Learning to play

[tbirdman]

Originally Posted by JackC1

I'm one of those ex-piano people. However, according to statistics 90% of guitar players quit within 3 months.

https://www.mozartproject.org/how-ma...n-play-guitar/

Having played piano and guitar, I can say that guitar is much harder initially.




I think having had some piano experience is very helpful with theory (much more so than guitar tab experience). For example, I can already read music (i.e. I know the note names); I can already identify common key signatures (which means I can immediately build the major/minor scales even if I don't officially know their note intervals); I'm already familiar with accidentals (maybe not double sharps/flats, but plain sharps/flats/naturals and enharmonic are already known); I already know distances between notes; etc. All these are missing in tabs.

Playing the piano definitely gives a leg up to learning theory vs playing guitar by tabs.

Interesting article on guitars. I guess I haven't only met piano players to quit. LOL

I also have a singing instructor. (I need all the help I can get ) First thing we will do is look at the score of a song I'm learning. My problem is the ability to accurately sing the right pitches without a piano accompaniment. So I have a class for ear training which uses Solfege, and also working with Solfege with my singing instructor. The piano is valuable to play pieces of the song where I have issues. You can't as you say you can't get from tabs or chord only song sheets.

Unfortunately I have gone the rabbit hole of music.

[rick-slo]

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

The idea that if you learn how chords are constructed you're doomed to wander lost in the wilderness forever and never actually hear music ( which certainly seems to be rick-slos possition) is false and absurd, I hope for the sake of students he doesn't teach music.

That would be absurd which is why I did not say that.

[aK_bAsh7]

[QUOTE=rick-slo;7111596]Got the below from a website about piano but the same applies to most musical instruments:
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"Learning musical theory may appear boring but in order to build a strong base for piano, you should gain certain understanding of theory as it will help you a lot in gaining skills for piano playability".

I don't understand why so many guitar players shy away from theory. For example, learning how scales are harmonized and how to apply chord formulas are two examples of skills that are not difficult and extremely useful.

[stanron]

Originally Posted by Robin, Wales

What's theory?

A Theory can be an investigation. It can be a scientific explanation as in String Theory, the Theory of Relativity, the Big Bang Theory. Quite often these theories can be counter to accepted ideas and take some time to be accepted and understood.

Or it can be a collection of observations and agreements that have developed and grown over many centuries.

Music Theory is the latter.

Pythagoras, over two and a half centuries ago, investigated pitch on a mono-string in a mathematical way. To me that seems more like the first type of theory than the second.

What we now call Music Theory started over a thousand years later and has been growing ever since.

At it's simplest it is a set of instructions that explain how to read and write music notation. Concepts like Keys, Time Signatures, Scales, Intervals and Triads are covered, simple at first and then more complicated.

Later concepts like Transposition, Inversions, The Circle Of Fifths and Cadences are introduced.

Then Jazz added to theory with more advanced chord types, substitutions and sequences. More recently CAGED has appeared as a guitar specific kind of theory.

In a way it all adds up to a vocabulary that is used to describe stuff that can happen when music is played. If you have played music with other people and to other people in a range of genres for a good few years, a lot of the ideas in Music Theory should already be familiar to you. All you have to do is learn the words.

[rick-slo]

Music theory isn't about what "sounds good" discussion in link

https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory...t_sounds_good/

[Robin, Wales]

All you have to do is learn the words.

So, music theory isn't strictly a "theory", a hypothesis, but is in fact a language used to describe and record what is happening sonically.

[stanron]

Originally Posted by Robin, Wales

So, music theory isn't strictly a "theory", a hypothesis, but is in fact a language used to describe and record what is happening sonically.

That's how I see it. I'm not saying that people have never hypothesised regarding music but those hypotheses are not a significant part of the consensus that we now call Music Theory.

In post #20 rik-slo posts a link to a paper that suggests that Music Theory is not about what "sounds good".

I agree with that.

You could say that it is hypothetical, but it's not about music, it's about what Music Theory is not, and not for.

[Brent Hutto]

I tend to use more specific terminology to describe what I mean. For instance, a lot of my guitar lesson time is spent on things that might fall under the general rubric of "learning music theory" but I would describe it is understanding how to add harmony notes to a tune I'm working on.

Those lessons end up touching on things like voice leading, chord progressions, inversions, chord substitutions, functional harmony that would be topics in a "music theory" syllabus but I'm not really interested in going down a list of subjects to be mastered. It all starts and ends with a specific tune, played on a specific instrument (guitar) in a specific context (solo playing).

It might be interesting many years down the road, if I keep learning little applied bits of "theory" like this, to see how many topics in a music theory book I might look at and say, "Duh, well that's obvious innit?".

[tbirdman]

For me learning music theory opened my world to the world of music. I started because a guitar instructor was talking of playing intervals of thirds, but unfortunately he could not understand why I questioned him what he really meant. I also had quit my singing instructor as I was unable to comprehend a lot of the concepts she was talking about. However, I went back to her as I learned music theory.

Yes, I agree people can become good players without knowing any music theory, but I like how it opened my eyes and my understanding to the world of music.

[ljguitar]

So, music theory isn't strictly a "theory", a hypothesis, but is in fact a language used to describe and record what is happening sonically.

Hi folks…
Before we had recording devices, notation and the accompanying theory were the only ways to store songs for reproduction by musicians later.

In fact if you went to concerts during John Philip Sousa's hey-day, after the concert you bought a piano score, or melody chart to take home and play the piece(s) in your living room by yourself or with friends (yes, marketing did exist in the 1800s). Sousa hated the emergence of the recording industry - and he referred to the wax cylinders as 'canned music' (round cylinders sold in cardboard boxes). He thought they stifled creativity.

While there is a case to be made for classical scores and exact reproduction of said scores, a lot of freedoms have always been exercised by players down through the centuries.

Recorded music certainly has given musicians access to interpretations of music they wouldn't have heard otherwise, and accelerated musical progress (some people would likely debate if popular music is making progress).

Theory has given rise to other interpretations of the scored (and non-scored) music, and still maintains a place in sharing it with other musicians.

[Andyrondack]

Originally Posted by rick-slo

https://musicmayhemmagazine.com/10-g...d%20ukulele%3F

The passage you have highlighted regarding Eric Clapton's supposed ignorance of music theory is misleading.
In the 1950s and Early 60s England was full of thousands of folk clubs which Eric frequented, he certainly would have met ,played with and discussed Blues with players as enthusiastic as he was and blues chord progressions and scales would have been common knowledge.
Eric Clapton and other UK musicians of the time have acknowledged the influence of Bert Weedon a respected jazz guitarist who wrote a book called Play in a Day which if he did not know it all ready would have introduced Eric to the use of minor pentatonic Blues scales and Blues chord progressions, ie music theory relevant to the Blues.
Playing along with recordings would have helped Clapton pickup the heavily syncopated phrasing used in Blues while being aware of music theory through Weedon's book which he has acknowledged as an influence.
That means that while playing along with recordings he would have been quite aware of what intervals from the scale were being used to construct the phrases he heard and so in that way trained his ear to identify musical phrases with intervals from scales which is key to putting music theory to practical use.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

The passage you have highlighted regarding Eric Clapton's supposed ignorance of music theory is misleading.

Well, I wouldn't trust any music site that spelled Hendrix's first name as "Jimmie".

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

In the 1950s and Early 60s England was full of thousands of folk clubs which Eric frequented, he certainly would have met ,played with and discussed Blues with players as enthusiastic as he was and blues chord progressions and scales would have been common knowledge.

True. it certainly qualifies that site's (strangely phrased) assertion that he "had no musical studying". He studied music *by ear* (at least).

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

Eric Clapton and other UK musicians of the time have acknowledged the influence of Bert Weedon a respected jazz guitarist who wrote a book called Play in a Day which if he did not know it all ready would have introduced Eric to the use of minor pentatonic Blues scales and Blues chord progressions, ie music theory relevant to the Blues.

Well, maybe. I taught myself from Weedon's book in 1966, and while I don't remember much about it, I do remember:

(1) It used standard notation, not tab. (I didn't see tab until well into the 1970s.) That was fine with me, because I'd learned to read notation at school - every kid in my school had the same music lessons, so I wouldn't be surprised if Clapton had them too (we both grew up in SE England - he is 4 years older than me). Whether he learned it would be a different issue.... (it was all in the context of classical music, which didn't interest me, but personally - aged 11 - I didn't find notation difficult.)

(2) It led me to believe that a 12-bar blues in C used C, Am and G, not C, F and G. I suppose I must have misread something, but I'm pretty sure it never touched on how to play the blues. I remember nothing about improvisation. It contained some extremely uncool old folk tunes, and even then Bert Weedon was not considered a cool guy at all. As a 1960s teen, he was seen as belonging to the 1950s. The USP of his book was it was the only one there was! Seriously, I don't remember seeing any other guitar tutor book that wasn't either classical, or for folk guitar. In his picture on the front he was wearing a stuffy old suit and tie and a stupid grin, but at least he was playing an electric guitar! Back then, you took what you could get.

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

Playing along with recordings would have helped Clapton pickup the heavily syncopated phrasing used in Blues

Exactly. Weedon's book would have been of zero use for that! Personally the first thing I learned to play on the guitar (before I saw Weedon's book) was the Smokestack Lightnin' riff. A friend showed me and I copied him. The blues was a natural language for me from then on. I needed no knowledge of theory to be able to play the songs I was playing in my first band (9 months later). I learned chord shapes from Weedon's book, learned some progressions from songbooks, and the rest from the guys in the band, and from copying what I could hear on records.

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

while being aware of music theory through Weedon's book which he has acknowledged as an influence.

Yes, there certainly was some good basic theory in that book - just not very much (it's a very thin book...), and none really applicable to blues. I certainly learned nothing about blues from it.

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

That means that while playing along with recordings he would have been quite aware of what intervals from the scale were being used to construct the phrases he heard and so in that way trained his ear to identify musical phrases with intervals from scales which is key to putting music theory to practical use.

Absolutely.

But that just comes back to the old question about what it means to "know music theory". Clapton, like the majority of rock musicians, "knows theory", in the same way that someone who can't read or write "knows grammar" - because they can speak perfectly accurately and intelligibly.
In that analogy, Weedon's book was little more than one of those first kids' reading books: "the cat sat on the mat" in big letters. Most people who learned from Weedon put that book down after a few months and learned everything else from listening and copying, and from playing with other musicians. To go on and study more theory after that would be like enjoying reading dictonaries more than talking to people....

[Andyrondack]

Something worth pointing out.
Bert's Play in a Day books were all written out in traditional notation, so Eric certainly learned to read music in his early days but of course the level of reading skill necessary to make sense of a tutoring book and playing someone else's score in front of an audience are world's apart. But then no one would ever expect or want Clapton to do that.
Clapton didn't need to be at a professional level of music reading to make sense of the scales in Bert's book and get the general idea of how this music was constructed.

[rick-slo]

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

The passage you have highlighted regarding Eric Clapton's supposed ignorance of music theory is misleading.
n influence.

Did not intend to have anything highlighted and not sure how that happened when I copied and pasted the link. Try https://musicmayhemmagazine.com/10-g...-music-theory/

Also the first sentence in that article is:

"It is a common misconception that famous musicians must have studied long and hard. We automatically think that they must have had extensive musical training and studied musical theory at college – how else could they have created such beautiful, and iconic sounds?"

I agree with that and applies to the artists listed. Of course they picked up ideas from their environment, verbally with other players and of course by simply listening to people playing.

[ljguitar]

Hi Derek
Well, seems like it was written by an experienced musician.

Certainly good points if one were asked to write an outline of what things new instrumental students might consider if they plan to grow in a steadily growing manner.