Is saw this question on Yahoo questions and thought it was interesting.
My answer to this is, “no.”
But I’ve seen a number of people who are concerned that learning about music theory and music in general with hamper their creativity. I’ve always thought this was odd because I’ve never experienced this myself.
For those who don’t know, I studied classical composition and film scoring in college and have learned quite a lot of music theory and it’s never hindered my creativity.
It’s actually only done the opposite. It’s enhanced my creativity by exposing me to new and interesting musical ideas that I probably wouldn’t have been exposed to before.
Music theory is just a way of analyzing and naming and discussing musical ideas or musical patterns that are common within one genre.
I suggest people learn music theory because it can help with understanding and expanding your musical interests and knowledge. If you don’t think that’s interesting then it’s not for you. That’s fine too.
No. The short answer to this question is no. It’s that simple. You don’t need music theory to be a musician or to be a ‘good’ musician.
The long answer is, “it can be useful for some things.”
It can be incredibly useful to communicate with other musicians. It can also be useful to describe what is happening in a piece of music as it relates to other pieces of music.
It can also be useful to understand and incorporate specific ideas into your own music because you understand those ideas and patterns more deeply.
Basically, it depends. Not a fun answer, but the answer nonetheless.
I had a conversation with a teacher friend of mine the other day and he mentioned that I was good at subjects like English and writing. And I’d never particularly thought of myself as being good at those subjects, but I did pretty well in school in both of them.
He said he wasn’t very good at those subjects.
And I asked if he enjoyed them.
He said he didn’t.
So I told him I did enjoy those subjects, and that’s likely why I was good at them.
I like to remind myself of this, and sometimes remind my students of this, because being good at something often just means that the person enjoys it enough to spend some time doing it.
For example, think of a hobby that you have. Are you fairly “good” at that hobby? Are you knowledgeable about that hobby?
My guess is the answer to both of those questions is, “yes”, for a lot of people because hobbies, or any activity that you enjoy, is something you do often. And you learn about it and think about it and try to get better at it.
If you enjoy it, you’ll get better.
If you don’t enjoy it, getting better may be more of a struggle.
So I play guitar and guitar is an instrument that’s incredibly hard to write for if you aren’t familiar with how the guitar works. Piano is similar, but in a lot of ways it’s easier to write something that’ll fit easily on piano, probably because studying piano music is much more common than studying guitar music. I also think much more music will “fit” on piano. There’s a large selection of things that’ll be playable. Guitar has some limitations that piano doesn’t.
For example, guitar has only 6 strings, which means only 6 total notes can be played at a time. Those strings are also fretted with one hand, which means in order to play all of those 6 notes, they need to able to be reached by one hand. These are limitations that piano doesn’t have. Guitar can also do a lot of things that piano can’t. On guitar you can bend notes and slide between them and scrape your pick against the strings and play hammer-ons and pull-offs.
But regardless whenever writing for an instrument something I try to imagine, especially if I know the basics of that instrument, is how will it fit on that instrument. Will it fit well? Will it be playable?
What I’m thinking about is literally how will the performer’s hands have to move in order to play the piece that I’m about to give them.
Guitar is a strange instrument because, unlike violin, the strings aren’t tuned in all the same intervals. The strings ascend in fourths except for one which is a major 3rd. That makes it a little difficult to write for unless you know the specific shapes that work.
Violin is similar, but violinists don’t often play chords.
Guitar you play chords all the time.
So don’t write out specific chord voicings for guitar. Writing out specific chord voicings for guitar likely won’t fit well on guitar if you don’t know the shapes that will fit.
There are a few standard shapes like for C, D, G, E, and A that can be used, but when writing for any instrument it can be useful to learn enough about that instrument to imagine what it’ll be like to play.
For example if you’re writing something for flute and there’s a run that has a tricky fingering change where many different fingers are moving in different directions, that might make it difficult to play that specific thing quickly. Learning just enough to be able to imagine what it’d be like to play is often enough. You don’t need to be able to actually play it, though that’d help quite a bit too.
Just knowing how the different strings, valves, finger holes and keys work and change the notes is a great start.
And it can save you a headache of having to rewrite something while in the studio and waste valuable, and expensive, studio time. It can also be a little embarrassing to have to change your music in the middle of a recording session.
Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how musical analysis or music theory follows the musical practices. It always comes after them, not before. We only have a way to analyze jazz music because we have jazz music to analyze and that music has patterns within it that are shared between different songs.
It doesn’t go the other way around.
Knowing theory can help you understand music and communicate your ideas better, but it doesn’t necessarily change those ideas. In learning theory you’re exposed to different ways of making music and putting notes and rhythms together. Those are the new ideas you might use, not the theoretical ideas.
In studying music and theory you have to study actual pieces, rather than just examples of music. That’s where you get the input and the experience to use those ideas.
But the analysis always comes afterwards. It’s always a little behind the current practice of where music is.
Take electronic music for example. There’s very little music theory frameworks to analyze electronic music, especially modern electronic music. And that’s not a knock on music theorists and musicologists. That to me just makes sense because that will always be the case. Electronic music hasn’t been around for that long, especially compared to older styles of classical music and jazz that have been around for 100 years or more, and any somewhat standardized analytical framework for it will be older.
I’ve been making YouTube videos, about one a week, for almost a year. One thing that has helped me keep making them, even when I didn’t think they were very good, was that quantity and quality are related.
Doing something a whole bunch of times, with some thought put into how to improve the quality, will lead to quality. In order to get good at something you have to do it a lot. You won’t be good at everything that you do right away. And you won’t be good at everything after only a few tries.
It takes time and practice to get good at something.
It takes quantity to get to quality.
For creating videos or creating music it’s the same thing. If you write a ton of music you’ll get better at making music. If you create a ton of videos you’ll get better at creating videos. Each new song and each new video is the practice of getting better at making them. The more you make, the more you practice. The more practice you get the better you’ll get with making those things.
My goal with YouTube is to have 100 videos on my channel.
Currently I’m at 85 videos I think. I have 15 to go and I’ll have met my goal.
After reaching that goal, the next goal is to make 200 videos. Hopefully they’ll be easier and faster and higher quality. I can already tell that my current videos are easier to edit and easier to script and film and create than my first few. I know how to get the results I want much more easily and much faster. That’s after only creating 30 or so. After creating a full 100 videos, I can only imagine how much better they’ll be.
You’ll always look back and think, “Wow I could’ve done this better. I should’ve changed this.”
But so what?
That’s the whole process of getting better at something.
I follow this my attitude when editing videos often because sometimes I get too focused on trying to make everything fancy. Not everything needs to be fancy.
Even in my music I have to pull myself back and simplify things sometimes. It’s easy to get caught up in making everything as fancy as possible and including every single fancy and complicated technique that you know of. But not everything needs to be incredibly complicated.
Simple works really well.
It won’t work for everything, but for some things it can be just as effective as something complicated.
Rather than wait for the time to be perfect or for it to feel like the right time. Just start the project.
Get started.
If you’re waiting to make an album or write a book or write a song or learn piano or lean a new language, just start it. Start doing it. There won’t be a time when it feels right. You won’t ever feel like it’s the perfect time and waiting for the perfect time just means that you’re delaying doing something that you want to do.