'Best' way to learn Music Theory

SimpleSimon

So a guitarist of many, many years  but never bothered to study much. I've been in cover bands but played mainly original bands in the 90's and early 00's. I'm self taught and can play most simple things from ear or tab but as i've got older (now in my early 40's) I feel compelled to study more and learn the basics properly. I now have time (and possibly the money) and want to structure it in the best possible way. I'm guessing the best thing I could do is take on some proper lessons. In order to progress i'm open to anything even piano lessons if this would progress my understanding of music more. My aims are clear - 1)to learn to site read 2)to learn the keys and scales 3)Advance my guitar technique (ie chicken picking/hybrid picking etc) 4)to generally become more accomplished.

So what you guys reckon?

octatonic

Yes to taking lessons.
It is the most efficient way.

Why sight reading?
Understand that there is a difference between reading music and being able to sight read fluently.

paul_c2

I don't think you need to go as far as actual piano lessons, but definitely having access to, and understanding, a piano keyboard makes a lot of the initial theory concepts much easier to comprehend. So, a cheap electronic keyboard/synth would do the job fine.

SimpleSimon

octatonic said:

Yes to taking lessons.
It is the most efficient way.

Why sight reading?
Understand that there is a difference between reading music and being able to sight read fluently.

Fair point, i guess i would just like to be able to turn up somewhere and play based on a score.

paul_c2 said:

I don't think you need to go as far as actual piano lessons, but definitely having access to, and understanding, a piano keyboard makes a lot of the initial theory concepts much easier to comprehend. So, a cheap electronic keyboard/synth would do the job fine.

I have a midi keyboard so have that covered. Would love to be able to play properly -Not much of a player though!

paul_c2

Its more that the paino-style keyboard presents the notes in an easy and logical way, eg all (well, most) sharps and flats are black, while all the natural notes are white. So its easy to visualise which notes go to make up a scale and you can count semitones in between them if needs be, or easily draw a picture and label them (or stick labels on them.....I'd not do it in case they didn't peel off!)

Also its easy to produce the sound, and to make chords. Imagine if you were trying to learn music theory and all you had was a trombone, chords would be a bugger! And knowing which note was which, would be difficult for a beginner too.

viz

My personal opinion is you should consider taking yourself through the ABRSM grades - at least the books and past exam papers, if not the certifications themselves (which are £30-50 a go). 

You will learn a lot of things that may seem irrelevant to you (the staff system, the different note values, the Italian and German words), and it will probably not all go at the right speed for you (some bits you'll already know, others you won't), but the majority of it you'll immediately be able to apply to your playing and listening. And it's the tried and tested approach for millions of classical musicians (you have to have passed grade 5 theory to qualify to take grade 6-8 instrument exams) - it will give you a proper, thorough foundation and you may even love it. Plus, doing it as a mature musician will probably be easier than as a child.

You can get the teaching guides and workbooks and past papers for £3 on ebay. 

And yes, use the keyboard as you learn. The way a keyboard is arranged actually models music theory. It's an amazing invention - it's like a pivot table of the circle of fifths. I don't know how anyone really knows how music theory works without an image of a keyboard, even subconsciously. 

SimpleSimon

Great suggestion @viz but I do think I need someone to push me, in terms of setting goals and correcting my mistakes. Also to give the whole thing structure and keep up my enthusiasm. I'm motivated but easily distracted!

viz

Deffo, that's an and not an or

stratman3142

viz said:

My personal opinion is you should consider taking yourself through the ABRSM grades - at least the books and past exam papers, if not the certifications themselves (which are £30-50 a go). 

Just curious. Are the ABRSM grades for classical guitar, which wouldn't suit me?

The reason I ask is I'm toying with the idea of going for the Rockschool Grade 8 exam next year after I retire. I purchased all the books when I was teaching my youngest daughter, until she decided she wanted to be a bass player.

viz

Well, the suite of theory exams is instrument-agnostic - it's just plain old theory. You need grade 5 before you can do any instrumental grade 5 (or is it any instrumental grade 6, I forget). 

paul_c2

Electric guitar isn't served well by ABRSM - they basically don't do it. However as above, they do offer music theory grades/exams which are independent of any particular instrument. If you want to have some kind of recognised qualification for electric guitar, the only choice is Trinity or Rockschool. Trinity do loads of other instruments (eg piano, woodwind, etc) too, in addition to music theory and other qualifications like "jazz woodwind" etc.

I'm honestly not sure how popular (or otherwise) formal grades on the likes of electric guitar or bass are. I know for "classical" musical instruments such as piano, woodwinds, brass etc that teaching, learning etc is much more formalised and exams are very popular. I think this is partly down to the fact that guitar lends itself to self-learning a bit more than others though - for example you'd really struggle on eg clarinet without a teacher, while people on guitar can self-learn quite successfully.

paul_c2

Also, I'd say for adult learning, an adult could be sufficiently self-motivated to learn music theory reasonably well and not need a teacher or the check/incentive/pressure/etc of exams. Although obviously having a teacher would be better (because you yourself will never know what the "gaps" in your knowledge are). There is quite a lot of stuff on music theory "out there" on the internet compared to some other areas of music:

For example, there is the "Sparky the music theory dog" set of graphics/PDFs: http://tobyrush.com/theorypages/

And more formal stuff: http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheory1.htm

Sporky

viz said:

Well, the suite of theory exams is instrument-agnostic - it's just plain old theory. You need grade 5 before you can do any instrumental grade 5 (or is it any instrumental grade 6, I forget). 

You need Theory Grade 5 to take any instrument at Grade 6.

I went up to Grade 6 theory - it was one better and I really liked theory. Quite a bit of it is about notation and understanding; it's not necessarily about writing music, particularly at lower grades.

Based on how much I've learned in the last 9 months I'd strongly recommend finding a teacher you get on with and who can spot where you need to pay attention. You still need to put in the effort yourself, but a good teacher will ensure that that effort is correctly directed.

stratman3142

paul_c2 said:

Also, I'd say for adult learning, an adult could be sufficiently self-motivated to learn music theory reasonably well and not need a teacher or the check/incentive/pressure/etc of exams. Although obviously having a teacher would be better (because you yourself will never know what the "gaps" in your knowledge are). There is quite a lot of stuff on music theory "out there" on the internet compared to some other areas of music:

I'm not worried about learning music theory because I have taught myself what I need to know. It's more about getting some sort of recognised qualification that would give me a level of credibility if I decided to do some teaching at some point.

It's interesting that harmonisation of scales and the interrelationship between chords and scales, plus what scales to use against certain chords (or groups of chords) doesn't tend to get listen under 'music theory', but I would regard that as one of the most useful things for most players.

Sporky

stratman3142 said:

I'm not worried about learning music theory because I have taught myself what I need to know. It's more about getting some sort of recognised qualification that would give me a level of credibility if I decided to do some teaching at some point.

I'd say a teaching qualification would be more useful.

paul_c2

Sporky said:

stratman3142 said:

I'm not worried about learning music theory because I have taught myself what I need to know. It's more about getting some sort of recognised qualification that would give me a level of credibility if I decided to do some teaching at some point.

I'd say a teaching qualification would be more useful.

I'm not sure if there's a specific qualification for a music teacher though. Obviously, there's MusB etc

Sporky

Doesn't need to be specifically for music, but teaching and training are skills themselves. Being able to play well doesn't make someone a good teacher.

ChrisMusic

Some useful resources ?

I'll just leave this here...

http://thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/7506/full-in-depth-music-theory-see-post-3/p1

frictionfraction

Sight reading is a really useful skill to have. It gets you gigs with musical directors who couldn't really care less about your Steve Vai licks - they just want you to play the dots in front of you at the right time. Berkley do a few books of sight reading exercises. The trick is to find exercises that have no melody - if you are a guitarist who plays by ear melody exercises will just result in you not reading the music but predicting the melody and playing by ear.  Unfortunately the only one to do it proficiently is lots of practice. 

Bygone_Tones

Do the classical guitar grades with ABRSM.  It ticks all 4 of the aims you mentioned.

Learning theory is important but incredibly boring to just learn on your own by reading about it, especially when you get past the basics and hit the heavy going stuff. Have a look at the higher grade theory work books or test papers and you will see what I mean. Without a teacher to push you, and without putting it into practise by playing classical pieces I think it will be very difficult to motivate yourself to get to any decent level past the first couple of grades.

stratman3142

Bygone_Tones said:

Do the classical guitar grades with ABRSM.  It ticks all 4 of the aims you mentioned.

But classical guitar requires a different right hand finger picking technique than most players use. It's something I've never got on with, although I can finger pick in what I would call folk style.