How I'd Learn Music Theory (If I Had To Start Over)

hey, welcome to 12tone! my name's Cory and I'm a music theorist. ok, that's probably not surprising if you've seen my other videos, but still, in order to get to the point where I could confidently call myself a music theorist, I had to learn music theory, and that was a complicated and messy process.

it started with the theory classes I had to take while getting a performance degree, and then I spent years reading whatever I could get my hands on, with no real direction or plan. it worked, but my friend Jordan Harrod recently made a video about how she wished she'd gone about learning machine learning, link in the description, and it got thinking: how would I do things differently if I had to start again? (tick, tick, tick, tick, tock) this video is sponsored by CuriosityStream the first thing I'd do is start analyzing songs immediately.

and not just, like, the example pieces they gave me in theory class. those are useful, but the thing is, every piece your theory teacher gives you was either selected or, in many cases, written to be an extremely good example of the particular concept they're trying to teach you. there's one interpretation, or at least one that your teacher is looking for, and the point is to find it.

it's a good way to expose yourself to certain ideas, but it's just not how music behaves in the wild. no, if I could go back, I'd take the tools I was learning and try to apply them to the music I loved. pick songs that mean something to me and try to break them down.

I probably wouldn't be very good at it yet, but that's not the point. the point is to see what these concepts look like in action, and more importantly, to see which other concepts I wasn't being taught. in most schools, the music theory curriculum is built around a very specific model of how music works, one that relies heavily on the behaviors of European classical music.

trying to apply those tools in places where they just don't work gives you a better, more realistic understanding of what their limitations are, and trying to fill in the gaps with your own intuitions forces you to really engage with the actual vocabulary of the music. this is something I've learned to do over the years, but in order to get here I had to unlearn a lot of things first. like, if you go back and watch one of my earliest song analysis videos, on Sweet Child Of Mine, which, y'know, don't, but if you did, you'd see me getting almost mystified by the fact that the song doesn't seem to play any V-I resolutions, which theory teachers had assured me were supposed to be everywhere.

and don't get me wrong, from the perspective of traditional, classical harmony a complete lack of V-I resolutions is extremely surprising. even in jazz, it'd be noteworthy, but in the context of rock music in the 80s? it's very, very normal.

that's not to say V-Is don't happen, but they're not a particularly important part of the style. despite listening to a lot more rock than classical, though, and even writing plenty of songs that didn't use V-Is, it hadn't really occurred to me to question how important they actually were until I started analyzing. if I'd been doing that from the beginning, I would've developed a much more complex understanding of music a whole lot sooner.

the next thing I'd do is focus more on transcribing those songs, for a lot of reasons. most obviously, in order to do a good analysis, you have to have a good transcription: if the band is playing E major and I think it's D minor, whatever explanation I come up with is gonna be useless. I'd be explaining the wrong thing.

for basic stuff like chords and vocals, you can probably get by with internet transcriptions, but in my experience those tend to be… questionable. they can get you in the ballpark, but you should always assume they're at least a little bit wrong, so at the very least you need to be able to double-check. but more than that, transcribing helps develop what I believe is the most important, almost universally applicable skill in listening to music, a skill I like to call orchestral listening.

this is the art of mentally separating individual components of the music. it means locking in with what each instrument and each section is doing. the better you are at it, the better you'll be at analysis.

untrained listeners will tend to attribute their entire experience to the most obvious thing they can find, which is usually just the lyrics. my favorite example of this is in Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah: I think most people would agree that the most powerful part of the first verse is when he sings "A baffled king composing Hallelujah", and yeah, that's a great line. but it's also the highest point in the section's constantly rising melody, it's where we get E major, the most interesting chord, there's the chorus swelling in the background, the drum fill at the end… the reason that moment sends shivers down your spine is about so much more than just the words.

until you learn to listen to music, like really, deeply listen to it, you're not gonna notice those nuances. you'll be left with a simple, shallow analysis that doesn't capture the true impact of the song. transcribing lots of music, and specifically transcribing each individual part, is the best way to build that skill.

the next thing I'd do is start reading journal articles and other forms of scholarship. this may seem counterintuitive, 'cause a lot of it would probably be over my head, but understanding isn't really the point. not yet, anyway.

the point is to familiarize myself with what music theory actually is. in an interview with Numberphile, link in the description, the mathematician Terry Tao broke the process of learning math into three parts: the pre-rigorous phase, where you're just smashing numbers together intuitively, the rigorous phase, where you're learning all these formal operations, and then the post-rigorous phase, where you're just smashing numbers together intuitively again, but now you have the tools to back your intuitions up. you know which sorts of assumptions are likely to be correct.

music theory is, in many ways, similar: most journal articles, even ones by highly respected and established theorists, effectively boil down to pointing at a thing and saying "hey, what's up with this? " we're constantly exploring, pushing boundaries to see what new ideas we can uncover, but that exploration is largely hidden from new students. college-level theory classes sit squarely in the rigorous phase, and with good reason: you need to understand how the tools work in order to use them properly.

of course, there's a good argument to be made that the tools we're teaching aren't the ones that are most useful to understand, but that's a topic for several other videos. the point is, being a good theorist means knowing how to think rigorously and formally about music, so it's important that we teach students how to do that. but when you're in the rigorous phase, it can be hard to see past it.

the way we teach theory gives students the impression that what professional theorists do is sit around writing roman numerals and then grading each other's work. reading actual scholarship is a way to break through that, to get a better picture of the sorts of questions theorists are actually trying to answer. it gives meaning to the tools you're learning, which helps you understand how to apply them, and it's also just motivating: trying to solve the same problem over and over can be stifling, so getting a sense of what you're building toward can help you power through.

you can get a taste of that from YouTube channels like Sound Field, Sideways, Adam Neely, and, yes, this one, but if you can, it's always better to go directly to the source. there's lots of good music theory journals out there, but one that I'd particularly recommend is Music Theory Online, for one simple reason: it's free. it's a real journal, published by the Society for Music Theory, and it's filled with all sorts of cutting-edge scholarship that you can access for zero dollars and zero cents.

if I was starting from scratch, I'd probably go to their website, scroll through past issues until I saw a title that sounded interesting, and then just give it a go. I mean, what's the worst that could happen? besides, I've been talking as if you're not gonna understand anything, but that's not really true.

music theory has lots of different branches, and many of them don't require all that much prior knowledge. you probably already have the tools you need in order to understand a lot of music theory scholarship, and the sooner you start exposing yourself to these different approaches, the deeper that understanding will be. ok, so at this point, I've been analyzing music, transcribing up a storm, and reading every paper I can get my hands on, so now it's time for the next step: explaining it to someone.

you've probably heard that the best way to learn something is to try to teach it, and in my experience that's extremely true. I wouldn't be half the theorist I am today if I hadn't spent the last six years making videos explaining every cool theory concept I could find. teaching something well requires you to understand every possible aspect of it, breaking it down into its component pieces so you can show how they all fit together.

it requires you to question all your own assumptions, to look for every place where you just said "yeah, I guess that makes sense" without knowing why, and then come up with a satisfying way to fill that gap. of course, you don't have to start your own YouTube channel. you can, music theory YouTube is great and we'd love to have you, but you can get a lot of the same benefits just by talking to friends.

maybe you know someone who loves the song you analyzed, and you can walk them through your analysis to see if it matches their experience. maybe you have a musician friend who you think would enjoy the model you just read about, and you can try to teach it to them. that's how I learned Neo-Riemannian Theory: I tried to explain the transformations to my roommate and did my best to answer his questions.

I didn't do a very good job, but that's not the point: the point was to try, so I could see where, exactly, I was failing. these sorts of conversations can also open up new avenues for exploration: to this day, whenever I release a video, I tend to get a bunch of questions I'd never really considered. everyone has their own perspective, and some of them will be interested in solving the same problems.

seeing a thing through someone else's eyes is a great way to really understand the shape of it, and talking to people opens doors you'd never find just by thinking things through on your own. in terms of practical skills, the biggest thing I'd do is learn about music production. I thought a lot about this bit, and originally I was gonna say learn an instrument.

I'm a vocalist by training, and the thing about vocals is that the mechanisms are largely hidden. if I go ba-ba, I don't need to know what those two notes are. I don't even have to know the interval, I can just follow my ears.

on a guitar, though, that's not true: in order to play those same notes, I have to know their exact positions on the neck, and if I do it enough times, those fret patterns eventually become instinctive. playing an external pitched instrument like guitar, bass, or piano requires you to develop an intuitive understanding of notes and intervals in a way that vocals just don't. but honestly, I think music production does all that and more.

it forces you to consider notes, intervals, and harmonies, but also rhythms, effects, sound design, orchestration, mixing, panning, timbre… pretty much everything. producers are wizards. and as technology develops, production is becoming a bigger and bigger part of modern music.

I think any theorist who really wants to engage with the music of the last, say, half-century or so needs to be at least somewhat familiar with production, and I wish I'd realized that a whole lot sooner. this is honestly still a pretty big gap in my knowledge base and I'm working to fill it, but it's a lot harder now than it would've been in college when I could've just, like, taken a class. if you're lucky enough to still have that option, go for it.

you'll be glad you did. and the last thing I'd do is just listen to a lot more music. specifically, I'd listen to more music from outside my comfort zone.

I hinted at this before, but I think the most dangerous thing a theorist can do is marry themselves to a single vocabulary. if you only know one style, it's easy to convince yourself that everything else works the same way, but that's incredibly not true. exposing yourself to music that works differently expands your horizons, allowing you to think a lot more deeply about the music you work on.

that means checking out all sorts of different genres: if you like rock, listen to jazz. if you like jazz, listen to hip-hop. if you like hip-hop, listen to folk.

in fact, no matter what you like, listen to all those things and more. but also, push yourself to check out music from other cultures, too. listen to Gamelan, Indian Classical, Tuvan throat-singing.

listen to Native American music, African music, Chinese music. if you're hearing these things for the first time, I wouldn't necessarily recommend analyzing them: good analysis requires some level of familiarity. if you don't understand the culture the music is from, you're likely to reach some pretty wrong conclusions about how it works.

but at least listen. see what people from around the world create when they're making music. that's what I'd do.

so how about you? are you learning theory, and if so how? or if you're a theorist yourself, do you have any other tips you'd like to add?

leave a comment, I'd love to hear your thoughts. learning music theory has been one of the best things I've ever done, and while I can't actually go back in time, hopefully you can avoid some of the mistakes I made. if nothing else, it'll give you room to make new mistakes I haven't even thought of yet.

one thing I wished I'd known back in college was that other people also liked having the sorts of deep, thoughtful conversations about music I was looking for. I would've especially loved to find out about music YouTubers, but that sort of thing didn't really exist yet, at least not like it does today. fortunately, the world has changed, and if you're looking for thoughtful discussions about music, which if you made it this far in the video I hope you are, I'd like to recommend checking out my podcast.

it's called Ghost Notes, I make it with my friend Noah, the guy behind the amazing music channel Polyphonic, and in it we talk about all sorts of topics related to music. we just released an episode all about music school, what it's like, whether it's worth it, and what else you might want to do instead. Ghost Notes is a Nebula Original, so the latest episodes are exclusively on Nebula.

if you're not familiar, Nebula is a streaming platform built by some of YouTube's top educators, including Adam Neely, Maggie Mae Fish, Wendover Productions, and, for some reason, me, to give us a place to experiment with new ideas and projects without having to fight with YouTube's algorithm. we've even joined forces with CuriosityStream to offer you an amazing deal: if you sign up for CuriosityStream with the link in the description, not only will you get 26% off an annual plan, you'll also get a Nebula account free for as long as you remain a CuriosityStream member! if you don't know CuriosityStream, they're an awesome streaming platform for documentaries like Rise: The Story Of Augustines, a stunning look at the history of a legendary modern indie band.

they've got an amazing library, and with the link in the description, you can get full access to both it and Nebula for less than 15 bucks for an entire year. and hey, thanks for watching, thanks to our Patreon patrons for making these videos possible, and extra special thanks to this video's Featured Patrons, Susan Jones, Jill Sundgaard, Howard Levine, and Duck. if you want to help out, and help us pick the next song we analyze too, there's a link to our Patreon on screen now.

oh, and don't forget to like, share, comment, subscribe, and above all, keep on rockin'.