Why you need to learn music theory
This article was written by Khalad. It is a great explanation of why it is important to learn music theory. For me, theory is the underpinning of all of the music I write. I've never been able to adequately express how important I think knowledge of music theory is to composition. The less you know about modes, scales, harmonic progression, and the like, the more limited you are. Not only in writing music, but also in listening. You simply cannot understand how much more enjoyment and fascination one can receive while listening to music if one understands the theoretical underpinnings of why something sounds good. It's not just that you understand the music better; it's also the fact that you can pick up on so many more subtleties.The subtleties in music are what make it interesting, and are what keep me listening to an artist and not care a whit for most popular music. To the untrained ear, all kinds of things sound good, but you don't know why. Oy, I know I'm sounding awfully elitist here, and awfully exclusionary. It's just that nothing riles me up like somebody asserting that music theory is unimportant, that it saps your soul and drains the meaning out of music, that trying to understand music on this level is stupid and unnecessary. You'll hear people denouncing pop music left and right, but you'll never hear many people justify their animosity very well.
For me, it comes down to the fact that most popular music is written in all the wrong ways, which means it's just rehashes of the same old musical tricks. I cringe when I hear a too-obvious V-I cadence. You can hear them coming a mile away, and they're just too obvious to be creative. That's what uninteresting music boils down to... uninteresting musical ideas. 90% of songs don't break free of some combination of the I, IV, V, and vi chords. To make that concrete, Am-F-C-G would be one (the key is Am, though it is weak and could easily resolve to C as well); or G-C-D. A V-I cadence sounds great, but if you can train your ear to recognize the sound it gets tedious to hear it so often. There are so many other interesting harmonic progressions. Not knowing music theory is to get stuck repeating the same old ideas because you don't know any better . That's why it matters to me--I can and have written stuff that just follows the established paths, and invariably people like it. I don't. To an untrained ear, most everything sounds good, which makes it hard to break new ground. Finding interesting notes outside of the established key is difficult if you don't know what you're doing. You end up just doing trial and error, playing random notes and chords hoping to find something interesting.
There's just so much great stuff outside of the normal diatonic scales and progressions that you don't know what you're missing if you don't try to learn about it all. You can change up your chords, break out of the key. Try modes other than major and minor; there are modes in between that are somewhat ambiguous, and modes even more "minor" than minor. Play with the harmonic and melodic minor scales. They let you resolve things nicely, at the expense of losing some of the minor tone. A V-i cadence (e.g. C-Fm) is probably the most satisfying cadence in existence.
Learn how to add tones to your chords, to thicken them up. Spice up that boring old G-C progression; try G7-C, G-Cm, G7sus4-C, G9-Cmaj7. If you haven't, play around with major 7 chords (e.g. Cmaj7 = C E G B). After that you can tack on other notes, which is the foundation of jazz. You know, those 9th, 11th, and 13th chords, with all their variations. How about some other scales? The major scale is distinguished by its sharp resolution to the tonic, so if you stick to diatonic scales you'll always be stuck with that. Have you ever played around with the whole tone scale? Each note is a whole step away from its neighbors. Try C-D-E-F#-Ab-Bb. Or, similarly, a scale made of minor thirds (ever note three half steps apart), e.g. C-Eb-Gb-A. The former is quite exotic, while the latter is dark. Neither has any central tone. Both of those scales have the interval C-F# (or C-Gb, same thing), which is called a tritone, or the devil's note . Why? Play it if you have an instrument available; it's dissonant, but not ear-bleedingly-so like a major 7th (C-B) or minor 2nd (C-Db). Music has tended to become more dissonant over the years as people became more and more used it. Long ago using a tritone interval was practically forbidden because of the dissonance.
Now a lot of people use it to make music more interesting. For example, Metallica loves using a "flatted fifth" instead of the normal fifth, which is the backbone of the Enter Sandman riff. Jazz theory lets you make a tritone substitution: take a chord like G7 with a tritone (B-F). The tritone is what makes the G7-C progression sound so pleasant (the tritone B-F collapses into the more consonant C-E combination), so jazz players figured they were the only interesting notes. So, lose the G and D, leaving B and F, and substitute Db and Ab. Now you have Db-F-Ab-Cb, or Db7, as an alternative for G7. Try it out. Most every great chord progression is characterized by notes moving in half-steps, which creates resolution from one chord to another. Like I said above, the canonical G7-C has B and F resolving to C and E, which are half steps apart. If you play around with this idea you can come up all kinds of great chord progressions. Tears in Heaven, which I'm sure you all know, has the chord progression F#m-C#-A7-F#-Bm-D/E-A. The chromaticism (half step movement) is so beautiful here, and I'll bet most people don't even notice it.
Music theory can become clinical, yes, but that should not be an indictment of learning about it. A good songwriter who learns music theory will be an even better songwriter. Theory helps you break into new musical territory, it lets you do something nobody's done before. Anybody can come up with a catchy hook; theory lets you flesh out that hook with a great song, and have people still listening to your music after the catchy part has lost its novelty.