One of the most-asked questions I get from people wanting to learn music theory is, “Where do I start?”
Probably one of the toughest parts of learning something new is understanding how to to learn that specific thing. Here is a guide on how to start learning music theory!
Table of Contents
Strategies to Maximize Growth and Enjoyment While Learning Music Theory
If you want to be successful learning any skill or knowledge, you need a strategy. This article is structured with a strategy in mind:
- Set your mind on curiosity
- Figure out your goals
- Find resources that help you accomplish your goals
- Remember that there’s more than one way to look at (or hear!) something
1. Set Your Mind on Curiosity
Like all subjects, music theory is best learnt by following your curiosity, as you’ll more willingly put in the work when the information is something that is directly relevant to you.
While it’s often presented as a list of rules that comprise “good music,” music theorists actually seek answers to questions like:
- What is this thing I’m hearing?
- Does it already have a name?
- Do other people hear this thing the same way I do?
- Do people from other cultures hear it the same way? Do people within the same culture hear it the same way?
That means, you’ll be “doing music theory correctly” by starting with questions about what you’re hearing and perceiving in music.
If you already have questions like this in music you listen to, fantastic! Jot those questions down somewhere handy.
But if you’re not sure yet, here’s an exercise to help you out:
Start by picking one of your favorite songs/pieces of music.
Listen to it a 2–3 times and write down some things:
- Is there a moment or two that makes you want to leap up and say “Yes!”? Where in the song does that happen?
- Is there a sound that tickles your ear the right way? Have you heard this sound or instrument elsewhere?
- Is there a specific vibe that you like? Maybe it reminds you of other songs?
Still Don’t Have Any Questions?
Sometimes you don’t know enough about a topic to be curious about it. If the above exercise didn’t conjure up any interesting questions, or if you felt like there weren’t any moments in your favorite song that gave you strong feelings, maybe you just need to learn some foundational skills.
That will give you the ability to listen more deeply. Below are the topics that are generally covered in a Music Theory Fundamentals course:
- Whole and Half Steps
- Intervals
- Scale Building/What It Means to Be in a Key
- How to Build Chords
- How to Read Sheet Music
- BIG NOTE: Reading sheet music is not music theory itself. Traditional sheet music notation does serve as a helpful pneumonic and way of conveying ideas, but just reading and writing sheet music is not what music theory is about.
- Basic chord progressions
Above are the topics generally covered in a Music Theory Fundamentals course at any university. Additionally, to give you a bigger scope for what there is to be curious about in music, I recommend taking a music appreciation course.
Music Appreciation and LaRue’s SHMRG Model
Music appreciation courses and beginner analysis courses often use Jan LaRue’s SHMRG model (from his book Guidelines for Style Analysis), which stands for: Sound, Harmony, Melody, Rhythm, Growth.
Sound includes everything from timbre (the sounds and colors of each instrument’s type and the ways they blend together throughout the course of a piece of music) to dynamics (how loud parts are).
Harmony has to do with chords and the ways different instruments/voices interact and blend together.
Melody looks at the shaping of melodies and their changes throughout a piece of music.
Rhythm covers rhythm and meter: the relationship of different rhythmic layers (surface, harmonic, textural, etc.), patterns of stress, and the rhythmic “fabric” of a song.
Growth covers how every element throughout a piece of music changes as time passes in the piece.
A bonus category of text influence looks at timbre, text/word painting, melody and text, rhythm and text, and much more related to text.
A course that covers these goes much more in-depth for each of these categories. I have a brief overview of them in my free course Beginner Music Theory: Your Quick-Start Guide (that you can finish in like an hour).
I’m currently building a Music Theory Fundamentals course that will include all of the above. If you’d like to be placed on the waitlist (and have a say in what’s in the course), you can sign up here (no obligations at all; I promise I won’t spam):
2. Figure Out Your Goals
Once you have some ideas or musical phenomena that you’re curious about, it’s time to match those questions with concrete goals.
A. Determine the larger purpose behind answering those questions.
Do you want answers to become a better performer? Learning more about music theory means that you can be more intentional and informed with your musical interpretations.
Or maybe you want to write music that has a certain effect, so you identified pieces that have the effect you want, and you want to know why and how they make you feel that way.
Maybe you just want to know for the sake of knowing. That’s totally valid too and what music theory researchers (like me!) do for a living. You don’t need a reason other than being curious!
The answer to this question will determine what types of music theories you look at.
Music theories can look at the same phenomena, but if they’re asking different questions, they’ll come up with different answers or at least frame the answers differently.
Compositional, performance-based, and theoretical-analytical tend to be the three most common types of music theories. While there is generally overlap between them, a performance-based look at sonata form will contain different information and focus than a theoretical-analytical one, for example.
A performance-based look at sonata form will talk about how you can vary repeats and specific techniques you can use in the medial caesura, whereas a theoretical-analytical account will look at the medial caesura and argue why a specific one is interesting.
B. Identify where you are currently in your music theory learning journey.
How much do you already know about the topic you’re curious about?
If you want to know more about really interesting chords and progressions, do you already know how to build chords, or is that something else you’ll need to learn?
For this exercise, you can focus on information regarding the topic you’re interested in, so you don’t need to write down rhythm and meter skills if you’re focusing on chords and progressions.
While this seems like a short step, it’s definitely one of the most important ones.
C. Align Your Purpose and Questions to Create Goals
Take out something to draw on. On one side of an empty page, write “Where I am” and list out everything you identified in section B above. What do you already know about the topic you want to learn about?
Sticking with our harmony example, you might already know what a chord is, how to build basic major and minor triads, and some basic chord progressions (like the ever-famous I V vi IV), but maybe not much more than that harmony-wise.
On the other side of the page, write, “Where I will be” and list out what you want to know and why. This will include everything you determined under section A above.
If you want to learn more about harmony to write your own music that uses harmony in interesting ways, you’ll write that down along with what you’ll know and what skills you’ll have that are part of that. You may need to look some of this up, but for this specific example, I’d write: building extended chords, understanding the logic of chord progressions, diatonic and chromatic harmony, tension and release.
Now you can visualize the difference from where you are currently in your journey to where you want to be. That means you can start identifying steps, or intermediary goals, to take you from where you are to where you want to be.
For this example, your next step might be “learn to build extended chords,” then “how chord progressions work,” followed by “chromatic harmony.” While it may not all be things you can find out and learn just by searching on the internet, this exercise will give you a better idea on which resources to use because not all books, courses, etc. are built the same. Some are meant for performers, some for composers, some for theorists.
To save time and money (and probably some frustration), you should start with resources that are aligned with your goals and your “why.” Can you branch off and explore things not aligned with your goals? Of course! But then, if that’s something you want to do, maybe you weren’t quite honest with yourself about what you actually want to do with music theory. Maybe you are just more curious, so you should revisit this exercise and think about what you’re truly interested in.
3. Find Resources That Align With Your Goals
Probably one of the hardest parts of this journey is finding resources that truly align with your goals. It’s hard to know if a course or book will actually take you on that next step in the diagram you drew above until after you’ve completed it.
Definitely read reviews before you invest time or money into a resource. Many times reviewers, or the description of the resource itself, will say something like, “This course is for people who want to be able to…” Look for sentences like those to help you decide if a resource is for you at the current stage in your journey.
And remember that there is no such thing as a perfect next step. The point is that you take a step at all. Learning isn’t perfectly linear: sometimes you have to take a step backwards before you can take a few forwards. If a resource didn’t perfectly match up with your goals, I guarantee you still learned something. Reviewing information you already know is still a worthy use of your time, and hearing it from another perspective gets at the core of what music theory really is and is for.
I have a list of recommended resources at the bottom of this article that give you a good place to start looking!
4. Remember There’s More Than One Theory
That ties into one of the biggest misconceptions people have about music theory as a discipline: people like to treat “music theory” like “music law.” In reality, there are many music theories that are based on people’s different listening experiences.
If you gathered a group of friends and asked them each what their favorite song is, chances are high that they won’t all say the same song. That’s because we all hear and perceive music differently. What hits hard for some may not mean much to another.
The way your parents talked to you as a child, what (if any) instruments you play, where you’re from, what languages you speak, your speaking range, and so many other factors lead into how you hear music. All of these factors will make certain musical features stand out more to you.
Some people hear lyrics more, some people hear bass lines more. Some people are so acutely aware of harmony, some focus more on texture. While we all have the capacity for listening to all these different elements, our pasts determine which ones poke out more to us.
That’s part of why different theories of music focus on one of these elements!
Even within groups of people who focus on the same musical elements, people will hear them differently. You, yourself, will even hear the same song differently on a second listen and especially on a different day.
It’s part of the human experience and what makes music so rewarding to study.
And when you study music theory you learn new ways of hearing music that you might not have come up with on your own. You practice hearing through another person’s ears, which sounds a lot like empathy!
Hearing through another person’s ears can be invaluable to performers, composers, and theorists alike. Performers ought to know how audiences will react to playing a song a certain way versus another way. Composers should learn how people will respond to a song in general. Theorists are primarily interested in musical experience.
Resources for Music Theory Study
What are your options for learning music theory?
Below are a few of the most common categories for music theory resources and some of my recommended options for each.
Courses
I recommend taking an in-person class at a community college or university if possible. Being able to listen to music and respond with a group of people and talk about your different experiences is paramount because music is a community activity. I know that’s not always financially or schedule-wise possible to take an in-person class, so I have some online courses that start with the basics and get more advanced.
I’m always adding more to the catalog (slowly, as I’m finishing up my PhD, but I hope to get courses out faster once I’m done!). If you have an idea for a course you’d love for me to consider teaching, let me know!
Books
There are two types of books you’ll be looking at as a music theorist.
First are textbooks, which will teach you the basic vocabulary you’ll need to read individual theories of music.
The ones I recommend are The Musician’s Guide to Fundamentals and The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis. You can skip the fundamentals one if know how to build chords and scales, but both are great first steps into theory world. They paid extra to include pop songs, so there’s a wide range of examples in both books.
The second type of book are those that cover a single theory. Every music theory falls into a topic area within the field of music theory, so it isn’t a comprehensive guide to each area; it’s just one theorist’s perspective on a musical phenomenon.
Take musical form for example: there is Hepokoski and Darcy’s Element of Sonata Theory, which covers two theorists’ theory of sonata form alone. That’s only one musical form. And there is also Rosen, Burstein, Caplin, and many more theorists who also wrote on sonata theory. If you were interested in diving deeply into sonata theory, then I would recommend making yourself a little literature review project, where you read these theories and compare the differences and similarities between them.
You wouldn’t have to write a full paper on it, but making some bullet points and trying to put together some sort of overview of what’s different and the same between each theory will teach you more than any teacher could! It’ll also leave you with unanswered questions that you can start to answer yourself, which is a big part of what it means to be a theorist.
Before diving into a project like this, however, you’ll want a specific research question, otherwise, you’ll get overwhelmed with the amount of literature there is on sonata theory (or any other topic). Ask a specific question like, “Are Schubert’s sonatas actually sonata form, or is there something weird about them?” Questions come from observations about musical phenomena, so think about the last time you listened to a song and thought, “Ugh this moment is SO GOOD!” or “What on Earth is this weird chord? It was so unexpected!” and form your questions from that.
Social Media
Believe it or not, there are music theory content creators! Most of them only post analyses of songs, but you can still learn a great deal of music from analyses.
Seth Monahan is a music theory professor at Yale School of Music with research focused on musical meaning, interpretation, and epistemology. He also runs a Youtube channel that is not analysis but concept-based, so it’s a great place to get solid explanations for a lot of music theory ideas. Right now, pretty much all of his videos are on harmony, so his channel is a great resource for that!
12tone on Youtube posts tons of analyses covering a wide range of music and phenomena. While he’s not a career academic, he did give the keynote speech at the Society for Music Theory’s annual meeting this year (2024), so his work is widely respected both on Youtube as a content creator and in the music theory academic field.
8bit Music Theory on Youtube posts analyses of video game music! Specifically, he posts analyses framed within the question of “How do I make video game music that sounds like a specific game?” These are super helpful if you’re learning theory to write your own video game or film music.
Adam Neely on Youtube posts analyses that look more at the cognition side of music theory with analyses focusing on pop and jazz music. His videos focus on why our musical experiences are what they are. While they’re not a structured music theory curriculum, you can learn a lot about the current state of the music theory field and general cool music things.
There are certainly tons more Youtube channels (including mine!), but these are my favorites.
Another social media site to mention is the r/MusicTheory and r/GlobalMusicTheory subreddits (on Reddit). If you have a music theory question that you can’t seem to find answers to by Googling, these are great places to ask! BUT please search the subreddit and see the sidebars/wikis before posting. There are probably already answers to your question!
Articles and Other Scholarly Publications
Scholarly articles are a great way to learn about music theory, but I totally understand that they can be so full of jargon that it’s too overwhelming to read them as a beginner.
That’s why the Society for Music Theory (SMT) has created two alternate types of peer-reviewed publications: SMT-V (for video) and SMT-Pod (for podcasts).
SMT-V is scholars posting videos on a topic in their research that are meant for the general public, as in people outside the music theory academic field. They’re video essays similar to the ones you’d find on Youtube but about real research that real music theory researchers are conducting!
One of my favorites is Nate Mitchell’s video on the music in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
SMT-Pod is similar to SMT-V, just in podcast form. You can listen on your daily commute and learn a lot.
A cool episode is Analytical Frameworks for Post(-Millennial) Punk: the “Twinkle” Schema in the Emo Revival by Tyler Howie and Matt Chiu.
If you really want to learn about music theory, checking out journal articles will help you more than you know and might actually be easier than you thought. The journal I recommend people check out first is Music Theory Online.
It’s completely free to read (unlike most scholarly journals!); has articles covering tons of different types of repertoire; includes pictures, video, and audio examples; and I happen to work for them as well!
Other Music Theory Resources
The above are only a small number of resources I recommend for those just starting their music theory journey, but if you’re interested in looking at more resources, I have a whole growing (free) and filterable database of resources I recommend in the music theory world that you can check out here:
Conclusion
That’s it for this guide!
As a reminder of what I covered in this article, here’s a good roadmap for getting started with music theory:
- Start with curiosity
- Set goals that align with your questions
- What is your larger purpose behind learning music theory?
- Identify where you are in your music theory journey
- Decide where you want to be
- Create goals as stepping stones that will take you from where you are to where you want to be
- Find resources that align with your curiosity and goals
What musical questions will you pursue in your music theory journey? Comment below or email me at [email protected]!
