstance, regardless of the voice leading and key, they know every single ii-V-I and can call on it instantly without even thinking about it.

These are fun but more like what A brief History of Time is to an actual textbook, or a David Attenborough documentary to an academic book on the same animals covered. Videos like this can be useful and you can learn things but it should never replace any of the normal ways you should learn about music. If it is to be used to learn music theory it should happen on top of everything else you do.

Good music theory books are inevitably dry. You can find ones that try to ease you into it but those won't do anything other than give you the absolute basics from which you have to move onto dry books. The only thing that the easier books do is to make it easier to read the hard books. If you don't have the ability to get through something that is dry then music theory isn't for you.

Some people might find it fun, just as some people might find advanced mathematics fun but it isn't fun in the way most people mean it. It is very complex and abstract and the only way to change anything you learn from a useless fact to something that is useful is by a hell of a lot of drilling. However if you want a taste of music theory in an easier form a few books have already been suggested in this thread.

I do not like the old counterpoint books. The problem I have with them is they never make clear that counter point is just the logic of developing motivic material, but to learn it you must learn basic principles devoid of motivic manipulation. It is an inevitable fact about learning counter point but modern books do a far better chance of teaching you in a way where the knowledge gained is actually useful.

How do I know you like to bite pillows

We need a new sticky

Pic related is ace for some fundamentals

I've been playing the acoustic guitar for a few years, watched a video course about music theory which covered modes and scales and chords and the like (although this was a few years ago)
I have trained my ear a bit, I can think in terms of intervals .

So I want to git gud . In the sense of finding meaning in what I play. I am also planning to pick up the harmonica and start messing around with music programming.
What do you recommend?

>finding meaning in what I play
music theory cannot help you do that

From what you are saying it sounds like jazz theory would be much more useful. In my experience classical theory texts are as interested in how something happens as to what it is they are describing. They tell you about a certain harmonic progression and then meticulously explain that the bass does this or that except when this happens, and the middle parts do this etc. They also tend to be geared towards someone whose goal is to compose, or to orchestrate or something else like that who need that level of meticulous understanding. It can be frustrating because a lot of what they teach isn't very useful for people with different goals.

The advantages of jazz theory books is they are aimed at musicians. In jazz the musician is the composer. I am in the other music thread right now where I recommended both Levine's Jazz Theory Book and Jazzology. Both books go from the absolute start, things like what is an interval, chord types etc to more advanced things gradually. If you find something too easy just skip the chapter. If you find something too hard look for help online. This is my favorite thing about jazz over classical theory. Youtube jazz stuff is amazing, absolutely amazing. The classical stuff not so much. If you have a problem the chances are someone else has had the same problem. There is also the jazz exercise book. As the name suggests the book is nothing but exercises. It can be useful in helping to change something you learn from some abstract idea to something more concrete. Using this book is optional.
Also guitar exercises to play. The guitar is a great instrument for learning theory and if you do your exercises right they will make the theory so much easier.

He meant an ability to analyze what he is doing, not a search of existential meaning in playing music.

> whitey not deliberately trying to forget everything he learned while playing

you're never gonna make it

stick to clapping on 1 and 3, can you remember that?

I don’t think Music theory is something you ought to try to rush learning. When you actually learn Theory, you ought to also be building up your listening skills, and that’s something that requires exactly as much time as it requires, there are no short cuts.

What are your goals? Do you want to compose? Or just understand the classical music you listen to better?

As others have said, learning the basics of reading notation; pitch, rhythm, dynamics etc, just YouTube it. Here will also be resources their for scales, and how chords come from scales, how chord progressions work and so on.

>jazz theory

Mozart is a perfectly reasonable place to start. Pre-baroque Music adhered to basically different rules, so while it’s music that is interesting in its own right, it’s not going to really carry over well for later stuff.

And Baroque music too, while closer to classical era stuff, is still very different from classical and later music. You will spend an age understanding Figured Bass, and then get passed Bach and never hear it again. Mozart is the quintessential exemplar of classism, and is usually a lot more enjoyable than Haydn (who is nonetheless under valued by casuals), so will give you your lasting foundation from which romanticism only extends and departs from,

Pirate bay Search TTC, find the course on Understanding the basics on music. In a couple lectures it will walk you through enough of the basics that other resources will be far Moe intelligible. Also it’s audio so it directly shows you everything, unfortunately no visuals, so it’s not going to help you read music.

>You will spend an age understanding Figured Bass
If you could already play a keyboard instrument it would take an afternoon of drilling for it to be fully internalized. It's an extremely simple system. Even then it's extremely rare to find sheet music for baroque pieces that use it, everyone writes them out in full.

>And Baroque music too, while closer to classical era stuff, is still very different from classical and later music
Maybe if you are talking about the very start of the baroque period but considering that it's the high-baroque that dominates performances and recordings I don't think it's fair to characterize it for it's very early days. The high-baroque is near identical to the classical style of Mozart in everything but style. The theory is all there and almost entirely the same, it's the stylistic features, instruments, forms and different ensembles that make up the differences.

Will I be a musiclet if I don't learn to read music?

Only Jews don't have veins on their hands

How much effort would be required of me to be somewhat decent at this?

>counter point is just the logic of developing motivic material,
Why do you say this?

why is her pooper on a musical instrument. doesn't she know about germs?

disgusting. those are old man calves and feet.

yeh, like flippers.

OP who is this germy gargoyle?

There are far too many variables and unknowns to be able to even begin to guess. Also I have no idea what you mean by decent.
You really have to learn how to practice otherwise you will never be good. Have a long term goal to reach, break it into smaller goals, then make a routine about how to achieve the smaller goals. When you practice you need to know exactly what you are practicing, what you want to achieve in that session, a means of measuring success and the degrees of success, and an understanding of how these incremental advances lead you towards fulfilling your goals. I've met people who have learned an instrument for one year and they are better than people playing for five years. Five minutes of real practice is better than an hour of farting around. The problem is though that unknown unknowns are dangerous which can be common if you don't have a teacher.

Make yourself some goals. You want to be able to play all the scales and modes in every possible way, up and down at a fast tempo. So you make exercises that focus on those. You want to be able to play any chord from any other chord etc. The theory stuff is a lot harder to make goals for and I can't really give much help on a place like Veeky Forums.

Because it's true. Counterpoint was designed as way of guiding the development of motivic ideas against other material. Counterpoint is the tool to achieve an end. It's like the difference between words and grammar as opposed to what it is the sentences are saying.
The reason I don't like older resources is they teach you an abstract skill and give you no way of relating that to the rest of your knowledge. It becomes a meaningless set of ideas that the student doesn't know how to actually use in a real composition. You have to learn counterpoint without motivic concerns but a good book lets you know that what you will learn from it is only a tool that makes sense after you have learned it and applied it to something else.

reddit.com/r/musictheory/wiki/faq/core/new_to_music_theory