Music theory concepts ranked by importance

this video is sponsored by the piano learning app skoove as somebody who makes videos on the internet about music theory i've been told countless times in the comment section that you don't need any music theory you don't need to know any music theory to play music to write music and that is true you don't actually need to know any music theory to write a song to play music you could even go up to a piano and not know what the notes are called and string them together in an order that you like and you've written the song there without knowing any music theory at all but i think anybody who's learned some music theory will agree when i say that even knowing just some basic theory concepts can go a massive way to expanding your potential as a musician particularly when it comes to communicating your ideas to other musicians knowing some fundamental music theory concepts can massively help there but the thing is you don't need to know all of music theory to do that you only need to know some of it some of the more important aspects of it you don't need to get bogged down in micro tonality and the harmonic spectrum when all you're trying to do is communicate a chord progression so today what i want to do is i want to rank music theory concepts by their importance i want to go from the need to know stuff to the nice to know stuff and i thought a good format to do that in would be the tier list a common thing on youtube where you have the bottom tier f the least important stuff the least important music theory concepts and then the top tier s super the most important the most fundamental things that you should know about theory and what we're going to do we're going to go through various theory concepts and place them on this list on how important they are so let's start with one of the most fundamental things in music theory something so basic and rudimental that you probably don't even think about it as music theory and that's knowing the names of the notes being able to identify on your instrument this is an a this is a b-flat this is a c-sharp if you don't know the names of the notes then you're gonna have a pretty hard time doing anything more advanced like chords or scales so let's put note names up at the top the most important thing to know in music theory and something that pretty much everyone is going to know even those who claim that you don't need theory so we've talked about note names but now let's talk about chords notes played together and more precisely triads three note chords so we're talking about major chords minor chords and also augmented chords and diminished chords and you could even extend this to sus 2 and sus 4. and i think most people will agree that triads particularly major and minor chords are very fundamental to playing music if you want to perform any song or even write your own song you're going to need to know some essential chord types this is going to go up there in the s tier as well one of the most important things to know is triads but let's talk about some chord types that maybe are slightly less important what about 7th chords so seventh chords are still very common and very important and they're also very useful but they're not as common as triads and in a way you can sort of substitute a seventh chord for a triad so for example if a song asked you to play c7 if c7 was in a song and you didn't know it you could just play c major instead and you could still do a fairly good version of that song so for that reason i'm going to put 7th chords in the a tier i still think that they're very important things to know because they're one of the most common chord types across all of western music really but you can get away without them if you really want to another chord concept is inversions so when you play a chord but the root note isn't at the bottom of it so if you had c major for example and rather than c being the lowest pitch you actually had one of the other notes as the lowest pitch like e or g and this would sometimes be shown as c slash e or c g and these a bit like seventh chords can be substituted for more basic triads so if a song asked you to play c e you could just play c and you'd pretty much get away with it it would certainly lose a character there that you might have wanted but you could still play the song without inversions so for that reason i'm also going to put inversions in the a category very important really quite fundamental but not essential not absolutely essential so we've talked about triads seventh chords inversions but what about more sophisticated chords things like nines elevens add 13 flat nine all that sort of stuff that's what we call upper chord extensions anything which goes beyond the octave beyond the eighth degree of the chord and this sort of stuff not only is still you know substitutable you could still put triads in its place if you didn't know how to play it like with the other options we talked about so far but with upper chord extensions you could even swap them out for seventh chords so for example if you were asked to play a c9 and you didn't know how to do that you could do a c7 instead and it would have a very similar effect so for that reason i'm going to put them in the bead here so that's chords but let's move on from chords let's talk about something that's more of a skill rather than a piece of knowledge and that's ear training so ear training is when you identify things about music purely using your ears you don't have to read it you don't have to be told about it you could listen to a song and say that sums in three four or that's got the chord progression c f g or something like that it's not necessarily having perfect pitch perfect pitch would sort of be the ultimate form of ear training but we're talking more about what's called relative pitch which is like perfect pitch but you require a reference note to sort of work out what you're listening to i think ear training is one of the most important things you can have as a musician you of course could go your entire career just reading sheet music reading chords and never having to use your ears to work out what music is doing but that's going to be massively limiting and it's going to restrain the way that you listen to music the way that you conceptualize music so even having a basic ability to identify things about music using your ears is incredibly valuable so i'm going to put that in the s tier and sort of following on for me training let's talk about intervals so intervals are the gaps between two notes two given notes so if we had the note c and we had the note g the gap between them is a perfect fifth and the reason that knowing the names and sounds of intervals is valuable is not only will it help you pick them out of songs when you're listening to them but if you wanted to transpose the song perhaps the singer says oh can we take this song up a major third if you know what a major third is if you know what interval that is then you'll have no problem doing that and it's that sort of thing where knowing the names of the intervals is a very fundamental aspect of music so once again that's going to go up in the a's here now when you talk about music theory i think a lot of people think about scales so let's put some scales onto our tier list and let's start with probably what most people would think of as the most important scale the major scales if you know your major scales if you know how to play all 12 of the major scales on your instrument that's is almost like pre-learning songs because so many songs are based around the major scale or largely based around the major scale so if your fingers and your mind are already used to playing those notes in that collection then it's gonna massively reduce the amount of time it takes you to learn new songs and it's also just going to make you a better improviser as well because having the major scales at your fingers means that you can instantly start improvising over a song that's in that major scale so for that reason i'm actually going to put major scales in the super tier right at the top because i think they're one of the most important things you can know and with that in mind let's talk about another type of scale the pentatonic scales and also the blues scale because the blue scale is like a variation of the pentatonics the pentatonic scales the major pentatonic and the minor pentatonic are generally considered the entry-level scale for guitarists the just the main scale that guitarists use and most of the stuff they do and the main reason for that is they are just so versatile they are slightly simplified versions of the major and minor scale and i think you can get a lot of distance out of the pentatonic scales i think that's been proven by um every guitarist ever so let's put that in the aid here because i think you can get a lot of mileage out of those and another common type of scale which you're going to be thinking of already is the minor scales and i say scales because there's three minor scales really there's the natural minor scale the harmonic minor and the less common melodic minor and knowing all three of those scales particularly the natural minor has all the same benefits really as knowing the major scales it kind of allows you to pre-learn songs if you're playing a song in a minor and you've already practiced the a minor scale your fingers are already going to know the sort of movements and places they need to go to so minor scales much like the other scales are really quite important and i'm going to put them in the aid here so we've got three types of scale so far what other types of scale could we have well there's the modes so that's your mixolydian scale your dorian scale phrygian scale and i think the thing is with modes is you don't really need to know modes to perform songs even if a song uses let's say the dorian mode you can think of it more as being in the minor scale with a raised sixth with a variation to it so if you already know your major and minor scales then you can kind of get away without knowing the modes but the modes really come into their own when you want to improvise and write music with the flavor of those modes knowing the mode of the major scale is useful but it's not going to be as useful as our other scales so i'm going to put that in the bead here and when we're talking about modes we're usually talking about the modes of the major scale so phrygian dorian mixolydian but modes can actually be of any scale you could have the modes of the harmonic minor scale or the modes of the melodic minor um and i think these modes these sort of extended modes are nowhere near as important as the major scale modes because they come up less often and just like the modes of the major scale they're sort of like variations on the typical major and minor scale and of course these modes can be useful for the same reason that the other modes and scales are useful they allow you to evoke a certain flavor in your writing and your improvising but these scales come up so much less often so i'm going to put this in the seed here useful to know but certainly not essential and as an extension to that we've got exotic scales so this is sort of all of the other scales that we've not mentioned so the whole tone scale the octatonic scale the bebop scales really any other scale which doesn't fall under the categories we've looked at so far they're almost like the miscellaneous scales and the reason they're miscellaneous is because they're less common they're not going to come up anywhere near as often so i'm going to place them in the seed here because they're useful for evoking certain flavors but they're certainly not essential if you've always been interested in learning to play the piano then you can get started right now with skoov scoove is an easy to use interactive app that can teach you real songs by classic artists like the beatles alicia keys and elton john start your free trial today with the link in the description so that's enough about scales let's talk now about more of a skill and this is transposition so transposition is when you change the key of a song and it doesn't mean a key change as in like when you change key during a song that's what's called modulation transposition is when before you actually start playing the song you rewrite the music out in a new key quite often when you're playing a cover it's valuable to be able to change the key because the likelihood of your singer's range matching the range of the original singer is quite unlikely so you want to have the option to be able to change the key and see if it sounds better in that key or not so it's an important skill it's not essential so i'm going to put it in the bead here and sort of following on from that is key signatures so key signatures is something that really only applies to sheet music so if you're reading notation if you're not reading notation if you're someone who doesn't really read cheap music knowing q signatures isn't really important at all but if you are reading sheet music reading key signatures is very important you basically can't read sheet music without that so those two polar priorities makes me think that i should probably put it in the bead here so this next one's another skill and it's roman numerals roman numeral analysis and what that means is knowing in any given key what a chord progression um is in relation to that key so if i said the chord progression c f a minor g and we're in the key of c then you could describe that as 1 4 6 5 and you spell that out with roman numerals and why roman numerals are useful is it allows you to think of chord progressions in the abstract beyond the key they're in because a 1 4 6 5 will sound pretty much the same whether it's in c major or e flat major the important thing isn't the particular chords in the progression it's their relation to each other and that's what roman numerals is useful for so i'm going to put roman numerals in the bead here because i do think particularly when it comes to using your ears it's an incredibly valuable skill now the next concept is once again highly related to reading sheet music and less related to performing music by ear and its note values so knowing that this note is a half note or what we brits would call a minim and this concept is generally limited to reading sheet music if you're reading sheet music it's note values that tell you how long you should hold a note for it it's telling you the rhythm but the other thing though to consider is that reading rhythm reading note values on sheet music is probably less important than being able to read the pitch being able to read the notes on the stave and this is because if you're learning a song that you know really well or even a song that you've just heard a few times you probably already know how the rhythm goes and when you read it off sheet music you're mainly just reading the pictures the rhythm is coming intuitively to you because you've heard it before so with that in mind i think it's a important concept but not the most important so i'm going to put it into the beat here the next concept is quite similar actually where it's quite closely tied to sheet music it's articulation so articulation is the particular way that you play a note whether you play staccato or whether you play legato and there's sort of two instances where articulation is relevant the first would be if you're in some sort of rehearsal room and someone suggests oh can you play that part dicato and obviously you want to know what staccato means to be able to do that but the other aspect to articulation is knowing what the symbols look like on the page knowing that this dot means staccato or a line like this means legato so this is something i think has sort of medium importance because the way you play a note the articulation is important but it's not as important as playing the correct note at the correct time so i'm going to put this in the seed here let's talk a bit more about some rhythm things let's talk about time signatures now you don't have to know what the time signature is of a piece of music to play it a little bit like i was saying before if you know how a song goes because you've heard it before you can sort of intuitively feel with meter and the pulse you don't necessarily have to be counting in your head or out loud what the time signature is that's perhaps only relevant with more advanced time signatures more unusual signatures like five four or seven four that said it is very useful to know what the meter of a song is it can give you that confidence to know that you're playing it right but i think maybe the most valuable thing with time signatures is knowing that they're there as an option i think most um people who write music default to some of the more common signatures four four three four six eight um they people sort of have a habit of writing in particular signatures and if you're aware that five four is a thing if seven four is a thing it might give you the motivation to try writing in that signature and that could be a great way of stimulating some new ideas so that all said i'm going to put it into the seed here now continuing down the rhythm line let's talk about tuplets so tablets are when a certain number of notes are squeezed into the space that a different number of notes would normally fit in and the most common type by far is the triplet so the triplet is when three notes are squeezed into the space that two notes would usually occupy and as with all of these rhythmic concepts you can play a tablet without knowing what it's called particularly triplets triplets come up a lot in popular music and if you know how the rhythm of the song goes you don't need to know that it's called a triplet when it's most important to know what a tuplet is is when you're reading them off the page if you're reading sheet music and you see a tablet well you need to know what that concept is you need to know what you're actually meant to do with that because otherwise you're just going to be completely stuck so it's important if you're reading sheet music not as important if you know how the song goes let's put it mid table into the seat here the next concept we're going to talk about is rhythmic selfish which might sound weird and it's probably a weird name for something that you actually already do rhythmic self-edge is when you describe where the beat is in the bar using a particular set of words so for example imagine i want to describe to you without showing you the sheet music that i want to beat here this is the third beat of the bar so i would just say it's on the three that's pretty simple but what if i wanted to describe this beat it's on the eighth note between three and four the name for this in rhythmic solfege is the three and because we name eighth notes with an and and if you don't know what rhythmic self-edge is if you had not learned this before then it seems like a very confusing and overwhelming concept but that's precisely why it's valuable to learn because people do use this all the time to describe where beats fall it's an incredibly efficient way to describe where a beat falls in the bar without having to write it all down so if someone says oh there's a hit on the forehand you want to know what that means so it is a valuable skill that said it's something that i only think is used in quite professional environments um so i'm going to put it mid table again i'm going to put it in the seat here so let's start getting into perhaps some slightly more advanced territory let's talk about cadences and functional harmony so cadences are movements between chords that sort of end or complete progressions the most famous cadence is the perfect cadence five one and there's a few of these cadences these movements between chords and when they're used as a way of moving around a key then it's described as functional harmony and this is the concept that is far more relevant in classical music and also jazz music when it comes to pop and rock functional harmony really does sort of lose its relevance so i'm going to put it reasonably low down i'm going to put it in the deed here now something we sort of skipped over earlier is clefs so treble clef bass clef and also less common caps like the auto clef what clef does is it tells you which note is which on the stave so knowing clefs is ultimately essential for reading sheet music because if you don't know what note is which on the stave you can't play any of those notes but if you're not going to be playing sheet music if you're going to play playing all of your music by ear or using tablature perhaps you don't need to know what clefs are you really don't so it's one of those skills where it depends on what type of music you're going to be playing what type of environment you're going to be in so i think it belongs mid-table really and because it's essential to reading sheet music though i think it's going to go in the beat here something else which is largely to do with reading sheet music is dynamics so dynamics is the relative volume of a piece of music whether it's played softly or loudly and in music particularly classical music it's represented by these letters which stand for italian words for loud and soft forte meaning loud and piano meaning soft dynamics are far more important in the world of classical music particularly when you're reading sheet music because the whole idea in classical music is that you perfectly replicate the composer's vision for the music but the thing is if you are just trying to do your own rendition of a piece of music your own vision of it then you're going to have an idea in your head a natural idea of where you want to be louder and softer so you don't necessarily need that dictated to you on the page so for that reason i'm actually going to put it in the d category um some people might get frustrated by that but i think it's something that you really only need if you're reading sheet music and then you only really need it if you're playing classical music and then you only really need it if you're trying to play that classical music faithfully so there's a lot of ifs and buts there okay so we really are now getting into some quite advanced concepts so the next one is polyrhythms a polyrhythm is when there are two different consistent pulses happening at the same time so for example one of the most common polygons is four over three now polyrhythms are one of those things where you could play a polyrhythm without knowing that it's a polyrhythm you could either play it by ear or you could even read it and not necessarily know that it's polyrhythm it's ultimately just a tuplet over normal notation and we've already talked about tuplets so polyrhythms is almost an extension on other concepts polyrhythms can be valuable particularly if you want to be really aware of the rhythm of a piece of music or if you want to write using polyrhythms it's good to know um what they are and the relationship between the pulses but definitely not an essential piece of um knowledge when it comes to theory so i'm going to put polyrhythms in the f category and something similar to polyrhythms is polymeters a polymeter is when you do have a unified pulse a unified tempo but different parts are sort of completing their bar their meter at different times and therefore they sort of fall out of sync with each other and then fall back into sync after a full rotation once again this is quite an advanced concept and it's probably more important to know than polyrhythms even though the term polymeters is probably less commonly known and the reason i think it's more important to know is if you want to perform a polymeter it's good to be aware of what's going on if you're going to be playing in a different time signature a different meter than the drummer then you sort of want to know that going into it because otherwise when things start sounding like they're falling out of time then you might start panicking and trying to correct it but if you're confident about the the concept of polymeters and the facts that you're going to be playing in different meters then when that sort of rhythmic tension begins you won't feel uncomfortable so i think polymeters are advanced they're not essential at all but they are more important than polyrhythms i think so i'm going to put polymeters in the d category next is a concept which is almost exclusively talked about in jazz music and it's tritone substitution what a tritone sub is is when rather than for example going five to one a perfect case resolution you substitute the five chord for a chord a tritone away so in this example rather than being g7 moving to c it would be d flat seven moving to c and as you can hear that has a similar resolution to it and because of that it's a very common substitution that you might make when you're adapting a jazz tune it's common in jazz music to re-harmonize to change the chord progression and tritone cyber is perhaps one of the most common ways to do that but yeah that said it's a concept which is really limited to jazz and if you're not playing jazz then you don't need to know what it is and you might even do it without knowing that it's cool to try tone sub so definitely not that important i think it's going to wind up in f i think if you're into jazz it's definitely more important to know but then jazz is a niche type of music so i'm gonna put it in the f category okay now we're really getting into the advanced stuff this is micro tonality so in normal western music the smallest interval we can use the smallest interval available on the piano for example um is the semitone and everything else is bigger than that but micro tonality is when you use intervals that are smaller than the semitone and when you use intervals that are based on stacks of those smaller intervals in layman's terms it's when you use notes between the notes as you can imagine that is a very unusual thing to do in music it's really quite rare it's a concept that's largely embraced by people who are actively trying to push forward the envelope of music and sort of find new approaches and sounds and it's also something that's quite relevant if you're exploring beyond western music um and that is obviously valuable but of course what we're kind of talking about here today is western music theory when we say music theory and you're in the west you're referring to western music theory so i think it's no surprise that microtinanity winds up in the f tier sorry jacob collier the next concept is the harmonic series so the harmonic series is the natural set of overtones you get when you play a note and what that means is for example imagine i hit the note a on the piano of course we're hearing the note a the pitch a but also due to the way that sound is physically created we're actually also hearing quieter overtones other notes which are also in there blended in and those other notes always occur in the same order the same series the harmonic series now for most music making particularly on instruments like the piano or the guitar knowing about the harmonic series is very much a nice to know not a need to know and there are some instruments like horns and also um things like violin where knowing the harmonic series knowing um about the tuning between different intervals in the harmonic series can be very useful but for the majority of music making on the majority of instruments you don't need to know the harmonic series so i'm going to put that in the f tier following on from the harmonic series we have temperaments so temperaments are the way that the notes of a instrument for example the piano have been tuned away from the sort of perfect ideal tuning you can tune instruments to a mathematical ideal where every interval is tuned to a perfect pure ratio and that's called pure intonation but for reasons i've discussed in other videos you don't really want your instrument to be tuned to pure intonation and equal temperament actually fixes a bunch of problems with that tuning so as you can probably tell from the density of what i've just told you this isn't an essential thing to know about music and it's kind of only relevant to um instruments that can play between notes instruments like the violin where you might want to play around with temperament on an instrument like the keyboard or the piano you can't really change your temperament so you don't necessarily need to know about it at all so this is very much an f tier concept there we have it we've basically filled up the entire tier list here and you can almost treat this as a list of concepts to learn in order if you started at the top and worked your way down to the bottom you'd be learning music theory in order of relevance order of importance and you could stop at whatever point you wanted to each concept you learn is going to be useful to you it's going to expand your musicianship and expand your ability to make and communicate music so just remember that you don't need to know music theory to make music but it's certainly helpful and as always a massive massive thanks goes to everyone who supports me on patreon including the names you see on screen right now and andrei science diargia andy deacon andrew andrew brown andrew sussman austin barrett austin russell bob mckinstry whitney parker cameron alvila colin aiken chris cabal christopher ryan david rivers donald howard dr darren wicks elena scorchenko eugene leroy fd hodor greg kabovsky iolamo kutcher hugo miller ivan pang jake fisher james kayo j.a kochensparger john dye josh sandolin justin vigger lee lawrenson mark ziegenhagen max o'keefe melody composer square melanie schoner michael vivian nancy gillard nathan lawrence nathaniel park paul middleton paul muller corpses peter dunphy richard bride roger clay john kennedy steve dailey stephen lozaro tim beaker homer aharoni trisha adams tim payne victor levy video flowers vladimir kodikov balti and weyland fairbanks [Music]

Channel: David Bennett Piano

Views: 753,566

Keywords: tier list, music theory, important, what should i learn, how to, explained, music

Id: ItsMmqTOgKo

Length: 30min 45sec (1845 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021