"The Minor Key" Question

[Hotspur]

Originally Posted by Mellow_D

Thanks JonPR.

You know, I often think about famous guitarists, and I've read articles about how they came to learn to play the guitar, and I'm sometimes bewildered.

Over the years I've read articles or seen videos with Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Slash -- just to name a few. And they and so many other famous guitarists have said they can't read music. And many admit they lack any all-encompassing grasp of musical theory.

Some of them obvious know theory. Some of them learned it from playing and listening rather than studying a book.

Do they know what the "harmonic minor" is? Who knows. It's NOT a particularly useful concept. Does their music show that they know what a leading tone is (which is the whole point of the harmonic minor?) - yes, clearly.

The other thing is that a lot of people say they don't know theory because they think theory is something other than what it is. Somebody once, on one of the guitar boards, posted a video of a famous player saying how he didn't know theory, and then talking about his approach. Of course, in his approach he talked about stuff like "the roots of the chords" ... so clearly he knows SOME theory, because the concept of a root note is part of theory. I think what happens is a lot of people is that they pick up a lot of theory, but assume that there's some big textbook full of stuff that they never learned.

Meanwhile, it turns out they know a ton of stuff about chord construction, progressions, resolution, modulation, etc ... they just don't realize that's all there is to it.

Don't make theory into a giant mountain! It's not. You can pick up a solid grasp of the fundamentals of theory in a month with a book like "Harmony and Theory" by Shroeder and Wyatt.

One thing that you're doing here, which I'm begging you to stop doing, is thinking that the harmonic and melodic minor are important scales. THEY ARE NOT. They are small variations in minor harmony that are NOT IMPORTANT.

You're doing what a lot of people do, except they usually do it with modes rather than the harmonic and melodic minor. What they do is think that learning theory is about learning all the modes. (I see you're in danger of that, too). You seem to think that learning theory is about learning these harmonized scales. It's not. They're SUPER NOT IMPORTANT.

There's a reason why only a few chords were bolded in the post where John listed the chords for you. It's because WHAT YOU'RE DOING IS NOT IMPORTANT.

If you want to get into jazz, or you start getting advanced enough to worry about complex voice-leading stuff, okay, fine. It starts to become important. But that's not where you are now.

THIS STUFF ISN'T IMPORTANT. MOVE ON. STOP WORRYING ABOUT IT.

Theory is easy, when you're ready for it. The fact that you're struggling so much with it means that you're looking in the wrong place. Move on.

I have no doubt that every great musician understands the relationship of the major scale to the harmonized major scale, because good musicians often work in chord tones, which makes it sort of obvious. If that's complex to you, that's fine. Don't worry about it yet. You're not ready.

Relax.

[Mellow_D]

Originally Posted by Hotspur

Don't make theory into a giant mountain! It's not. You can pick up a solid grasp of the fundamentals of theory in a month with a book like "Harmony and Theory" by Shroeder and Wyatt.

One thing that you're doing here, which I'm begging you to stop doing, is thinking that the harmonic and melodic minor are important scales. THEY ARE NOT. They are small variations in minor harmony that are NOT IMPORTANT.

You're doing what a lot of people do, except they usually do it with modes rather than the harmonic and melodic minor. What they do is think that learning theory is about learning all the modes. (I see you're in danger of that, too). You seem to think that learning theory is about learning these harmonized scales. It's not. They're SUPER NOT IMPORTANT.

There's a reason why only a few chords were bolded in the post where John listed the chords for you. It's because WHAT YOU'RE DOING IS NOT IMPORTANT.

If you want to get into jazz, or you start getting advanced enough to worry about complex voice-leading stuff, okay, fine. It starts to become important. But that's not where you are now.

THIS STUFF ISN'T IMPORTANT. MOVE ON. STOP WORRYING ABOUT IT.

Theory is easy, when you're ready for it. The fact that you're struggling so much with it means that you're looking in the wrong place. Move on.

Relax.

Advice I'm going to take. I think that I just started worrying that I'm learning HOW to do all these things on the guitar and HAVE learned a number of things -- open chords, barre chords, major scale and pentatonic scale up and down the fretboard, chord progressions -- and said to myself, hey, I'm actually making music, continuing to learn how to play, but I don't have any deep understanding of it all. I just thought that it somehow would be detrimental to my playing, that it would soon impede my progress so far as playing, not knowing the theory underlying everything I was DOING.

And as another member said, and I'm paraphrasing, you can have a PhD in music theory and still be a lousy guitarist (or musician).

[clintj]

I remember an interview with Stevie Ray Vaughn where he said that he didn't have trouble playing until he actually thought about notes, scales and such. When he relaxed and played what he felt, he was at his best. With practice, you learn what works and sounds good. Theory just tells you why it sounds good.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Mellow_D

-- and said to myself, hey, I'm actually making music, continuing to learn how to play, but I don't have any deep understanding of it all. I just thought that it somehow would be detrimental to my playing, that it would soon impede my progress so far as playing, not knowing the theory underlying everything I was DOING.

Two myths about music theory (from opposite camps):

1. It's essential to becoming a good musician
2. It will inhibit your creativity.

Just to be clear: by "music theory", I mean the academic jargon, the terminology. There is a middle view - if you like - which likens music to a language, with theory as the "grammar". We all have a pretty good understanding of this, without needing the jargon.
We learn to speak our mother tongue purely by ear and trial and error. We don't need to study grammar; we get to know what sounds right, how to pronounce things and string words together so they make sense.
But when we learn a foreign language, as adults, it's a lot harder to do it purely by ear. We use books of grammar and vocabulary to help us make sense of those strange sounds.

Music is kind of between the two. It's not "foreign", because we've been hearing it all our lives, enough to know what's "right" and what's "wrong" when we hear it. We know when a musician plays a wrong note, just as we can tell a great piece of music from a crap one. (Although naturally there are aesthetic differences of opinion between the extremes.)
So the "grammar" of music is already in our heads, in a way the grammar of a foreign language is not.
But in order to produce the good sounds (and avoid the bad ones) we need musical training. That's largely a matter of technical exercise, and ear training. We need to learn how to control a musical instrument (or our voice), and we need to be able to hear properly what we are doing. The knowledge of musical grammar we already have (intuitively, subconsciously, from years of listening) may be enough to help us recognise when we get things right and wrong.
But usually we need some help from theoretical terminology, if only to help organise things in our heads.
As guitarists, the minimum we need is the names of chords. We can memorise shapes, but of course it's easier if the shapes have names. Then we can read chord charts, and know what someone means when say "A minor", or whatever.
Further levels of theory have the exact same purpose: to aid communication, and to help with the mental organisation of aural concepts; to lay out a map (to change the metaphor) to show connections and routes, help us to negotiate the territory.

In short - it's useful, but not essential. The better your ear, and the more extensive (and intensive) your listening experience, the less you need it.

The myth about inhibiting your creativity comes from the notion that theory is "rules", laws you need to obey. It isn't, it's just descriptions of common practices (same as the grammar of language is just describing how people speak, derived from studying language as it is spoken).
(A map isn't a set of instructions; it's information you can choose to use, or not.)
People from this side of the camp often point to pop geniuses such as the Beatles, saying they "knew no theory" - and yet they were amazingly creative. Well, they may not have known all the academic names for the sounds they produced, but they knew the grammar intimately; they "spoke" music like natives, because they'd picked up all the "rules" by ear. They listened and they copied; their originality was in their specific combination of influences.

They certainly never worried that lack of understanding would get in their way! They simply found sounds they liked, and played them.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by clintj

I remember an interview with Stevie Ray Vaughn where he said that he didn't have trouble playing until he actually thought about notes, scales and such. When he relaxed and played what he felt, he was at his best.

Like the story of the centipede: when told he had 100 legs, he found he could no longer walk...

Of course, being able to "play what you feel" requires years of experience internalising everything. Music becomes second nature - a second language that you can "think" in directly, without having to translate or look stuff up.
Applying the conscious intellect on top of that can often make you stumble. If we tried to speak English by first identifying each word as a noun, adjective, verb, preposition, etc, to make sure they were all in the right place, we wouldn't speak very smoothly or naturally. But we can only speak it smoothly without thinking about those things because we internalised the rules so long ago.

It's pointless telling a beginner musician to "play what you feel". That's no help whatsoever. You may as well tell someone wanting to learn Chinese to just "say what you mean". We all feel stuff we'd like to "say" in music. It's the technical process of getting there that's the problem.

[clintj]

Stevie was a skilled and intuitive player, no doubt. He started young, and by the time he started getting noticed and recording he had spent years listening to music and copying what he heard until he had that sense of language that you spoke of. That's a level of fluency I would really love to get to someday. Fair bit of the time, I'll play something as it was written and try to figure out how the writer came up with that but it's a slow process for me. Sometimes, I'll take the pattern for a scale and try to squeeze something that sounds good out of it, but I end up making myself cringe most of the time. Every now and then something jumps out of the noise though that makes me smile. I guess that's more what I had in mind when I wrote about playing to a feeling, taking a framework and trying to use it to make something pleasing from it. If I came across as being a little flippant, I sincerely apologize. This really is like learning a second language. I took four years of German in school, and didn't start to really be able to use it conversationally until well into my third year. I feel the same way now, like I'm learning words and phrases and am still trying to figure out how they create sentences. I can figure out the key, and from there the chords, and then to the scales involved but getting a good melody out of them is my weak point.

[Bern]

Originally Posted by JonPR

The myth about inhibiting your creativity...

I think, this kind of attitude comes mostly from lazy people, who don't want to put in the effort. If you have never studied theory, how would you know that it does inhibit your creativity ?
Personally speaking, theory assists my creativity in a lot of ways. It puts a little spice into things besides just using salt & pepper.

Originally Posted by JonPR

People from this side of the camp often point to pop geniuses such as the Beatles, saying they "knew no theory" - and yet they were amazingly creative.

Well, they did have George Martin to help them out with the theoretical stuff. I believe, it's safe to say that Martin was the 5th Beatle. What would their music have sounded without Martin's influence ?

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Bern

I think, this kind of attitude comes mostly from lazy people, who don't want to put in the effort. If you have never studied theory, how would you know that it does inhibit your creativity ?

Well, you wouldn't, but - if you don't know any - you might still be afraid of it. You might believe you get on just fine without it (and you might be right), and - in support of your prejudice - you might point to lots of famous artists who (you believe) got on fine without it. You might believe that learning how all the machinery works would "spoil the magic" - or some such nonsense!

Originally Posted by Bern

Well, they did have George Martin to help them out with the theoretical stuff. I believe, it's safe to say that Martin was the 5th Beatle. What would their music have sounded without Martin's influence ?

Martin was producer and arranger. As such, he added polish, and perhaps a little editing here and there. He never helped them with their songwriting, AFAIK.
I'm sure, if they'd asked, he would have "helped them out with the theoretical stuff" - but I'd be surprised if they ever asked, and I doubt he would have attempted to lecture them in that respect.
The kind of things they asked him to help with were more technical, to do with recording technology and effects - eg Lennon wanting his voice to sound odd in some way, or McCartney wanting a string section or horns; and when he did want such things, he would often sing the lines he wanted; Martin would notate them, so in that minimal sense he "helped with theoretical stuff".
But I'd be surprised if they ever asked him to suggest chord or key changes, or if he ever offered such suggestions. (But I'd be very interested if anyone knows otherwise.)

[Percy]

i do not think in music theory...as much as i think in jazz theory....this seemed to help me..cause now its all about chords...jazzy chords...i am alot like you why,why and more whys...now i do not care so much that it doesnt drive me crazy.....its just more chords and more chords. i know this is not much of an answer...but i do not think that there is an answer ...good luck

[Mellow_D]

Originally Posted by Percy

i do not think in music theory...as much as i think in jazz theory....this seemed to help me..cause now its all about chords...jazzy chords...i am alot like you why,why and more whys...now i do not care so much that it doesnt drive me crazy.....its just more chords and more chords. i know this is not much of an answer...but i do not think that there is an answer ...good luck

I bought Peter Vogl's "The Guitarists Music Theory Book" -- a book I had seen recommended in other threads by several members. I'm almost done with chapter 2, intervals, and it's tremendously helpful. I'm not just memorizing, I'm UNDERSTANDING! (I take the guitar out and work out the intervals, and it's all making sense.)

I'm so glad I found this message board.

[jackcooper]

Originally Posted by Mellow_D

I bought Peter Vogl's "The Guitarists Music Theory Book" -- a book I had seen recommended in other threads by several members. I'm almost done with chapter 2, intervals, and it's tremendously helpful. I'm not just memorizing, I'm UNDERSTANDING! (I take the guitar out and work out the intervals, and it's all making sense.)

I'm so glad I found this message board.

Glad the book has been of help to you. It really is the most logical and well explained "need to know" guitar theory book I've come across.

[Mellow_D]

Originally Posted by jackcooper

Glad the book has been of help to you. It really is the most logical and well explained "need to know" guitar theory book I've come across.

What do you think of his other books? I ask because, well, I'll share with you what I asked other members in the following post:

http://www.acousticguitarforum.com/f...d.php?t=282122

I ordered this book from Amazon and they sent me an email saying something to the effect that those who've used Vogl's The Guitarist's Music Theory book also purchased others of his: The Guitarist's Scale Book, The Guitarist's Chord Book, Guitar Method 1 (With 2 CDs), Introduction To Rock Guitar (with DVD) and Introduction To Blues Guitar (with DVD).

What's the story with these other books by Vogl? How important are these other books? Is there a learning "progression" so to speak, where the knowledge gained from one book builds on the knowledge gained from the previous?

My first instinct is (was) to think this is just a money-making thing, but, since so many have written highly of Peter Vogl and the first book (music theory, the one I'm studying now) -- I just want to know if it's a worthwhile investment (his other books) or if I'm just being suckered in by Amazon for more $$$$$$.

[Hotspur]

Originally Posted by JonPR

Like the story of the centipede: when told he had 100 legs, he found he could no longer walk...

Of course, being able to "play what you feel" requires years of experience internalising everything.

What I've seen a lot of is people who think that theory limits them because they don't know enough theory to know that they're following it.

eg, I think the way the harmonized major scale is taught ends up making a lot of people think those are somehow the only chords theory approves of, and anything else is "breaking the rules."

Simply referring to it as the harmonized major scale rather than "the list of chords in the key," helps.

I see a lot of inexperienced musicians (and some who should know better) for whom "playing what they feel" means feeling something intensely like playing the same pentatonic/major/chromatic riffs they always play.

Originally Posted by Bern

Well, they did have George Martin to help them out with the theoretical stuff. I believe, it's safe to say that Martin was the 5th Beatle. What would their music have sounded without Martin's influence ?

I don't find this that compelling. It's not like George Martin is somebody like Brian Eno, which a whole other body of work showing a voice. (eg, it's easy to see the effect Eno had on "Achtung Baby" if you're familiar with Eno.) Martin's other work as a producer?

Furthermore, there isn't much evidence to suggest that Martin was a major musical creative force in the studio. A lot of the Beatles early stuff was written out of the studio, and from what I've read it doesn't seem like he was doing much that would count as "writing."

[Bern]

Originally Posted by Hotspur

I don't find this that compelling. It's not like George Martin is somebody like Brian Eno, which a whole other body of work showing a voice. (eg, it's easy to see the effect Eno had on "Achtung Baby" if you're familiar with Eno.) Martin's other work as a producer?

Furthermore, there isn't much evidence to suggest that Martin was a major musical creative force in the studio. A lot of the Beatles early stuff was written out of the studio, and from what I've read it doesn't seem like he was doing much that would count as "writing."

When Martin recalled some of the past Beatles recordings, he always said, WE did this or that. Considering the Beatles later recordings with orchestral arrangements, I'm pretty sure that he had a lot of room to add some of his creativity in regards to arrangements and choices of instruments.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Bern

When Martin recalled some of the past Beatles recordings, he always said, WE did this or that. Considering the Beatles later recordings with orchestral arrangements, I'm pretty sure that he had a lot of room to add some of his creativity in regards to arrangements and choices of instruments.

Of course. Arrangement and orchestration (as well as production) were his specialisms. That's different from songwriting.
He certainly regarded himself as a collaborator with the other four (especially on the later material as you say), but only after they'd brought the songs to the studio.
As I said elsewhere, the prime example of his creative input was "Strawberry Fields Forever" the finished version of which Martin described proudly as a "tone poem". The band had done two takes, at different tempos, one in A, one in Bb, and couldn't decide which one they preferred. Lennon wanted one spliced to the other, despite those differences. Martin and his engineers managed it by steadily speeding up the one in A and splicing to a slightly slowed down one in Bb - luckily the alteration in speed meant the keys blended too. And Martin added the psychedelic orchestration, which IIRC Lennon later considered a little over the top.
IMO it's their masterpiece, and it was Martin who definitely enhanced Lennon's original vision, even if the latter was dissatisfied (probably just because he hadn't had total control...)