Ask HN: Tools to learn music theory?

Practice reading sheet music, which does not mean playing what is on the page but reading the page and understanding the harmonic structure in both the vertical and the horizontal. Starting out this means sitting down with some sheet music and a pencil and marking up the pages. This will also help you learn the notes and more importantly the intervals. And play those scales, circles of fifths, triads, arpeggios through the 7ths, etc. Sing the note names as you play them, it will really beat it into your head both the staff position and the sound even if you are not good at singing them at proper pitch.

Flash cards are not great here since you loose context, you want to study both the vertical harmonic structure of chords and how that evolves through time in the horizontal structure. Just download a bunch of sheet music and print it out or buy a notebook/pad of staff paper and write it out.

This is a bit of a less traditional way to learn, but I'm big on learning from chords. Find a song you love on Ultimate Guitar Tabs and learn to play the chords – play them in different inversions and experiment with tweaks (adding a 7 or 2). Over time as you get comfortable with those chords and their inversion start to fill in the gaps following your ear. Personally I find this style of playing new songs more motivating as I can play a variety of pop songs and I can play them quickly and make them my own. An unfortunate side effect – I'm not great at sight reading

Two books I'll throw in here: Foundations of Diatonic Theory [0] which gives the simplest, modern, math-based explanations of how notes and chords relate. It's a college workbook that you write-in for the exercises. Really terrific.

Also, not a theory book but the most important music learning book I've read: The Perfect Wrong Note [1]. Reading this permanently changed the way I approach learning the piano (or synth. in my case) and I my playing has vastly improved over the last couple of years because of it.

[0] https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780810862333/Foundations-of-Diatoni...

[1] https://www.halleonard.com/product/331733/the-perfect-wrong-...

Best way to get fast at reading music is transcription. Listen to melodies and try to write them down, either with or without the help of an instrument

I like musictheory.net

You might want to give Rick Beato a try: https://rickbeato.com/

He does interesting YouTube videos on music topics, but also sells theory and ear-training courses online.

I would avoid flash cards. A few tangible steps you could take:

- Play and read lots of sheet music. Especially by sight. It will come, I promise :)

- Complete Ear Trainer is hands down the best aural training aid out there. Be warned, it is difficult (I got it while studying for my later instrumental grades and it was initially very tough) but I’ve never come across a tool as good. Think of it as being a bit like aural flash cards with harmonic context

- Transcription is a good idea. I’ll also suggest transposition; my main instrument is horn, and for grades (at least in the UK) you had to do sight transposition as well as sight reading. Once you’re comfortable sight reading, try doing the same thing but playing it up a fourth, or down a third, etc.

I would recommend using something like tonedear.com and practicing ear training mostly. I played a lot of classical music when I was 14-15, my biggest regret is not focusing more on ear training :)

I made a (bad) video about interval recognition and how you can map to songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DILEEOybFQI

In addition to https://tonedear.com, I have used the functional ear trainer app and seen good results.

Le logiciel gratuit et open source Pure Data permet de consolider ton apprentissage. C'est tout approprié pour comprendre comment et pourquoi les notes ont telle ou telle hauteur, tu pourras facilement recréer n'importe quelle gamme, notamment les gammes microtonales. Pure data est aussi intéressant pour comprendre et composer de la musique sérielle. Aussi, pure data étant une véritable appli audio , il pourra tout aussi bien gérer la sortie audio et midi de tes instruments, et t'accompagner dans tes compos et impros. L'interface est très déroutante, mais compte tenu du ratio 'potentiel du logiciel/prix', ça mérite le détour. Le seul bémol au regard de ton post original est que pure data ne suffit absolument pas a lui seul à appréhender ce qui fait l'essence de la musique. Sur youtube et autres plateformes tu pourras trouver des sons, des effets et des preuves de concepts proprement hallucinantes réalisées avec pure data, mais les compositions musicales estampillée 100% puredata sont souvent assez fades et décevantes à mon goût.

Here's a few tips from a self-taught musician who couldn't read sheet music if you paid me to:

- Analyze songs that you like. While reading sheet music (as other's have mentioned) is certainly a good approach, take time to find songs you actually enjoy listening to. If the song is guitar driven (as many are in today's popular music), you can find "tabs" online. They're a little weird to decipher at first, but you'll be able to extract the notes, and transpose it to piano.

- Then take a melody, for example, and play it back. What scale degrees are they playing? Did they start on something other than the I (or i)? What part of the melody did you like, specifically? How did the melody change over the course of the song? Lots of little lessons to be learned. You can apply this to chords as well.

- Next, pay attention to the rhythm. I find this part left out of a lot of discussions surrounding music theory. When you play a note is as important, or often times, more important than the note itself. There's a seemingly infinite number of ways to play even the simplest set of notes.

- Finally, just play. Take whatever small lesson you learned, and improvise something. Over time, you'll commit all the little things you like to memory, and the music will just flow out of you (sorry if that sounds corny).

I started learning music as an adult too a few years ago in the local community college. Especially initially I couldn't trust myself at all with playing, rhythm or anything, so I ended up hacking on some exercises, as new concepts appeared. See if you can find them helpful. They turned out pretty useful with students and teachers in my college.

Some are simple intervals and stuff that other more polished apps do better, but some are more advanced and I've not seen anywhere else.

E.g. ear training for more complex chords (9, sus, 6/9) https://www.onlinemusictools.com/chords/

Or interval "strands", a regular interval training but with three notes, which looks like it should be simple but is a big jump from 2-note intervals: https://www.onlinemusictools.com/strands/

What are you hoping to get from knowing music theory? It seems like many of the commenters are assuming a specific goal from this (etc being able to more easily understand/memorize what you are supposed to play or being easily able to transpose music). Perhaps that is not your goal. And I would offer that music theory might not be the magic bullet for being able to read music much faster (eg better sight reading).

I taught instrument playing to a number of people, and I would say that associating the written note to a logical note and then associating a logical note to finger movements to play can be done with little to no formal music theory. These two things are orthogonal, and at least for younger learners, I find that the former (going from written notes on a score to which tone it is) is the most difficult part. That is, if I were to simply call out the notes in turn, the student could play at a much faster rate than if they had to read it themselves and decide what note it was. I found that mobile apps and websites that present notes to you and ask you what they are, helps tremendously for making this process faster. That is, speeding up the whole process is nothing more than repetitive practice. Once single notes are easily and quickly decoded in the mind, multiple simultaneously notes actually come faster because you decide one note at first and then can figure out the others by looking at the relative distance. Music theory can help here by providing some heuristic shortcuts but honestly, I don't find it is necessary or that helpful.

Don't worry, the whole process takes time. I would say that if you were already a competent pianist, but one who struggles with reading scores for sight reading, it would probably take months to years to see satisfactory progress, focusing on sight reading alone. That was consistent with my personal experience as well. I would stay away from trying to transpose music, unless you have absolute pitch, in which case transposing music would be easier than reading it in the first place.

I started piano about the same time too. I was a non-reading player of other instruments before though, and I wanted to use piano as the instrument to properly guide me along my musical theory path.

Yes, it's a slow journey. Repetition is key. And even though I still considered myself a slow learner, my teacher has been quite hands off these days whenever I am given a new piece. He would still put in the fingering, but he no longer put in what the notes are, like he would when I first started.

And the discussions also changed a lot, from the beginning, when I was struggling to even identify what the notes in different triad are, to now about how much tension different chord progression and how to resolve them properly.

I still have plenty to learn, but generally sticking with the ABRSM standards. Already on theory equivalent to grade 5 now.

Yes, I did try other learning tools, like flashcard, or even asking ChatGPT to come out with pneumonics. But I find repetition is still better. And plenty of rest.

The priority as an adult learner would never be about trying to be the next prodigy. Internalise the learning process and take it slow. Sometimes you need to slow down to move fast.

I enjoyed https://www.lightnote.co/

I wish it could connect to a midi keyboard which I believe is a browser api that exist today.

I’m using Pianote.com to learn Piano on my own and I love it. Bite sized lessons slowly building up skill and theory at the same time.

Duolingo are working on something in this space, though who knows when it might launch https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/20/duolingo-for-music-app/

Without knowing any context, I would recommend getting a textbook. I have The Musician's Guide to Theory and Analysis (by Clendinning, Marvin). The book is well-structured, reasonably clear, and comprehensive. The main risks when you go self-taught are that you have gaps in your knowledge or that you learn things in an order which makes it harder to learn. Textbooks are great—they give you an order to learn things in, where each piece builds on previous pieces.

That said, it’s hard to give more specific advice without understanding your goals more. Are you trying to understand songs? Are you trying to write songs? Are you interested in specific genres?

I will give a few other tips:

- Don’t think too hard about the rules.

- Don’t get too distracted by modes and scales. Major and minor will carry you far.

- Many books cover counterpoint. You can skip it. Think of counterpoint as a learning exercise that gives you a set of techniques for dealing with multiple voices when composing music. The rules are there to teach you those techniques.

https://www.chordieapp.com/, you may need https://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/loopmidi.html as companion.

I am surprised nobody has mentioned Language Transfer. I haven't listened to the Music Theory course, only the Spanish one, but I can highly recommend it: https://www.languagetransfer.org/music

Not a Tipp about music theory, but as a general Tipp make sure that you practice hands separately https://fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io/chapte...

The first thing I would say is that music theory is a very broad topic. You're going to have much better results if you study aspects of theory that you then practically apply in your musical life. So if you tend to play a certain style of music, learn the theory that applies to that first.

Eg say you play rock/blues piano (or generally play pop music). You might want to start with learning pentatonic and blues scales, first in the keys of the pieces you play a lot, then in all keys.

Say you like a certain player, you may want to look at a song they wrote/played, try to figure it out, try to understand how it works. So you could for example take apart the chord progression. Try to understand it harmonically, say there's a bit of the song that you like. Try to find other songs with a similiar progression. Then look at the voicings they use. Try to put those voicings into practise in your playing. Look at places you can use similar voicings for different chords.

Since you go to a class make yourself an exercise between classes to find in your normal music examples of the things you did in class.

There are very specific times when things like flashcards are going to be useful. For example, I made myself a deck of flashcards with different one-crotchet rhythmic snippets on them and used to deal myself out random bars of rhythms and then tap them out to improve my rhythm recognition for sight reading.

For theory in the mainstream/classical tradition, I would highly recommend getting the ABRSM guide to music theory by Eric Taylor. It comes in two books, and you can get "workbooks" of examples to just go through. It's a pretty solid intro to the basics and by the time you have done both books you are at the standard of "grade 8" in music theory.

From there, the traditional way to progress is to work on analyzing Bach Chorales (ie get that book which is just all the chorales) and then analyzing other major works from subsequent periods. Studying the chorales is a really excellent intro to most of the harmony that you will encounter until you get to the romantic period, and what I personally did is just work on Jazz harmony after that given that covers Romantic style harmony as well as the things that later 20/21C music does (eg if you can understand Miles you can understand Hindemith pretty much). For Jazz there are two books I would recommend, which are the Jazz Piano book and the Jazz Theory book both by Mark Levine.

Lots of people suggesting great ways to get around reading sheet music!

But what's a way of getting fast at reading sheet music? I picked up the piano again after quitting several years ago, and one thing I'm really struggling with is glancing at sheet music and being able to play a phrase—I need to step out one note at a time. And I'm hopeless with ledger lines, I have to stick my face close and count the lines to see what note I'm playing. Sightreading exercises haven't helped because they're either too easy (I can easily follow notes across small intervals, from my music theory training) or too hard to make meaningful improvement on (I start doing the pause-and-name-each-note thing).