Yeah I think the “fear” that knowing music theory will stifle you is likely to be wrong but some people will use music theory or perhaps someone’s lack of as an attempt to stifle others. Similarly to someone using a dictionary to stifle a poet being creative with spellings or meanings. I think the fear of music theory mostly comes from not wanting to be like the people who attempt to mandate theory upon them.
Knowing it or not as long as you are happily making music then I say you are just fine.
my fear is actually that is doesnt stick. I read, reread, practice…and it just slides off. the fear…is that I fear music just doesnt werk with me, or that im just that stupid.
id love to learn it or some of it…it just doesnt like me.
I’ve been playing music for nearly 24years and can say I know zero music theory and never once had any urge to bother to learn… just play something and I’ll join in…. Watch my fingers and you join in… the end.
When I started guitar when I was 13 I could never play all the punk songs I loved properly, I lived in a street with no internet at the time, so all I did day after day was play the songs I liked and I just took the role as the 2nd or 3rd guitarist and made my own stuff to go with it, taught my ear n fingers over time.
My ears n fingers then became best mates and they then did the sensible thing and cut me out of the decision making.
Yeah having stuff not stick is definitely annoying, I would consider myself pretty unknolagable at music theory… personally I am far more interesting in learning music theory with some sort of historical context, like learning about the scale/intervals monks came up with for gregorian chants vs a book that is just talking raw theory.
Serious-
How can anyone who’s never learnt music theory presume that it wouldn’t have benefitted them??
You have zero reference point to the other side of the argument, to what could’ve been had you learnt some theory.
Music is a language, and it has a vocabulary like any other language.
Not serious/serious-
I can freely go to France, I love France, even though I don’t speak a word of French… I can get by and experience France and French culture, and thoroughly enjoy myself without knowing the language.
Why do I need to speak French? I don’t… I’ll just raise my voice in English thank you very much, let the French join me in speaking English, job done.
Really the core divergence in this thread is about whether music theory is descriptive or prescriptive.
I understand that there are people who TEACH music theory in a prescriptive manner, and that’s a shame. I also know that there are people who learn music theory and then feel obliged to “obey” it…that too is a shame for the creativity, exploration and joy that can be found in musical spontaneity.
Fact is though, those issues are about what people DO with music theory…they are not inherent to music theory. Because music theory in essence is descriptive, not prescriptive (it would be a methodology if it were, not a theory…which does exist in different genres where people spend a lot of time learning how to sound like everyone else in their genre…ie “The Hit Formula” or “Blues thisnthat” or “Jazz Comping Libraries” etc etc).
I also think we need to stop equating music theory to and associating it with classical music. Classical music is a genre, not the embodiment of music theory. As I and others have said already, there isn’t just ONE music theory, there are many different theories about many different types of music / emergent from different musical evolutions & traditions.
I understand the freedom part, and fair enough, but to me the fear of losing one’s freedom of expression by learning theory most likely stems from not knowing much (about) theory in first place. I had the same fear and thus a strong resistance for years, until I finally started looking into it…I then realised that it was descriptive and super helpful when needed while easy to ignore when not needed.
I think it’s fine to not want to learn it but I also think it gets misrepresented in this discussion which will make it harder for people to embrace learning it.
I think some people think learning is prescriptive because, even if the environment isn’t coercive (and it too often is), one is graded on one’s understanding of the material. You have to show how to use what you’ve learned on the exam. After that, the choice is yours as to whether to use it or not. It doesn’t spoil you in any way, or make you incapable of thinking in different ways.
I don’t doubt we all come to this with our own baggage.
I think some people have had bad experiences with teachers who did have a prescriptive attitude, or who cared more about theoretical knowledge than actually making music, and that bad association makes them resent formal knowledge.
I think some people who have learned music theory blame it for their lack of creativity, not realising that they just not very imaginative people.
I think some people without that knowledge are needlessly scared of acquiring it, because of what they’ve heard from those mentioned above.
I think some people don’t even think about it, and that’s fine.
I think some people have invested a lot of time in learning theory and resent those who have success without it, making music that seems (to them) insultingly simple.
I think some people are personally invested in the idea of being ‘punk’, and not needing theory because they have Soul or Authenticity or something.
That was me. For years. I even refused to call myself a ‘musician’, despite writing and performing semi-professionally. But I started learning theory, just a little bit, and it has been very helpful. For me, it hasn’t been snobbery. Quite the opposite. It’s letting go of the ego trip of imagining myself to be some Authentic Original who can reinvent everything by myself.
This was my concern when I dove into the thread. I didn’t want it to turn someone away from it, intentional or not.
I’m no music theory buff, I can’t even remember most of it off the back of my hand (self taught).
I am very capable of referencing it and using it to aid me when I need it though. That’s enough for me to see that it’s very useful knowledge.
It can get you out of a rut or help you come up with things you might not of thought of. It’s also a way to see the bigger picture of what you’re doing and can guide you when you’re lost. It’s all about how you choose to use it.
There are so many tools and references available. You don’t even have to learn it in a standard way anymore.
Mostly saying that if you’re curious about it just try some basic things and move up from there.
It’s good for remembering stuff. You do all these things on a keyboard or guitar fretboard with your hands. If you want to repeat it, it’s way easier to remember what you were doing if you know what to call it. On one level, it’s that simple.
I’d love to get to the point of being able to say what chord I’m playing on the keyboard.
I can suss it out, but I’ve thought about the advantage of that too.
Simply playing something and saying what sequence of chords I just played to myself so I can play those again? Wow! No more just hoping it was captured somewhere (come on retrospective record, please work )
I associate it with “what would be nice to come after….[note]”. Changing keys?
I’d like to know the simple shit. How to figure out signatures…how to freakin USE signatures.
I’m definitely not trying to tell anyone what to do or what not to do but was just stating my own reasoning and approach on the matter and some observations I’ve made over the years.
It’s not entirely obvious to me that theory isn’t both descriptive and prescriptive as most of the musicians I know personally, me included tend to be at times v neurotic and insecure about what they’re doing and it seems to me that the rules of music theory are often times used to solve the questions of what note or chord should come next.
In my eyes this is making ppl sound the same and predictable more than it makes them sound unique and interesting.
The main point in my ramblings is that I personally don’t want to join that club despite at times struggling with chord progressions and harmonies, and that I don’t want to think when I’m playing but to develop myself on being intuitive and spontaneous and above all being willing to sound incorrect and perhaps primitive to people who know music theory well as long as it sounds right to me.
With modern electronic instruments like Elektron gear I think all of the needed theory like scales and the way rhythms are created is already built in to them. Same goes with anything that has piano roll.
Also, I don’t think ppl should just embrace something without hearing some opinions and experiences from both sides of the discussion first, especially when you cannot unlearn this stuff even if you wanted to.
Hey man, thanks for that post, just to clarify: I have no idea why my previous msg ended up being a direct response to you, I didn’t mean to tag you/respond to you specifically, it was meant for the thread generally.
Yeah, I think this is one of the key “issues” and I’m certain you are not alone with this. I remember when I first started learning an instrument (I was 25), I felt like I wasn’t a “real musician” and “not allowed” to play & experiment because I didn’t know theory. Obviously that’s counter productive and a real shame. It’s what I meant when I said what makes it prescriptive is what we do with it.
It’s also really not rules, the whole theory thing, even though I do agree that sometimes — especially in the classical & pop worlds — it’s taught and treated like that. Music theory is a description of what has worked in the past and why it has worked, not more not less. The conventions of dos and don’ts / ie “rules” are driven by genre and their gatekeepers, not theory itself.
I don’t think anyone is arguing otherwise here are they? Learning anything of any subject has an obvious benefit.
The language analogy you use is rather simple, communication can be done in a number of ways, and no theory/learning language as you put it does not imply a point of arrogance on the person either. Infact I find playing my friends who are classically trained they most enjoyable and creative as we push each other with two contrasting styles.
For me simply I grew up in a non musical family, with non musical friends with no access to musical books so I did what I could - could I now later in my life invest my time in learning it? I could. But I rather use my free time to learn French.
I might be naive, but my notion of music theory is that it’s entirely descriptive. This makes me curious about prescriptive aspects. Could you exemplify something that could be regarded as prescriptive music theory?
I get what you’re saying. It’s not my own experience that I feel obliged to use any particular musical idea just because I know that it’s theoretically complementary, but I get that others are wired differently and might feel some anxiety about that.
If you watch a YouTube video about how you should sidechain your bass to your kick, do you feel like you have to do it every time, or is it just an option you’re aware of?
Heh, no problem. That has happened to me too many times here.
As this is undoubtedly a passion for us it’s easy to have all kinds of biases and sometimes only time will tell which biases will work for us and which ones are working against us and even then is not purely a binary thing of course.
I have a tendency to push my views to be a bit more extreme than they actually are for the sake of conversation and just to see if I can defend them or I should consider discarding them hehe.
The reason I still consider it prescriptive and as something that is presented as rules is mostly bcs that’s how it was taught to me when I wasn’t resilient enough bcs of my young age at the time.
Although I’ve made some melodic music in the past, most of the music I make has very little melodic content, as it’s mostly noise, drone and techno.
I don’t need to learn chords, because I don’t use them.
I don’t need to learn scales, because I don’t use them.
I don’t need to learn intervals…you get my point.
I know that learning music theory won’t do me much good because the music I’m making doesn’t really require it.
I honestly can’t for the life of me understand why some of you find this so offensive.
) 
