How Much Music Theory Do You Need To Know?
One of the most common questions beginners ask is how much music theory do they need to know before they start writing music. The technically correct answer of course is none. Anyone can sit down with a guitar and create some kind of noise and call it a piece of music. We live in the modern/postmodern era after all, the artist is absolutely free!
Writing a piece of music that people enjoy and want to listen to, and perhaps more importantly that you yourself enjoy, is a different matter. Different styles of music have different expectations of compositional complexity. Punk rock famously only needed “three chords and the truth” while progressive metal can feature extremely long passages featuring virtuosic playing and harmonic transformations rivaling classical music.
So the answer to the question “How much music theory do I need to know” really depends on the individual asking the question and what kind of music they are trying to create.
Ear Training
A good starting point is ear training. Listen to songs from your favorite band/artists and see if you can figure out what they are playing on guitar. Sure there are many tabs available online, but doing this exercise will get you more intimate with the music and build your confidence in your general musical understanding. See if you can discern the logic behind the choices the songwriter took. Is there a verse-chorus type structure or is it more loose? Are there any key changes and if so where do they occur? How is tension built up and released over the course of the song? Doing this enough times will provide you with a great working knowledge of how a song is put together. To dig deeper into specific songs, you can analyze sheet music/tabs that are available online at sites like Ultimate Guitar and see how the riffs are constructed to flow well together.
Basic Concepts
If you want to learn some proper “academic” music theory, first start by learning how to read sheet music. Know what the notes of the treble and bass clefs are and how time signatures work and how to read rhythms. After that learn the major and minor keys and the scale degrees of each. Once you understand that, learn about the chords that go with major/minor scales and the function each of them play in diatonic harmony. To start you out, look at how the I chord and the V chord create the polarity of the key and how often the V chord is used to create a feeling of suspense or anticipation before the I chord which creates a sense of returning home.
I’ve found Music Matters to be an amazing source for music theory tutorials. They have tons of videos on their YouTube channel as well as some high quality paid courses that very clearly and efficiently teach the core concepts of music theory.
The Bottom Line
I highly encourage everyone to learn these basic music theory concepts but I won’t lie and say it’s absolutely necessary to write music, even good music. Many bands have achieved success without PHDs in music and by mostly just going with their gut when writing music. I’ve found that the more music you listen to, the more of an intuitive grasp of the songwriting process you naturally cultivate.
Also keep in mind that many concepts in music theory were only codified after composers had been using them already. Musicians like Bach and Mozart wrote advanced harmony before these ideas were really known and explicated in music texts. That’s why they became so acclaimed and well-known, because they wrote music that sounded like nothing people had heard before. So while it is a great benefit to learn as much music theory as you can, always remember that the job of the artist is to feel, not to analyze, and to take the audience somewhere they didn’t know they wanted to go.