This touches on another thing to think about: sometimes skills just take time to master. Just like with math, there are skills that build on each other. You have to start with the basics and build up. One of the biggest mistakes adults make trying to learn something new is to trying to go too fast, because we forget how long it took us to learn the things we’re already good at.
I’m just funnin’ - I get the basics, when I think them through. I just don’t actively invoke them as I am music-ifying.
I assume what you are suggesting would be similar to what I think of as setting A at 440, as opposed to transposing based on 1/4/5. But because you used terms I was unfamiliar with (movable do) - I got the impression it confused rather than clarified.
I imagine one beneficial aspect of learning some amount of music theory is to be able to accurately communicate with others using common terms. Similar to how in another of my hobbies - gardening - it is generally preferable to rely on scientific names of plants rather than common names.
Doug K makes a good point I alluded to before - it ain’t enough to read a book or take a class. You need to apply it over and over, and refresh with some regularity.
OK, so let me clarify:
Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti (or Si)-Do
We’re familiar with this, right? In Spain (and many other countries) these syllables correspond to C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. This is called “fixed do” because “do” is fixed to a particular note, a C. The whole “do-re-mi…” sequence is the C major scale.
In the US, English speaking countries, parts of Asia, and some other places, “do” can start on any note. This is called “movable do” because the “do” can be moved. Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do are the syllables for any major scale.
I don’t think most musicians think much of theory while playing. It can certainly help to figure out on-the-fly chord substitutions and reharmonizations and things like that, but a lot of musicians just figure that out intuitively. You’re certainly using theory even if you don’t know it formally, just like we use grammar when speaking languages, even if we haven’t studied it formally. I’ve never formally studied theory–it was just something I learned as I went along, bit by bit, piece by piece as I played through classical and jazz music. (It really was the latter where it became interesting and a bit more solidified for me, since in jazz you’re reading chord charts and improvising on them all the time, and you begin to figure out how certain chords work and relate to each other.) Also, trying to figure out chord progressions by listening to songs without having my instrument in front of me. I don’t have perfect pitch, so I can’t tell you that a progression is C-Am-Dm-G7, but I can tell you it’s I-vi-ii-V7 in some key or another. You probably can do the same thing. If I start playing a blues progression, you know exactly what it is, even though you may not know the key. If I yell out, “blues in G,” you’ll know to play the I, the IV, and the V chords and where to play them. You know the theory, even if you don’t realize it.
Hmmm, I don’t usually frequent Cafe Society, but this discussion is close to my heart, and something I have thought about quite a bit.
First up, people learn in different ways. There is no one true way, and what works for one person might be absolutely useless for another. OTOH, having two different threads in looking at a subject is often really good. Often one or the other provides the initial insight, and sometimes the act of reconciling and understanding of both provides the insight.
Music is buy its nature partly a physical thing. You need to make noise, and unless you are hearing the results of everything you are trying to learn about theory you will never get anywhere.
Also, you learn by doing. Every single step needs to be done. This means writing out notes on paper, and playing them.
Anyway, for me, coming to an understanding of musical theory (as much as I do understand) has come about by realising that a lot of how people are taught is backwards. Rote learnt rules seems to be a dominant form of teaching. And these rules are often impenetrable because they require an initial bootstrapping into the nomenclature and jargon before even the sentences make sense. And perhaps the worst component of all is that musical theory is taught as a massive set of rules. Which is IMHO almost exactly backwards. (Again, for me and my way of thinking about things.)
The core insight for me was to go right back to the question of humans and music. What is it about music that makes us like it, and what is it about the patterns of sounds that works on us?
A guitar is a prefect instrument to start with. In front of you is laid out in all its misbegotten glory is the entire story of harmony and melody from the most basic of the Platonic scales right up to equal temperament and transposing, and everything that can go wrong in between. And it is this journey that seems to have spawned the largest fraction of the jargon and confusion of rules.
You can play on a single string and mark out those fret positions that correspond to simple ratios of string length. The octave is simply the string half as long. But you can quickly see that there are frets pretty much on the spot for lots of other simple ratios. 3:2, 3:4, 3:5, 4:5, 5:6, 9:8, 15:8 etc. (These ratios only use the basic numbers 2,3,5 and multiples of those numbers.) You can mess about with these and quickly come to realise that the simpler the ratio it is the more harmonically pleasing the relationship is. You can make up simple melodies on the simple ratios. You can build up arpeggios, and obviously if you work out how to make those same note appear on other strings you can work out how to make up chords where you stack up notes that have those self same simple ratios. You will quickly come to hear how adding a note that is a 3:2 ratio higher than another fattens the sound out in a pleasing way. You can play with other options, some will sound consonant, others much less so. You might can add a little rote learned knowledge and find that 1:1, 3:2, and 5:4 make a pretty nice sound all together. You could muse on the lovely simplicity of this, and the manner in which your ear and brain must be somehow processing the consonance of this mixture. Jumping ahead, you can build up a neat and very physical understanding of some quite sophisticated music theory just doing this. Playing with consonant ratios of note frequencies based upon ratios formed from just the basic numbers 2,3,5 and multiples thereof. You can build scales, and experiment with the different sound of scales as you substitute different notes into and out of the scales. Seeing how even a subtle tweak of just one note from a low fractional ratio one to one chosen from a higher order ratio changes the sound.
Obviously we don’t call notes by their ratios, but we do use a closely allied thing. We give them numbers. But the numbers are on order of ascending frequency, not in order of simplicity of ratio. So our simplest ratio - 3:2 is actually called a fifth. And if you work out the names for all the others you realise that 5:4 is what is called the major third, and so on. The point being that the names we give these ratios actually hides the underlying importance of what make them work. Theory as taught tells you as a rote learned fact that the tonic, major-third and fifth makes a simple chord. Then it all goes downhill with mind numbing factiods about diminished 7ths and stuff that only makes sense once you have already learnt it. But of you explored the underlying physics of what it is your brain is hearing, and explore it on the fretboard, you might see both the patterns in the ratios and the patterns on the fretboard emerge together, and when you link hat back to the jargon, be able to understand not just some rote learnt rules, but actually describe the reason why those rules come about.
Really the above is the first part of what I consider to be the core of understanding musical theory. Another part is understanding why the entire thing goes to hell the moment someone decides they want to play in more than one key. And that can be summarised in two phrases - unique prime factorisation, and equal temperament. Which I won’t go on to bore you with, except to say that the entire edifice of consonant ratios breaks down when you try to apply it outside of a simple single scale structure. The ratios don’t work anymore. They miss, and you get notes that you think should be one frequency that turn out to be another, and the things starts to go all wrong. Coping with it going all wrong when someone wanted to do something neat, like shift to another key, resulted in a whole heap on compromises, and eventually the equal tempered scale. Which is basically a way of making every note a little bit out of tune, but spreading the joy across all of them, so that when you do try to play with neat tricks involving multiple keys, and other harmonic fun it didn’t totally fall apart. Neat tricks like the circle of fifths and the like are just cute things that fall out from this process, and are ways of trying to place some order on chaos that results. Once you accept that key changes, and all that come with it, is possible, you can walk away from those simple ratios as a true underpinning, but keep their simple beauty and the rules they provided in the now much richer world of equal temperament. All the new rules are simply derivatives of those rules from simple ratios, but extended, and sometimes compromised, to work in this bigger world. Plus you get new opportunities, as you are freed from the notions of a single scale and key, but never forget, fundamentally, under it all, your ear is hearing ratios, and every rule, or chord progression anyone ever spouts can be ultimately taken back to those roots, sometimes the process also uncovers a few nasty secrets, about how the ratios are almost but not quite right on any fretted equally tempered instrument.
Finally you can get into more abstract notions of tension and release, and also rhythm. They are a different beast.
OK, this is all a bit of a rant. 2:30am, on a hot and sticky night when I can’t sleep. But maybe someone might feel inspired buy my ramblings.
I absolutely agree with you. Music comes first. Then the theory comes as a description of what (and often why) certain things work in a particular type of music (not all styles of music will have exactly the same theory behind them.) It’s like going back to my grammar and language analogy. When we learn language, we learn the grammar intuitively, whether we know it or not. Grammar was codified and studied afterwards. It can tell us what things work in our language, what are accepted, and what are not. (But, like in theory, those can change over time.)
The music, just like the language, always comes first.
Right. I was just reassuring you that you can forget about how we use “do re mi…” in English – not really important.
Just “translate” your do as C, your re as D, etc., and you’re good to go. As I said – troublesome and annoying, but not *that *big a deal – especially since, by luck, fa is F! 
Oh, and I agree it’s annoying that the two systems “start” on different notes. For an English speaker learning the Spanish system, we have to remember that you start on “C.” For a Spanish speaker learning the English system, you have to remember that we start on “la” (as you noted).
Why? I just looked this up – it’s because some guy named Boethus around 500 AD assigned the “all white keys” major scale to start on do (first syllable in the Biblical mnemonic passage*), but whatever instrument or voice he was using went as far as two notes lower than that, so he called that note “A” (for the lowest ‘possible’ note).
*Technically, it was called “ut” at first, which is really the first syllable in that passage.
That’s exactly what it means. Just like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, do (fist) is the root note of whatever scale you’re using. It’s a great system because the relationship between notes is what matters. C could be do in one context but so in another or la in yet another. Also the relationship between relative major and minor chords I’ve found to be very helpful.
Yes, this is all very much true. I guess that is my point: I haven’t set learning Theory as an explicit objective but I respect the fact that I have picked up a number of the basics along the way. I can hear a I iv ii V progression, etc. But I don’t actively pursue it, and I sure don’t beat myself up for not knowing it.
I remember reading an interview with Joe Satriani back in the day - or maybe it was Vai discussing his lessons with Satriani. Anyway, at one point, I recall reading something like “yeah, if I am at that chord in the progression, and I don’t realize that I can do a G Mixolydian, I would be so limited.”
My eyes rolled up into my head. I have gone back and parsed out what I had recalled, and I do get how having more scale options for leads (and using modes like Mixolydian as a way to access more scales) is powerful, but yeah, that is not even remotely how I approach my playing.
Agreed – having a way to express pitches in a scale relatively** is** certainly useful. I only meant to say that (in my experience) English-system-users don’t often call these “do re mi…” (We simply don’t use those words often for anything).
Instead, we typically call them by their interval names – how many notes up from the root (the root being 1, not zero). For example, if the key of a piece in E, then a D (or, in some cases, a D-sharp) could be called a “seven” (referring to harmonic progression). Or, if the basic chord of (say) a measure is E, then a D (or, in some cases, a D-sharp) could be called a “seventh” (referring to making the chord a more complex one).
Yes. While I do know very basic solfėge (the system of syllables that start with “do re mi”), I don’t ever really remember using it at any point of my learning music. (And I still can’t remember what the syllables are for the accidentals/notes not in the major scale, because it’s never been useful for me to learn it.) I’ve only had people talk to me in terms of intervals or the notes themselves.
This is definitely how it worked for me. I began taking guitar lessons after playing semi-professionally (part-time paying gigs) for a couple of decades. I went to a well-respected local jazz guy who I had known since I was a kid and said “Please explain to me what I’m doing.” He did teach me some techniques, but most of what he taught me was the theory behind what I already knew how to do. Knowing the theory allowed me to expand my skills quite a bit.
Yet you probably already know the Mixolydian intuitively. That said, yeah, there are some weird out-there scales that do take some practice and a bit of knowledge to get to, as they are not easy to discover accidentally, unless you listen/are exposed to a broad range of music.
Theory is mostly interesting to me for one basic reason: it establishes a shared vocabulary to talk about music, especially on a message board. But it also helps in me in picking out tunes on the radio without being near an instrument. That’s as much aural skills, but it’s nice to hear a song and go, hey! That’s just a iv-ii-V-I in the verse and a IV-iv-I-V7 in the bridge, and basic theory gives you the vocabulary to put that into words and help remember it for when you’re next to your instrument, so all you have to do is find the key it’s in, and you’ve got it.
That said, it’s also interesting because it does help expand your vocabulary and may introduce you to new ways of putting chords or melodies together that you might not have come across yourself.
As noted by Beatles scholar Ian McDonald, ‘[The Beatles’ 1963 song “Not a Second Time”] inspired a musical analysis from William Mann of The [London] Times, citing the “Aeolian cadence” (Aeolian harmony) of Lennon’s vocals as the song draws to a close, and noting that the same chord progression appears at the end of the final movement of Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde.”
Lennon, years later, remarked: “To this day, I have no idea what [Aeolian cadences] are. They sound like exotic birds.”
I used to be scared by all this stuff - it was the sense of knowing that it was all out there and that it was, as you aptly describe, a “massive set of rules,” and that I didn’t understand it and feeling like I never would understand it. But eventually it comes together, if you just listen to a lot of music and play along with stuff once you understand the basic concept of intervals and chord progressions. I try to play along with a new song, by ear, every day. (My primary instrument is the bass, though I can also play guitar but not nearly as well.) I try to do it without looking at a chord chart. As I play along repeatedly and get a feel for what the chords are, I just play by ear, while at the same time, thinking in terms of what intervals work. I can be like, “hey, I can play a sixth here and it sounds good to go from the sixth up to the ninth because it fits well with that little vocal harmony right there,” and so on and so on. Just learn the intervals and recognizing the sounds and how they fit together, and understand chord progressions starting with the basic I-IV-V-I. Understand the concept of chromaticism and how, for instance, a series of chords can contain part of a chromatic scale if played in a certain order. (The Beatles used this a lot.) Simple things like a major chord transitioning to a minor chord (another thing the Beatles used a lot.) YOU WILL EVENTUALLY UNDERSTAND. Don’t overthink it.
Intervals are awesome. When you go to an open stage, chances are most of the musicians don’t read written music, but they certainly understand when someone says this progression goes to a quick IV right at the start. In fact, Nashville notation is pretty standard stuff at jams.
These are good points, and the Beatles didn’t read any written music, though they certainly understood theory from an untrained point of view. Of course, they also had George Martin to figure it out for them.
I have always assumed that Lennon confused “Aolian Cadences” with the creatures in Hercules’s 6th Labor: The Stymphalian Birds 