I meet many people who play a musical instrument who unabashedly admit that they are unable to create a new song of their own, improvise a solo over existing music, or to learn songs by listening to a recording.  This may be true even though they can display a level of technical achievement on their instrument that clearly shows that they have spent a great many hours practicing and refining their skills.  I think this is a shame, and shows a great deficiency common in musical instrument lessons.  This post is the first in a series designed to help address this lack and hopefully make these skills more accessible to readers of this site who play an instrument.

The greatest enabler of the skills I mention above is the development of an understanding of music theory (together with ear training which I will also touch upon here).  I have often wished that I had learned more about music theory when I was first learning to play music. Obtaining a basic understanding of this subject is not difficult, and will provide anyone who pursues it with a much richer way of relating to the music they wish to play.  The study of music theory is not about technique. It is, first and foremost, a way to think and talk about the structure of musical compositions and their component parts.  Learning music theory allows for better understanding of how the parts of a piece of music fit together and allows for an understanding of how, for instance, a piece relates to other music that one is familiar with.

This series of posts is intended to be useful for anyone from the person just learning their instrument through to more accomplished players.  The information I will present here is designed to amend, certainly not replace, musical instruction from other sources.  Many of the concepts I will present may already be familiar to the reader.  However, the sequence of presentation here may differ, and even if you have some familiarity with the topic, I hope you will find that going through this series of posts adds some clarity to your understanding of the subject.  Much of what I will discuss centers around learning the terms commonly used by musicians.  I believe that developing this vocabulary will not only allow you to converse effectively with other musicians, but will also help to frame your thinking about music and improve the conversations about music that you have inside your own head.  When discussing practical examples I will reference guitar or piano as these instruments are most popular and with them one can play harmonies (multiple notes at the same time).  If you play a single note instrument (e.g. a saxophone) it is still quite useful to have access to a piano to help visualize and listen to harmonies.

[This post is the first in a series on Introductory Music Theory.  The next in the series is Stepping Stones.]