You don't need to know anything about music theory to make music. You don't even need to know what a note is to make music, music predates every concept you just mentioned and it likely predates language. It seems pretty elitist to assume you need all or any of that to make music. Does it help? Sure, in the same way art classes help you make art. But you don't need to take an art class to paint a beautiful picture with time and dedication.
Hey pal, do follow the tutorial. Music keys, scales, chords + progressions, baselines, melodies, etc are all covered with examples and/or exercises. It's not as deep as a full music theory course but I don't think anyone is claiming this will get you a music major ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
It even has an advanced topics section with an intro to pentatonic and octatonic scales, triads and inversions; check it out in the menu.
This is a tutorial. Learning scales on the piano is hardly "making music" either.
>Is paint-by-numbers making art? I sure don't think so, so neither is this.
Painting by number surely is one, albeit limited, form of expression, and thus art.
And if you could re-arrange the numbers and change colors, and add your own parts (like you can here) it would be 100% art.
>What would have been way way better is a brief introduction to music keys, major and minor, then basic chords, then progressions, then melody, with each section having a few examples of each so that the person going through the article could have some understanding of how music is really made, and how musical concepts actually relate to each other.
That would be better to make e.g. a classical or jazz musician.
(I was trained when young in those things).
This is for another style of music, that could not give less fucks about those "musical concepts" (you can use some of them - and some are covered in the tutorial -, but you can do it instinctively too, or it can bypass it altogether -- great techno tracks using just one chord for example, or of indeterminate tonality, are very common), but which still enables all kinds of expression (to the point of creating works that can move listeners to tears and heightened emotional states).
"Better" is relative. People will learn that by looking at what other artists are doing and figuring it out themselves, and they will remember it better for that reason.
Everyone I know who is into making music (which includes a large mix of professional and non-professional musicians) started out in electronic music by putting interesting sounds together, and then by imitating what their favourite artists have done.
What you describe is like starting out an art course by teaching students to mix colour -- describing the colour spectrum, which colours lead to what, etc. But really the students will learn all of that and much, much more by just experimenting with combining random colours and seeing what they get out of it, and sharing and comparing with the rest of the class.
I think most people have a prespondence to teach theory first -- indeed, this is how it is generally done in academic settings, but people tend to learn better practicing something first, and then seeing how the theory generalizes what they have learned. After all, you can't really learn something properly until you have experience with it.
I know this, because both of my parents are teachers -- one taught an adult class for decades and is now teaching children, the other is currently long-distance tutor for a university course, and has done/is doing art classes. But here, have a quote:
According to studies, students who practise what they’re
learning first-hand are three and a half times more
likely to retain that knowledge than when they’re sitting
in a lecture room, hand-scribing notes.
Thank you for your comment, the post formulated extremely well what i was thinking about for a long time, but couldnt express in such a clear way.
I found this holds true for me with many things, not just music or any arts in general. That’s how it worked for me with learning computer science as well. I found that lecture slides and book chapters were waaaaay more useful for me after i attempted the relevant homework assignments and experimented on my won, as opposed to the other way around, where i just read a bunch of theory concepts without much context or immediate useful application.
Reading after attempting and experimenting felt like i was filling out the missing gaps of a puzzle piece, as opposed to completing a puzzle piece sequentially, starting with the top left corner and going left to right and then top to bottom.
Honestly, it's something I've had to relearn. I got so used to reading academic sources and theory, and then realising later I hadn't properly grokked the information fully. It's taken me a long time to realise I should just start by digging in and using the sources as references when need-be.
The last paragraph of your comment is absolutely how it feels.
I think you are looking from the wrong way. Imagine there is a language you don't speak but you get a phrasebook with 100 useful sentences. Like general experssions what to say, how to ask etc. Now if you visit a country where they speak this language it will be very useful. You don't know the grammar, you don't even know the proper pronunciation. Yet you already have a base to build upon and express yourself. This site is like that. You don't _have to_ know music theory and such to start making music. But that's not just the music I'd say the same applies to writing as well.
I have been playing and writing music for 20 years and learned by ear. I have minimal theory training and really have to look things up to tell you theory behind anything I’m writing unless you just want to know chord names.
Your description is one of the best analogies I’ve heard. I can jump into a foreign country and learn the language through immersion, and I’ll pick things up and learn by trial and error, slowly improving as people point out my flaws. Eventually, I’ll speak the language fluently.
Music is a rewarding hobby. I wish more people played and wrote music instead of things way more popular like video games. I bought a guitar for a nephew once, since I started playing when I was his age (10). Ultimately, I think playing on his iPad or Nintendo DS was just easier than learning something like electric guitar which requires patience and some pain for a beginner.
>Ultimately, I think playing on his iPad or Nintendo DS was just easier than learning something like electric guitar which requires patience and some pain for a beginner.
I picked up guitar a little later than you, but what turned it from passing amusement (took some basic lessons) to lifestyle (still play almost two decades later) for me was forming a band with a friend who happened to be decent at songwriting and figuring out accompaniments to his songs. Much like with other things, a good social experience significantly improves the overall experience.
I still write music solo, but I personally don't find it nearly as rewarding without a partner to bounce ideas off of and give/get ideas/critique.
And if you only ever do what is directly taught, likely at best you will be proficient but never great, and often not even entertaining.
I used to have a Fijian flatmate at uni who played guitar, totally self taught.
Played ukulele from age 3 with his sisters in acts in hotels back in Fiji. Just one thing (of many, many things) he could do musically was play along to most songs first time he heard them, anticipating chords/keys, no formal training.
He did say they had so much spare time on their hands as kids it was all he did, but he could play so many songs and lead breaks, bass riffs etc etc note for note, perfect timing.
While we were at uni he cleaned up because he could just roll up to any house band for the night and fill in on almost any instrument, pocket a hundred bucks or more, free drinks and at least one girl.
I love the grid, but if you follow the grid too strictly, all your music will sound sterile and lifeless. Especially if all the instrumentation is programmed. Maybe a real drummer playing to a click track can help avoid that.
I don't think the grid is the problem, it just happens that it's very easy in DAWs to make patterns that are very short (e.g. a 1-2 bar loop) and then arrange them in these 1-2 bar units. Very likely that will sound a bit stiff, repetitive and predictable, which works in some genres but not others.
Personally, trying to think in patterns that only repeat at 4-8 bars helped me out avoid that, while still using the grid.
Of course you can. But if you can only make music with a grid - in fact if you can only imagine music with a grid - that's not necessarily ideal.
Ableton is actually textbook modernism - mechanised regular repeating patterns, both in the GUI and in the kind of music it encourages.
Which is fine as far as it goes - as long as you realise there are other possibilities, and that that kind of modernism is more than a century old now.
It takes a whole chapter to explain rhythm because I have witnessed people spend literally over an hour stuck on "counting out a measure" with varying note lengths. This series is starting where a from-scratch musical education must start.
An education for theory training does end up focused on note interval structures, and there's an endless amount to talk about there, but then, you don't need a great deal of traditional theory for simple songwriting - major and minor triads will suffice. This tutorial gets those but in my skimming of it seemed to stop short of trying to explain circle of fifths usage, which is probably the one most essential thing to make composition in the large go from "I have to guess and check" to "I have a guideline to work from that lets me calculate ahead."
Exactly. It even has an advanced topics section with an intro pentatonic and octatonic scales, triads, inversions and whatnot— a pretty cool and practical intro to all these topics IMO.
It's been kind of eating at me a bit. I want people to get into music, so what about this could feel so bad?
After a day of sitting on the thought, I think it's this: They come at it from the most over-glorified, super-high, angle. The place where all of the fame to talent ratio is wayyyy on the fame side. It's not that talented people don't loop, but there's already enough people falling into that music trap without it being literally the first thing they're introduced to musically.
Coming at it from drum loops first seems like a good way to ruin any chance a person had of being patient with the practice. Why work for years to hone in on an instrument when it sounds so much better to just play prefab loops?
