43 Music Theory Concepts That EVERY Modern Composer Should Master [The Music Theory Map]

trying to learn music theory and composition all on your own through self-study can be a very frustrating challenge a lot of students learn things in the wrong order and they don't understand why they're learning topics because they're not applying them and they don't understand how they relate to previous topics that they should have already learned so it can be a real frustrating decision to make to embark on learning theory all on your own but if you go slow and if you learn things in the correct order it's actually pretty easy now as a music teacher i've spent a lot of time thinking about this and in this video what i've done is compiled 43 of what i consider to be the most important concepts that any modern composer should have mastered and more importantly the order in which they should be learned just recently i finished up producing my entire theory and songwriting course which is 9 hours of lessons across 45 videos and it goes through every single one of the topics i'm about to talk to you about and each one of those lessons comes with printable worksheets and pdfs as well now i know that not everybody wants to buy my course and i know that not everybody can afford my course so i'm hoping that if you're in either of those boats you can still get some information and value out of this video by walking through this entire music theory map with me and checking off these things all on your own as you go through them i really do think this is an efficient path to learning theory and composition but if you check below in the links i'll include a little pdf that includes each one of these topics so you can just go through them on your own at your own pace of self-study now it's time to get started with our music theory tour i wasn't sure how to actually go on the tour with you did i want to draw a map did i just want to sit here and talk to you about it and fortunately at just the right time an awesome piece of software popped up on my radar called noda noda is an application for building 3d mind maps and i really thought it would be fun to use this kind of technology to demonstrate what we're talking about here today i reached out to the developer of the app with some questions and he was actually kind enough to meet up with me in virtual space and film me as i walked through this entire presentation so now please join me in my virtual presentation of the map of music theory so what we have here is the entire map of music theory this is where we start and we travel this entire course all the way until where we end pretty much everything in this path is built off of where we start so the very first starting point is basically the bridge to everything else and the very first starting point for any composer is the musical alphabet this is the language of music and if you want to learn a language you do need to learn its alphabet learning the musical alphabet will teach you about the chromatic scale and introduce you to the idea of end harmonics it's kind of dry stuff it might not be fun to learn but you're going to have to learn it if you want to move on to another dry topic which is the music staff if you play piano or if you've taken formal lessons you're probably familiar with the music staff but a lot of guitar players aren't and if you want to be a professional composer this is one of those things you'll need to know at least the very basics of as a guitar player you're specifically going to want to know your actual fretboard and even if you're not a guitar player whatever instrument you have is going to be really important here so if you're a saxophone player you need to know how all of these concepts fit into your saxophone now the first big topic that you're going to learn that is actually practical right out of the gate the first topic that you'll be using immediately is the major scale ninety percent of everything you are going to learn about music revolves around the major scale it either derives from the major scale or it is compared to the major scale so this really is one of the most important topics you are ever going to learn when it comes to learning music and as a guitar player you're specifically going to be thinking about the scale shapes that we use to generate these major scales because as a guitar player you only need to learn one scale shape and from there you can generate every single major scale after that you're really going to want to need to know the basics of rhythm even if you're not a drummer everything in music is what note do we play and when do we play it so if you're not thinking about the when you're missing out on half of music so rhythm it's a really important topic and as you get into this you're going to learn how to count and vocalize your rhythms and also understand basic topics like syncopation if you'd like to go even further into these topics what you could do is you could experiment with triplets and swing and advanced tuplets now swing isn't very complicated but it derives from a fairly complicated topic which is the triplet but these advanced rhythm skills are the kinds of things that any good drummer or any good percussionist they're familiar with and for me as a composer the more i know about this the more it supplements pretty much everything else that we've learned once you've got the hang of the rhythmic basics you need to understand how meter and time signature fits into the structure of western music and if you decide to explore this topic even further you're going to run into poly meters and polyrhythms as well but music in the western world is organized in meters and structures and measures and we name those structures and measures differently depending on what's inside of them understanding and parsing them makes it easier to read music but more importantly understanding these concepts makes it easier to compose music that isn't boring because rhythmic variety is one of the real essences to interesting and exciting music once we're done with that we can move on to audition and melody audiation is the idea of hearing something in your head and then producing it through your voice this is basically the core skill that anybody can do even if they don't play an instrument little children can audit they hear a nursery rhyme and they reproduce it with their voice so this is the core human component to making music hearing things and then producing it with our voice so even if you're not a vocalist even if you're not a singer this is still a hugely important skill to start working on because composition happens in your head and then using your voice is just a way to translate it from your head into the real world one of the most annoying topics you'll ever have to learn as a musician is that of key signatures and most importantly end harmonics if you're going to read and understand music this is one of those things you just need to have mastered but i'll be the first to say i think it's very annoying i don't think it's always that practical i don't think it helps us make better music but you do need to know it if you're going to be writing physical music or if you're going to be reading and analyzing a lot of physical scores this is going to be a very important skill for you but let's face it i'm sitting here in virtual reality talking to you about music theory so times have changed and these concepts are not as important as they used to be you can actually be a fantastic composer wonderful skilled learned composer and not have this stuff mastered but if you're going to be a professional composer and communicate with other composers and speak their language this is one of those topics you will just need to know so by this point we are familiar with the musical alphabet but what we're gonna try to do is convert the entire musical alphabet into numbers and that's what the idea of scale degrees is all about we're not thinking c d e f anymore we're thinking one two three four and this concept is closely related to intervals if you know these concepts you don't have to think about keys letters scales you can really just think about notes as independent things and you can identify them without thinking about their letter name which to me is hugely beneficial especially as a guitar player where i have this giant fretboard to memorize it's much easier for me to think personally in just scale degrees instead after that you're probably going to need to start finally learning more about chords and the very core basic components of chords is the triad there are only four kinds of triads which makes it very easy to digest this topic but i really suggest you don't approach this topic fully unless you've learned all this other stuff that came before and if you have learned to triads you can easily go on to the next topic which is simply the idea of movable chords as a guitar player we think of these as bar chords but it's simply a chord shape that generates a triad and we can move that anywhere we want which is pretty cool so by learning our movable shapes we can generate all of the triads easily so at this point we've learned quite a bit and in my opinion this is what it all summarizes to this is the big pot of gold at the end of the music theory rainbow for right now at least it's one of the most important things you could possibly learn the diatonic chords of the major scale you already know what a major scale is you know that there's things called chords well there are chords in our major scale and an astonishing amount of our music relies on this concept so you're going to want to know what chords exist within a major scale and you're also going to want to know the roman numeral notation for that and then you can start writing chord progressions in major which would be our next topic writing chord progressions in major is a very simple thing to do if you know the diatonic chords within major and it's easy to write progressions in major because so many songs have been done that way and we can use those as references so learning songs analyzing them and then referring back to the major scale is a hugely important concept additionally after that once you've learned to actually write chord progressions in major you're going to want to start doing things on top of those chord progressions in major which is where writing solos or lead lines comes in now the major scale is going gonna work very good for most chord progressions in major but it's a little scary you can get into a little trouble sometimes when you're just using the full major scale so instead we often use the abbreviated version of the major scale called pentatonic major it works good all of the time you will never fail so that's a great place to start when you want to begin writing leads and writing melodies and once you've learned all this other stuff don't think about the whole major scale just think about the pentatonic major scale and learn some licks that other musicians have used with just that scale i think a very good next step for us is to learn our suspended chords now we're taking our basic triads but we're going to be kind of modifying them we're going to be doing cool things to them to our major and minor triads and one of our goals as a composer once you've gotten these basics out of the way is how do we make things better how do we improve things and i think suspended chords are a great little improvements to make around our major and minor chords but they also have other functions as well so very cool topic very practical and i think it fits in well and nice with the rest of the order of things after that i would finally suggest you would approach learning the minor scale the minor scale is like the major scales evil twin it's extremely popular it happens all over the place but it sounds drastically different it also has diatonic accords you can build chords of a minor scale and if you can do that then you are going to want to be writing actual chord progressions in minor keys which would be the next step for any composer and now you can write in both worlds you can write in major you can write in minor if you can write chord progressions in minor just like major you're going to want to do things on top of those chords and a great way to do that is with the pentatonic minor scale this is the king of all scales it sounds good no matter what you do in any order every guitar player has just abused this scale so there is an entire wealth of encyclopedic knowledge on how to use it and it works for melodies it works for guitar solos it works for lead lines pretty much anything and it fits in buttery smooth over anything that is in a minor key so i really think that this is a good time to learn it most guitar players learn this topic way too early to actually to be able to apply it but if you understand all these other concepts already then you're really going to be able to apply it right out of the gate next i think it's a good idea to tackle the king of all composing and theory topics which is ear training intervals and chords the ability to hear music and know exactly what you're hearing know that it is eight half steps away or that it is five half steps underneath this is the idea of ear training and it might seem like magic but if i can learn how to do it then anybody can learn how to do it because i do not have perfect pitch i do not have a good ear well at least i didn't until i started practicing these concepts and it gave me the tools and skills to be able to hear chords and know what they were without having to have a perfect pitch or without having some massive brain it's just the skill it's just skill building and learning and that's what ear training your intervals can do for any musician it allows you to hear things and translate it into immediate musical concepts after that a real guitar player favorite is the concept of power chords what guitar player doesn't love power chords now even if you're not a guitar player you should know about this concept but this is an entire realm of its music there's entire genres of music that depend on nothing else except this so you really should be learning how to apply all these other concepts to the power chord topic because it's very important to be able to apply power chords but even if you're not a guitar player i think musicians need to know why guitar players are so obsessed with power chords now one of the most confusing topics for any musician is the idea of relativity and tonal center eventually you'll realize that major scales are minor scales and minor scales are major scales but unless you understand these other things that topic can be very confusing and hard to grasp but it unlocks the idea of modes if you understand that major scales and minor scales are really the same thing then you'll also understand that modes are just variations of our major scale so approaching this topic independently and trying to understand that duality is going to be very important if you can do that you will make it much easier on yourself to combine your pentatonic shapes this is another guitar player skill specifically because we're talking about shapes but a lot of guitar players are having trouble with combining pentatonix because they can't figure out why the five shapes work the way they do and it's because they don't understand relativity and tonal center so by understanding relativity and tonal center you'll also be able to easily combine your pentatonic shapes from there it's time to finally start approaching some more advanced lead concepts spamming the pentatonic scale on top of stuff is fun and it sounds cool but you can do much better and that's where we start using our entire major scale our entire minor scale and focusing on our lead lines around arpeggios and chord tones very complex topic that applies to every musician i don't care what instrument you play if you're gonna play leads you need to know about arpeggios and chord tones now inversions are a topic that many musicians are taught early on and because of that they don't know how to use them or why they learned them i think it's a much better topic to learn once you're a little more advanced with music theory because then you'll have some ideas on how to actually apply it but an inversion is simply just a rearrangement of a major chord or a minor chord and a slash chord is simply a different way to notate those kinds of chords but they're very powerful concepts to a composer who has only mastered the basic triads to continue outside of your basic triads you'll want to learn our seventh chords now there's a few that are very popular the major seventh the minor seventh and the dominant seventh these seventh chords pop up all over music and you should be able to build them understand them recognize what they sound like and you'll immediately be able to apply them because you understand everything that precedes this concept so once again a lot of players learn this stuff without knowing how to use it and then they get confused or bored or frustrated and the problem is they don't know the previous concepts so by knowing them in this order you'll be able to immediately apply these seventh chords because you can see how they fit into our major and minor scale so by being able to compose in major and minor and by knowing our seventh chords we're easily able to compose in major and minor using all these seventh chords now that you're familiar with seventh chords major seventh chords minor seventh chords you can explore different genres of music like the blues or jazz and the blues is primarily divided into major or minor blues and learning the blues is a very good precursor to learning jazz and you'll see that a lot of the blues concepts do depend on everything that we've learned from before now i was a guitar player that decided to learn blues right out of the gate and i had no idea what i was doing i was just emulating people just mimicking people but once i learned these other topics i was really easily able to make my own blues and jazz songs with my own spin on it because i understood the core concept that built up the blues and jazz after that we can start getting into some more exciting and advanced theory concepts like secondary dominance really all we've been composing with up until this point is just seven notes we've been staying in a scale we've been staying in a minor scale or major scale and we're trying to just use those seven notes but what we'll want to do is use way more than seven notes and by introducing secondary dominant chords we're actually playing chords that are outside of the key and they add a lot of interest additionally you're going to want to tackle the big bad diminished chord the diminished seventh chord doesn't show up anywhere in diatonic major or diatonic minor music but it does show up all over the place in my favorite kinds of music there are two kinds of diminished chords the full diminished and the half diminished which would also be diminished 7th or the minor 7 flat 5 chord but it's a pretty confusing and bizarre topic and i certainly suggest that you have all the basics figured out before you approach this one if you've mastered diminished chords you can master augmented chords once again they're very weird chords you're not going to see them all over the place but as a composer these are the kinds of things that i look for very unique specific chords that might be tricky to use but they give you very specialized sounds and effects but it might seem a little uncomfortable or weird if you learned this all the way back over there if you learned this earlier on you might think why would i ever use this chord to me it's much easier to understand its applicability once you've learned these advanced topics also if you know augmented chords and diminished chords you are really ready to learn harmonic minor which is a wonderful exotic tonality everything up until this point has kind of sounded western sounds like western rock sounds like western pop the harmonic minor does not sound western it sounds much more like the music you hear overseas in india or eastern countries it's got an exotic flair to it a lot of excitement a lot of drama that you do not find in major or minor and inside this scale you'll find diminished chords and augmented chords and after you've learned all of these concepts i do suggest you go back to some very basic concepts like writing a melody anyone can write a melody you don't need to know any of that we just learned about to write a good melody people that have never played an instrument or learned music theory still write good melodies but as a composer you're probably going to want to study what is that secret sauce that makes a good melody what are the tips and tricks and trends that constantly occur throughout all the music we hear that can describe a good melody so at this point i think it's a very wise idea to focus in on the core components of music like a simple melody now we're finally approaching some of the more advanced topics like passing tones and chromaticism once again we're trying to leave at the idea of just using seven notes seven notes is pretty restricting but a passing tone is something that is an extra note outside of those seven notes and it bridges the gap between some of those seven notes and that's what chromaticism refers to notes that are right next to each other and they are not in our major scale or minor scale so we're bringing back in the very first topic of the chromatic scale but now we're applying it in a much more musical sense if you're learning chromaticism and passing tones you'll probably encounter the bebop scales which are simply varieties of our major scales and modes that include an additional note so our bebop scales have eight notes and that means that there's going to be chromatics in those scales and now i think it's time to tackle one of my favorite topics which is the modes of major this might seem like really advanced stuff but if you know major and minor then all of these different modes are very easy to digest and each one has its own unique independent sound the ones you're already familiar with are ionian mode which is a different word for major and the aeolian mode which is a different word for minor but the mixolydian mode for example is a very common sound that we hear in classic rock and scottish celtic music the lydian mode is a classic sound we hear in progressive rock and ambient music the phrygian mode is heard in metal and eastern music so each one of these modes is an entire world of music theory unto itself and it should not be ignored but to really digest all these things earlier on in your playing is going to be very difficult by learning them now you can really apply your passing tones you can you apply your seventh chords you can apply everything you've learned to this concept and really get the most out of it once you're familiar with developing modal tonalities why not change between them that's the idea of modulation and transposition we don't have to just stay in one key we can be in two keys or three keys we can be in multiple keys we can modulate and transpose our songs now we might want to have a reason to do this it's not the best idea to just modulate for no reason but once you understand this concept you'll understand why composers actually modulate and why they choose to change keys and more specifically what keys do they like to change to and why might they use those keys versus other keys now if you can understand modulation you are certainly prepared to tackle the idea of modal interchange modal interchange is the idea of borrowing a chord from a parallel key we also hear this known as modal mixture but borrowed chords modal interchange modal mixture all different sides of the same coin and a powerful tool to help combine literally everything that we've learned up until this point now that does take care of most of our music theory so it's time to get on to some more modern theory of modern song sections what a modern song sound like what are the sections of a modern song you know a lot of stuff that you may have learned from school about you know rondo form and sonata form those are really not applicable to the stuff that we hear on the radio the concepts that we need to learn for song structures today on the radio are things like pre-choruses or bridges post choruses those ideas so studying those and understanding their function why a composer might use a pre-chorus and what makes up a pre-chorus very helpful to the modern composer if you know the sections of a song it's pretty easy to build an entire song the structure for an entire song now there's no one song structure but there are some very common patterns you will see the cookie cutter structure of a verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus and is very powerful and with small little modifications we can easily make some really interesting and unique sounding songs without sounding too generic or copying people then even if you're a guitar player you're going to want to be able to know a little bit about writing drum parts especially if you have a drummer in your band or if you work with a percussionist it's pretty important to be able to speak that language of rhythm and groove to know things like half time or double time or know what a syncopated part might sounds like or even just being able to vocalize a drum part for your drummer by doing that you will hopefully understand the concept of groove which is pretty abstract but it is extremely important to having energy in your song without energy your songs just fall flat and a lot of people won't be attracted to them energy is a lot of times dictated by groove and percussion most of the time the energy just comes from the rhythm department so if you're a composer and you're ignoring the percussion and you're ignoring what the drummer should be doing you're really doing yourself a disservice and it's worth the time in an effort to investigate this topic so you can amplify your own compositions with better grooves better rhythmic concepts additionally if you're able to write drum parts you'd want to be able to write bass parts as well and if you're a guitar player this shouldn't be too difficult because four strings of the bass are the same as the four strings as our guitar but the concepts of writing a bass line are pretty different than the concepts of writing a guitar part at this point i think any composer would be prepared to create a full song you could have started doing this all the way back at our first step but at this point you are deadly because you know every single component to theory and you've studied the trends and common techniques of other composers as well so at this point i think the idea of creating a full song is literally an effortless task making music at this point with all of these concepts absorbed isn't something to worry about you know that you can just sit down and make music without a single sweat but it doesn't mean that you're done learning music it just means that you're done with the most of the core concepts of western music theory if you'd like to continue your studies you'd like to study some more advanced ideas like world music many of the concepts we learned do not apply to other cultures and other cultures use concepts that we won't find in western music they might sound strange to you they might sound too complicated and it's just because you haven't been exposed to them you'll also things like alternate tunings that we do not see in the western world all of this is built on 12 notes but other cultures use 22 notes other cultures might just used five notes so clearly these theoretical concepts won't necessarily apply additionally there's advanced systems of harmony there's a million systems and theories and techniques on how to develop harmony so it is one of those topics that you can approach once you've learned all this other stuff on your own and you can even invent your own systems of harmony and lastly the only thing i'd like to bring up now is the idea of timbre this goes into production of music how does a note sound what are the components of why a note feels and sounds a certain way and why is it shaped a certain way very abstract stuff but it goes into the realm of production and equalization well i thought that was pretty fun once again thanks to brian the developer from noda you can check out that application at noda.io and it's also available on steam but before we close out this video i really need to talk about this idea of what is a composer you see there's plenty of people out there that make great music and they don't know anything about what we just talked about they don't know scales or music theory at all and they're still composers they're still making great music so learning these things does not make you a great composer being a composer just means you're making music but being a professional composer means that you are armed and ready and capable of handling nearly anything that comes your way professional composers don't run into the problem of saying oh sorry i can't read that music i don't understand it professional composers don't have the problem saying no i can't write you a bossa nova groove because i don't understand how that's done professional composers have the skills to get music made all over the place in all sorts of different genres so i kind of compare it to being a chef plenty of great home chefs can do their job just fine but if you put them into a professional kitchen some of the language might not be understood by them or some of the techniques might not be understood by them they're still cooking great food and they still might make a better meal that i want to eat more than a professional chefs but they might not succeed in the professional world as easily as somebody who knows all the terminology knows all the concepts knows the applicability across realms so these concepts i'm really aiming towards somebody who is trying to pursue music as a professional career but not only will they aid your professionalism they will also aid your creativity me personally by knowing these concepts i am more creative i have more ideas i have more options and i have more confidence i go into songwriting knowing that i can make music because i have all these skills that i've developed and honed i don't go into songwriting thinking oh i hope i can do it this time and that was really the result of having developed and learned these skills so i'm not trying to sound elitist i don't want you to think that composers have to know all these things i don't think that's true at all i think there's a lot of talented folks out there that don't need the guidelines like i did but if you're not immensely talented and if you're not just oozing out artistic creativity it certainly helps to have some of these theory basics under your belt that just give you a starting point and i can honestly say as a musician my life and my art has only been enriched by learning these topics and i have many more to learn so i hope you enjoyed this video i hope you enjoyed watching it like i said i do have all of these topics covered in my new theory and songwriting course so if you're interested please check the links below for that but if you enjoyed this video please just thank my patreon supporters for making them possible they are the only sponsors i trust at this point so they have my appreciation and i hope they have yours as well thanks for watching and i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 525,678

Keywords: jake lizzio, dole mansion, crystal lake, free lesson, guitar lesson, cool guitar, play solos, how to play guitar

Id: qeS8txkoUH4

Length: 28min 27sec (1707 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/elaintahra]

13:30 Penatonic shapes? different from pentatonic (5)?