Hello, one guy in another thread asked on how to use scales in songs, and noting that the extensive post might go to waste, i would like to share this to those that didnt go through that thread. as again, im only going by what i know (which is extremely limited) and it might not be perfect. anyway this is the post, happy reading!



The Thread

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This post has been edited by +3kk!: Jan 4 2013, 09:20 AM

thx for ur tutorial bro !! +1

Excellent stuff mate. Hopefully this can be a starting point to build on this subject - Im sure a lot of ppl r interested to figure this thing out. Looking forward to further contributions from TS and others.

WHOA this is awesome stuff! Thanks for sharing! =D

This is a good read and thought ! Especially for someone like me who don't have any formal background in theories (usually when I play, if it sounds right, good to go)

Good read. You sir, are awesome.
Moar please.

very basic, very fundamental, and yet we musicians needs to know these kinds of stuff.

and it's not only important to learn this, but it's also equally important to know this by heart. to be able to execute this on instinct.

thanks +3kk for this.

my 2 weeks of learning theory, compressed in 1 post. good job.

I would like to highlight a matter about theory to clear some confusion; traditionally a lot of people get confused about theory and make very wrong mistakes in understanding the principles. This is very important because if you don’t understand what theory is, how are you going to learn it?

Origination

Most of the theory including the basics we have up there are “western” theories, in a more accurate form it would be “Classical” music theory. Now for a number of years, music theory was never documented by most cultures, teaching was done via hand me down from sifu to student. (Think Ravi Shankar and his Daughter)

This was mainly because people were quite poor and underdeveloped then, and like music today, its considered not as important as official documents or religious texts. Hence during the peak of church wealth, the church (being too rich and nothing else to do) commissioned the first writings of music, hence why you see a lot of old Latin and Italian words in music. Yes that means all written music came from bible music from the church lol.
This expanded later, with various classical composers adding their input and observations of music in theory. Then later after a few wars it spread over the world and more people added their observations of music into it.

“Why is this important to me as a musician?” you might ask

What you learn up there, the circle of “5ths”, Major/Minor are all “Classical” music, hence that’s why some people go as far as to make sweeping comments like “Theory stuns my creativity”. I would like to clarify this matter, they are wrong but I can understand where they are coming from.
See theory is like a language and classical music is a kind of language (like malay), unfortunately because the church started writing it down first. All the music language in the world uses it as a base, like how plenty of languages uses alphabets and English/Maindrin “constructs” as base.
This base is where we all start, hence in correct terms basic classical would be something like an introductionary course, teaching you “A” is for Apple. It builds the foundation on which other forms of languages will add on. So for most folks they cannot link this together and close themselves down with “I am not a classical player, hence I don’t need classical theory” totally ignoring the fact that while this is classical theory, it is also foundation theory.
Example of theories forming a foundation for other stuff

This is best seen in blues; early blues is a merger of two musical schools of thought. The language of western music and the language of African Music, if we observe we will notice very weird chord and bend structures that are not found in traditional classical music. If you were to follow strictly to classical music (as per the key & progression mentioned above), you will immediately notice these are “mistakes” as some of them are off key and of wrong structure.

What is really happening here is there is a merger of the two languages to form blues; this “merger” can be traced back to African music which carries very different tonal and rhythmic structures as to western classical music. Hence while its wrong in a western way, it’s actually right in a musical way. (think putting “la” in English to form Manglish, its not right English but its right language)

Now if you are still with me, theory like a language differs from genre to genre, blues has its own school of thought, jazz its own, etc etc….each a different language but united with the same “foundation”, the extreme form of this can be seen in indian classical music, of which follows little of western classical style of music. So unless you want to learn Indian classical which has its own theory structure, you would need to sit through the basic “classical” music.

Ok so after the history lesson, WHY SHOULD I LEARN THIS BULLSHIT?

Simple, theory is the foundation on everything musical builds upon, its not a rule hence creative restriction argument can be taken as moot. But it opens you to worlds of other things to play with, it opens up libraries of styles, forms, and languages for you to choose from and this is not restrictive to a single genre alone!

Let me show you a perfect example, take an E Major chord, strum it fast, sounds like an E Major right? Good, now how do you make it Spanish? A person without any theory background would probably run through tombs of “Spanish” chords, songs and etc, yet never get it right.

All you need to do is actually; put an “F” into the mix (using E as root). So use the higher E note in your cord (third string, 2nd fret) and shift it half step forward.

Now strum it fast, does it still sound like the normal E major?

And that my friend is theory at work.