> You have to hear and feel the theory, it's not only intellectual.
This is the most important part, for sure. The theory needs to get into your body.
I'd also suggest to the OP to find a teacher that specializes in jazz, because the practice of improvisation requires you to embody that theory. A good teacher that focuses on improvisation will help you navigate through all the different building blocks you need, which happens to be theory.
I studied your typical classical piano as a kid, abandoned it in college, and later in life came back to it with a jazz improvisation teacher. It's amazing how little you actually learn about music when all you're doing is reading sheet music as a kid. Now when I go back to play, say, Bach, I can see so many other things going on since I've spent so much time hearing and feeling the improv theory.
> It's amazing how little you actually learn about music when all you're doing is reading sheet music as a kid.
I would add that historically, most musicians did not read music or theorize. They were practitioners who picked up the skill by listening to others, practicing, and improvising. Improvisation was what historically characterized musicianship, not theory, not sight-reading.
As the philosophical joke goes: anything you can do I can do meta. Theory is about music; it is not the practice of music. You can learn as much theory as you want, but theory is not practice. Theory can, of course, later sharpen or lead you to certain insights that can shape the music you produce, but practice is what produces facility, familiarity, and understanding, whereas theorizing produces knowledge. Learning theory too early is a pedagogic mistake. By analogy, consider speech. You don't begin to speak by learning grammar first. You begin by practicing. Only later can some knowledge of grammar help, perhaps. The way you become good at speaking is by practicing, and what is speech if not some combination of recitation and improvisation? Reading is entirely incidental and secondary.
> Theory is about music; it is not the practice of music.
I'd quibble a bit with this: theory is language to speak of certain experiences and patterns one discovers in the practice of / play with music.
Saying this to (perhaps) refine your point rather than contradict it. I quite agree that practice is key and theory was dead for me until one summer as a teen where I noodled freely enough in front of a piano and suddenly noticed "oh, this is what they're talking about." Everything up until you have enough up close and personal experience with the music to notice doesn't matter.
And then once you notice it becomes a name you can call it with.
The instrument itself is all you basically need to make music. People spent thousands of years just trying not to hit the wrong notes without knowing the difference between a sharp or a flat.
Theory was reductive to begin with, it codified what was already acceptable to qualify as music.
With deeper understanding the theory can be built upon creatively on its own, and rewarding composition or improvisation achieved independent of a particular instrument. Even better documentation in many cases.
Every instrument is different, but I do think it's a good idea if you're going to get into theory, you do it on an instrument where you have the greatest proficiency beforehand.
If you concentrate on the instrument itself primarily, you might spend some time producing relatively unmusical passages, but each instrument only has so many notes. If you play each note every day for some reason or another, you can become more familiar with all of them than otherwise. If you succeed at making it sound better over time, by playing however you like more & more regardless of theory, that would be notable accomplishment.
That's more like instrument theory rather than music theory, but if your instrument familiarity is good enough you can do your part and pull your weight along with advanced theorists who can cover the academic areas that are encountered. Once you're groovin' these are the ones to build up your theory about what you're already doing together.
Edit: There's also the alternative approach of playing only a limited number of the notes available on any one instrument. Almost theoretically in a statistical way to completely limit the output to that which is proven most acceptable to the mainstream. For instance Irving Berlin only played on the black keys and became the most popular songwriter that way.
Your last point is one of my long-standing pet-peeves about language teaching methods. It seems the universally accepted practice is to give students mountains of vocabulary to study, grammar rules that make no sense, and a little bit of speaking practice.
It is no wonder that native speakers of language X have a characteristic accent when speaking in a different language. When they try to read a word in the foreign language, they default to their native language's pronunciation heuristics.
That is completely backwards from how children learn languages. They are exposed to the sounds and intuitively figure out the rest.
After years of starting and stopping language learning via classes that take the typical vocab/grammar approach, I've found I'm actually progressing with confidence using Pimsleur and other listening based approaches. It just makes a whole lot more sense to me this way and I wish my middle school/high school foreign language teachers had just handed me this instead (at least at the beginning).
If you look at modern teaching getting it's root in nation formation in France/Germany where there was no 'national' language but regional dialects blending one into another it makes more sense. What if the original purpose WAS TO CREATE that 'characteristic accent'?
Totally agree. The practice is what's important. My teacher won't let you look at sheet music for songs at first, he'll make you listen to Donna Lee 1000 times, sing it and work it out yourself before you check your work with the sheet music.
Which reminds me of an anecdote in Hampton Hawes' autobiogrophy [1] where some famous teacher convinces him to take a lesson, after which Hampton writes he didn't really care for all of that theory stuff, he learned from playing with people like Mingus and Charlie Parker.
I'm a jazz musician, and have likewise learned very little theory. On the other hand, there is a lot of attrition in jazz, so watch out for survivor bias. And it depends on what you want to do. Everybody I know who is active in composition and arrangement is fluent in theory. Being able to create original material is super cool and valuable. And there were certainly theory experts among the greats.
Oh absolutely, there's always the anecdotes of Coltrane carrying around Slonimsky's thesaurus, or George Russel claiming Miles used his lydian chromatic concept. But personally I find none of it really makes much sense until I sit down with the theory and practice it on my instrument. Memorizing theory with flash cards, like the OP mentioned, I don't find to be all that helpful.
Essentially it’s two tunable sine wave oscillators and a simple waveform visualizer. you can manually tune the oscillators to any interval, gradually slide things in/out of tune, select intervals from from scales and see the mathematical calculations generated by various tunings. You can also run it in binaural mode (pure tone in each ear).
When I was teaching piano and music theory I used this tool to help students practice active listening for beat frequency and harmony. Maybe it can be useful to some of you.
Wow I just played with this for a while - I've never had the opportunity to see and hear the waves at the same time and really enjoyed it. It was really neat getting the frequencies close in binaural mode and hearing the pulsing of the phases being slightly off. Thanks for sharing!
I used Earmaster a few years ago. It is not free but it covers everything from sight singing, which works fairly decently, to rhythm detection/dictation, chord detection, melodic dictation, interval training, etc.
It was a ton of practice and for me not very fun. I already knew quite a bit of theory but after putting in the work it's helped a lot. Prior to this I had only done some sight singing, basic interval training, and some basic chord progression detection.
I can pretty much play close to instantly anything I hear in my head. I can also play anything I hear in real life as well, almost, if the music is incredibly fast or complex I might not remember it well enough to do so. Even if I can't play something I hear though in real life I can break down the higher level parts and structures pretty quickly at the very least.
Either way, if you're new to this or don't want to pay for software since you can probably do a lot of this for free, I would definitely start out with sight singing. It'll speed up learning intervals and melodic dictation much faster than if you don't learn how to do it.
I wonder why the for-teacher version uses chords to establish the tonic, and the other uses just a note. I find the latter much easier (but probably only because that's what I've practiced). I assume there's great benefit in being proficient in both.
To add to this, one of the seemingly better examples i was shown was that most of us who like music have a handful of songs that we can hear perfectly. We don't realize it, but that's one foundational tool to find the relative pitch of something.
Ie despite not having absolute perfect pitch, we know can accurately hear a variety of notes by just remembering a song, chorus, hook, etc. In doing so, we can figure out those notes and then use that to help determine the relative pitch of something else.
Works better the more songs you know. It's also not advocating learning songs for this purpose, but rather using songs you already know. Songs you grew up with, etc. Anything you deeply know.
Then I found 2 exercises are all I needed for playing and composing music by ear:
- Functional intervals / scale degrees: https://tonesavvy.com/music-practice-exercise/220/functional.... If you start tone deaf like me checked "Fixed Key", learn all the intervals, then restart with basic intervals without fixed key.
- Melodic dictation: the advanced version of the exercise above once you are comfortable with each interval: https://tonesavvy.com/music-practice-exercise/222/melodic-di...
Once you can do melodic dictation you will be able to easily decode anything you hear, and map it to theory.
Edit: chord identification (https://tonesavvy.com/music-practice-exercise/216/chord-iden...) is obviously important but by then identifying basic chords should be easy, so it's for a more advanced level.