Practical Music theory is what most music students need when they begin their music lessons.

Many students feel overwhelmed with the thought of studying something as grand as the theory of music. They are intimidated by this idea of studying some college level music lessons.

What students really need to understand is that they are learning practical music theory principals.

What Are The Principals Of Music Theory?

Taking a practical approach to learning music involves learning symbols and meanings. Simply figuring out what a symbol means and how to handle that meaning.

Take the “music note”. It is just like a letter of an alphabet. It provides a meaning to music. When applied to lines and spaces it represents a pitch. That pitch then gets held for a certain number of beats; which is also determined by the symbols wholes, dots, and flags. Combined together they form a sound made of tone and time.

So learning the practical theory of music is about defining concepts into a set of rules that form a framework which allows musicians to communicate their ideas to others to be played.

Don’t Go Looking for the Everything Music Theory Book

You don’t need to find the ultimate music theory text or course. Practical music theory is about learning specific elements of music that help you understand how to read and play a song. The basic ideas of intervals, scales, keys, and chords provide a way to get beyond the note by note playing.

It allows you to create motion with big sound within the framework of a key signature and scale. Using chord motion and scale patterns lets you assimilate a piece of music faster. It allows you to create in phrases and not just letters.

Explore the Theory of Music Made Easy

Take a look at the big picture of music and you can break it down into a few elements that need to be mastered in order for you to understand music well.

The application of practical music theory elements are notes, rhythm, key signatures, scales, and chords.

Learning each of these elements is only a matter of taking practical specific steps in a direction that takes you from simple knowledge to more complex.

It’s not a lot different than learning math. You started with counting then explored addition and subtraction. It wasn’t long you were learning multiplication and division. Algebra came next and so forth.

Music can be made practical and easy if one will take this type of approach.

Technique Without Fundamental Music Theory

Playing technique is one thing you must concentrate on to play beautifully. Applying technique is about knowing what you are applying it to. That would be where you’d like to step in with some fundamental practical music theory.

If you know how a series of chords progress, or a grouping of notes as a scale or broken chord, you can focus on playing these phrases and sequences with good technique. That knowledge can allow you to express the music through your playing technique.

An example is using a loud soft louder approach to groupings of 16^th notes. Say you have 4 sixteenth notes in a beat. And it’s a C major chord grouping. You can accent the first note loud, then the next is soft and you build loudness on the next two so that the first note in the next beat gets that loud accent again.

This is a typical playing technique used in classical music.

How to Learn Practical Music Theory

Music Students can learn these fundamental music principals in many ways. There all sorts of websites and books devoted to teaching them. The issue becomes with the style in which these methods use to teach.

Most end up being “please read this and I hope you get the principal down.” Now go practice a bunch of notes on your instrument until you learn it in several months. That is simple and unacceptable way to learn music.

The best method of learning the music principals is in a workshop type of environment. You can read more about our workshop learning methods used in our materials which we believe is the best method to practical music theory.

The Getting It Down Cold Workshops and Courses are designed to provide you with a music workshop approach to quickly and thoroughly learning practical music theory.