The Best Way to Approach Music Theory

To those who may play instruments but never really focused on learning music theory, your hesitation is warranted. The standard method of teaching theory includes all sorts of redundancies and complications that reduce it to a hard-to-apply series of terms and classifications. That being said, theory is still incredibly useful and rewarding if understood. So how do you go about learning it in a simpler and more utilitarian way?

The key is to focus on intervals, and you can find many free music lessons online that will lay them out for you. And understand that when I say focus on intervals, I mean learning their names as well as learning their sounds backwards and forwards. A true understanding of theory means not disconnecting it from sound at any point, but this is hard to do when introduced to scales and other large collections of intervals at once.

You cannot understand how a scale works in theory or in sound until you understand intervals in theory and sound. Scales, chords, and everything else are just collections of intervals; they are not really anything different, and if you know all of the intervals, you know all possible scales.

So to get a very solid knowledge of the intervals you will need to spend a lot of time with them one by one. The best way to do this is to play them on the instrument of your choice, and also sing them. Start with the root to minor second interval and play it in every possible way on your instrument, and then sing it in every different key.

After you’ve got it down a little bit, test yourself by playing a root and singing the minor second. Do whatever exercises you can think of, and after you have the interval mastered, move on to the next one. Just make sure that you practice the root up to the interval sound, and the root down to the interval sound.

When you feel like you have a handle on the single intervals, start combining them into triads and other three note collections and repeat the process. Gradually move up to full scales and you will find that your knowledge of theory and of your particular instrument is on a level that you never could have imagined.