What is music theory?

Question

i know music theory is scales,notes...what ever

but what is a good way to teach myself without a teacher?

what books can teach me?

Answer 1

i guess you are talking about, reading music and the signs, and about composers and their history. well, there are books you could buy or borrow from your school music teacher. that teach you all the basics about how to read music ( notes and signs).

i learnt the flute, the violin, the piano by my self, by the books <3

good luck have fun

Answer 2

Music theory is a 'semi-scientifical'/'semi-artistical' discipline that deals with how music works. It's not really reading sheet, that's a kindergarten music theory, if it can be considered so at all. Notes are just a script like Cuneiform, Roman, Cyrillics, Japanese, Brahmaic, Chinese or other scripts, to write music down just like you write Spanish, English, Chinese, Hindi, Zulu or Swahili down. Music theory is grammar, phonology, syntax and the stuff.

It's more about explaining which intervals go together and why, which chords do so, how do the intervals/chords and tonal centres of a song influence the mood of the song. It elaborates why for instance major scale sounds happy and why natural minor sounds sad, why byzantine scale (E F G# A B C D#..my favourite in thrash metal) sounds 'exotic' (I wrote quite a comprehensive essay about 'how to make a scale sound exotic' on progarchives.com a long time ago), why do certain chord progressions and interval combinations sound dissonant/unpleasant whilst other consonant/pleasant and so on.

As a rock musician with a bit of grunge taste, you won't need most of serious theory unless you expand your musical tastes with something more sophisticated as Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd, King Crimson etc. For now you'll get by with some basic chord progressions, what scale do correspond them etc. Put other way, you'll just need some basic grammar to be able to interract with other speakers of a language (in this case, musicians), but unless you wanna write novels, poems or research the language, you won't need to know the complex sematical, syntactical rules or be an expert on phonology. Just keep it simple.

About the books, I don't know, but I find it not worthy to buy one. You can find it all on the net: http://www.smu.edu/totw/toc.htm

Good luck.