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Something I wish was more clear in music theory is just how much overlap exists between the various concepts. I think it suffers from having so many names for everything, the learning curve seems much steeper than it really is. Even in this article, much time is spent on the duplicate names of notes and intervals. As a fairly proficient self-taught guitarist, this intimidating perception of theory delayed my learning of it for easily 5-8 years. For example, you may spend a while learning the major scale, and what can be done with it. Then you learn the minor scale, and it seems like a totally separate scale that sounds completely different. And after that you learn that there are five other scales (modes) to learn about! (Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, and Lochrian!). It can seem extremely overwhelming until you learn that they're all the same scale with different relative starting positions. Where major is [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], minor is [6,7,1,2,3,4,5], and the other modes are all the other permutations of starting positions. My other gripe is that learning theory on piano puts a lot of bias on the notes themselves rather than the intervals. For example, the B major scale has 5 sharp notes (black keys) to remember whereas C major scale has none. These are pretty different shapes to remember. Learning these on guitar means taking the same exact shape and shifting it up a fret (so if you know one major scale, you know them all!). Not to say that guitar is the perfect instrument for learning this - folks will often learn scales as close to the 0th fret as possible, causing you to start on different strings and have slightly different patterns. That being said, I wish there was a purely linear instrument (a piano with the black keys flattened?) for learning theory. The real magic comes from identifying the shapes and patterns, and how they're similar to each other. Like how major and mixolydian are identical except for one note, so it's very easy to modulate between them, or make a listener think they're in one mode when they're in another. Same with minor and phrygian. Being able to drop the baggage of "the second note of the B major scale is C# which is this black key here" and just focus on a floating set of intervals seems like it would make this all easier and less intimidating. That all said, I still feel reasonably early in my theory journey. So maybe this is just my bias coming from guitar. |