Music cognition such as Sweet Anticipation by David Huron and everything like that… especially note Music and Memory by Bob Snyder which expresses everything except harmony in a style that avoids traditional notation, and Sounds of Music: Perception and Notation (out of print) by Gerald Eskalin who also wrote Lies My Music Teacher Told Me
For the most part, "music theory" amounts to music-notation-and-style-grammar because very little of it is actual theory (i.e. explanation) until you add real science which means music psychology (because notation patterns and physics patterns are not music, music is a mental experience).
I'd also recommend:
- Nahre Sol - https://www.youtube.com/@NahreSol (Composition, reinvention, exercises, more theory recently)
- David Bruce - https://www.youtube.com/@DBruce (Composition techniques)
- Sideways - https://www.youtube.com/@Sideways440 (Film and musical soundtrack analysis/rants)
- Tantacrul - https://www.youtube.com/@Tantacrul/videos (Maybe. "Music meets sociology"?)
Those 6 channels plus r/musictheory (pre-2018) are basically my entire Music Theory / composition education. A quick note that r/musictheory is not the same thing as it was back then. IIRC there was a big switch/restart some years back, not sure what happened. Still a good Q&A forum today.
Great analyses and teardowns of all kinds of classical music. I'm especially fond of his Bach chorale analysis.
This is not particularly useful to most musicians, but from a music theory perspective, it's one of the best introductions to set theory (the musical version) around.
I didn’t really start to grow until I started to learn as many covers as I could and how to improvise a solo over the changes.
The theory part helps only in that I know how a dim7 chord looks, sounds and feels but most importantly how it is used by composers.
That being said, Mark Levine’s Jazz Theory book is excellent. And get a copy of a Real Book and watch YouTube videos on the voicings used by players and you’ll expand your harmonic palette immensely!
Actually, I never bothered googling video courses on undergrad music theory and relied on books instead
https://www.dummies.com/book/academics-the-arts/music/music-...
I thought music as a set of languages is way easier than it happened to be. A CS degree and passion for linguistics doesn't convert into fluency as fast as I wished, and now I see why I'd need 4 years of music college + 4 years of an actual degree.
This short video is awesome for ear-training for anyone -- it's presented for guitar, but it's general, with some fantastic exercises. Pretty audacious claim at the end, which I intend to test over the next few weeks :-) [2]
1: https://www.patreon.com/m/578011/posts?filters[tag]=Ear%20Tr...
Btw I really think that the world's obsession with learning to hear intervals before hearing harmony qualities (minor triad, major triad, dominant seventh, diminished), and before hearing harmonies within a key (I or i, V, pre-dominants, VI or vi, V/V) is a wrong order to master things. I still can't solidly tell apart a minor sixth from a major sixth, but so what? The more important skill to me is to focus on a chord that currently sounds, so that I can interact with the real tonal language (homophony) of the last 2.5 centuries. This way I can eg. play by ear the melodies with chords that stuck in my head (including from way in the past).
We switched from polyphony and intervals on top of each other to chord progressions around Bach's time, and since then intervals aren't the main thing, I'd say.
Well not any, like that, but at least any simple melodies should be easy peasy. Larger interval jumps are harder to hear/identify and moreso if they're fast.
In any case learning to sing what you play is really really useful ear training!
I remember coming across that document many years ago when messing around with music composition. The funny thing is, I went to college with Toby Rush and worked with him at the college library. He was an incredible source of information and I'd pick his brain trying to understand various concepts.
I was several pages into his guide before I made the connection that I knew the author.
His wobsite and blag are here https://tobyrush.com/
4. Skim through [Toby W. Rush's overview](https://tobyrush.com/theorypages/pdf/en-us/the-whole-enchila...) to see how many moving parts does a classical theory have
His guide is great!
I'd consider adding the title "Awesome Music Theory" to the top of the README, and add your url to the Awesome List of Lists for more reach.
1: https://www.coursera.org/learn/edinburgh-music-theory
2: https://books.ed.ac.uk/edinburgh-diamond/catalog/book/ed-978...
