Easy, practical music theory resources
This post is part of my series on songwriting.
Big shoutout on the channel today to one of my mentors, Terry Everson (Professor of Trumpet and Department Chair, Boston University, composer, and a 2019 Grammy award winner with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project!)
This was a great resource when he first recommended it to me 20 years ago, and it’s still around and still great. It’s called musictheory.net.
If you can get all of the way through the free lessons on this website, it’s the equivalent of about the first year or two-ish of the music theory courses you’d take at pro music school.
It starts with the basics of music notation like note names and clefs, and moves all the way through more complex items like chord progressions, formal theoretical analysis, and Neapolitan chords. I really like how it ties all of this together with both the piano keyboard and the guitar fretboard:
I’d especially recommend getting into the ear training exercises, once you’ve completed the basic lessons on how written music notation works.
Ear training work is some of the most practical stuff you can learn in music. I use these skills every single day in my professional career.
That’s because they’re fundamentally applicable skills that work across a ton of different musical disciplines, from composition to engineering to performance to teaching.
I sometimes run into artists (especially on the popular music side) who seem worried that undertaking any formal study at all will make them less intuitive musicians.
It doesn’t work that way.
Intuition is a skill that’s developed over time and with practice. It’s not innate, and it can’t somehow be lost, just because you got some more education.
Formal study, book learning, jam sessions, improvisation, and intuitive ideation are all complementary skills that build upon each other.
They all work great together, when used in balance and in combination.
