If you’ve landed here, you’ve probably already decided that you want to learn more about music theory. Or you’ve at least heard from someone that it would be a good idea. But maybe you’ve started dabbling with it and have started wondering if it’s really worth the effort.
So is it? (Given the title of this blog post, my opinion on the matter shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.) I absolutely think it’s a good idea!
Why? Incorporating music theory into my own learning was a turning point in my musical journey, and I’m here today to tell you how.
Learn music faster
Once you start to recognize the harmonic patterns commonly used in music composition, the rate at which you’re able to learn new music skyrockets. You start to recognize that those 12 notes aren’t just a dozen individual notes you need to process one by one, it’s actually just a C Major chord broken into a pattern and repeated three times.
And once you’re able to recognize chords easily (and patterns created from chords), you’re going to start to recognize that the order they come in repeats a lot. From there, you’ll start to make connections across keys – that there are progressions that composers use over and over that makes learning music more predictable and easier to follow.
All of this streamlines your learning process, and helps you learn more music in less time.
Music theory helps you improve your reading skills
Similarly, learning music theory is going to boost your reading skills. With your increased understanding, and this sort of intuition of what could come next in the music, reading is also going to become a lot simpler. You can finally stop reading individual notes and start recognizing groups of notes together as chords, scales, arpeggios, and other patterns created from these musical building blocks.
Just like when you got better at reading your native language, you were finally able to read entire words as an entity, instead of sounding things out letter by letter. From there, you’re able to scan through sentences and paragraphs more quickly and fluidly. Music theory will help you unlock that level of reading because you will have a deeper understanding of what’s happening with the notes themselves.
Memorize music more easily
Music theory also helps you simplify the memorization of your pieces. Once you’re able to identify chords, scales, and arpeggios in your music, you’re able to group musical ideas together and memorize in a more dependable, holistic way. Using knowledge of music theory provides a security net that supports other memorization techniques, such as “muscle memory”.
On top of that, there are also certain harmonic patterns that repeat across periods, composers, keys, and genres that can help you memorize more quickly. For example, most classically composed music in a major key will have various sections that use the chords I – IV – V7 – I (Tonic – Subdominant – Dominant 7 – Tonic) and I – ii – V7 – I (Tonic – Supertonic – Dominant 7 – Tonic). Once you know which patterns are likely to appear, you’re able to memorize them easily, regardless of variations in accompaniment patterns.
Understand music on a deeper level
Once you’ve learned how chords relate to each other, you also start to understand a deeper meaning behind the chords and patterns. Essentially, you’re learning to speak the same language as the composer!
Two chords going back and forth are no longer just repeating patterns – you understand that the composer is communicating indecision, or maybe the composer is making a joke, or really trying to drive a point home.
Unexpected chord changes no longer feel weird and random, but you understand the element of surprise or change of atmosphere that the composer is sharing. Theory can actually help you connect on a deeper level with the music.
So what’s the catch?
Ah, the catch. Why is there always a catch?
Studying music theory will help you in all of the ways I’ve listed – and probably more!…but. Music is a language. Music theory helps you better understand and process that language. Languages take time – lots of time, and lots of effort.
Nobody wakes up one day, decides to learn Spanish, and is fluent by the afternoon. But if you know why you want to learn a language, it doesn’t matter. You want to move to Spain, or to understand the lyrics to the music you love, or to be able to communicate with your in-laws in their native language, and it’s worth the time, the effort, the struggle.
So no, spending one hour today trying to cram in all of the information you can find about music theory won’t significantly improve your reading skills, learn your newest piece in the morning, memorize it in the afternoon, and understand all of the encoded messages right away. But you would be one hour closer to all of that.
And the good news is, there are more organic ways to incorporate these skills into your playing than just reading books and filling out worksheets and doing a harmonic analysis of your pieces. I really like using chord charts to play accompaniments to get more familiar with the chords themselves and to use these topics in a hands-on way.
TL;DR
You can use music theory to unlock new levels of learning and musicianship – and it’s best if you learn these topics in a hands-on way.
Check out this series of videos on YouTube for examples of ways to go about learning music theory.
0 Comments