[jongold]

The most important thing is to relate the theory you learn back to your instrument, and to use your ears as much as your brain.

I have a hunch that so many of my engineer friends are musicians because music theory is happily systematic - it reminds me a lot of category theory & FP. It meshes perfectly with my brain at least - but just knowing theory without feeling it is useless. Learn to feel.

[pmoriarty]

"music theory is happily systematic"

Funny, when I tried multiple times to learn music theory it seemed very unsystematic to me, and more like the result of hundreds of years of accretion by lots of people who thought their own way and did not have any kind of coherent, overarching system or vision in mind.

If it was more systematic it would have been a whole lot easier to learn.

[ehnto]

It is actually pretty systematic, but with edge cases. The trouble I find with music theory teachings is they don't have systematic approaches at all, they use brute force memorization and some of the more shallow constructs. When you dig deeper, you can see the underlying patterns that created the things that get memorized.

[abannin]

Theory is very systematic if you start with listening, but will seem haphazard if you start with the physics.

[wwweston]

This. ^

I have a half-baked theory about music theory that this is best facilitated by playing / singing instruments that are often holding the root of a given chord -- which means singing the bass part, playing bass guitar, or double bass, or cello in a string quartet. If you're playing entire chords (keys, guitar) you'll get some of it too, but I suspect there may be something about focusing a while on a monophonic low part that helps establish the feel for theory.

[zozbot234]

Nitpick, but the bass part does not always play the root of a chord in the proper sense - "inversions" (which are actually very common) are precisely those chords where the bass is playing some note other than the root. What is true however is that the bass part provides the broadest level of "structure" in a piece of music that can be directly read in the score. Notes in other parts are always (at some basic structural level, disregarding further elaboration) chosen based on how they "relate" to the bass according to the rules of counterpoint.

The "thoroughbass" is a historic way of thinking about the "accompaniment" of a piece of music that's based on these principles; a "thoroughbass part" writes down chords by "annotating" a bass line with intervals, and music pieces can be written as "lead line(s) plus thoroughbass part" in a way that's comparable to a modern lead sheet but a lot more theoretically founded.