Music Theory is Just a Useful Tool

1:35 What's good, everybody?Scoobert Doobert here.Welcome back to love music more today.I want you to love music more by talking about music theory.It is the rocket science of music theory.There's a joke that rocket scientists say to each other, hey, at least it's not musictheory.There's also a joke about musicians.The good ones don't know the music theory.And I am here to say that is absolutely not true.

2:01 It might be true for some of the artists, but for 90, maybe 80% of working musicians,they know music theory.And I want to dig into my own personal life story because I don't want to make assumptionsabout how you feel.I want to talk about how I felt and see if I can apply some concepts that might help putinto context what music theory means to me, why I think it matters and why I think even

2:26 music fans should learn a little bit.So for a while, I thought that industry jargon, any sort of fancy specialized terms, was primarilythere to keep the in-group in and the out-group out.It was vocabulary meant to create inside and outside.You don't know these special textbook words, therefore you do not belong.There certainly is some of that, but I think that's naive.

3:01 And naive in the true sense, naive is in, you haven't been around a long enough kindof energy.But here's why I say that.I'm actually experiencing something really interesting with computer coding slash softwaredevelopment stuff within AI.And there's a lot of people that are talking about vibe coding.Go with me.I'm coming back to music.Don't worry.

3:28 Vibe coding is where you are letting artificial intelligence do a lot of the coding work.The secret, though, to the people that are really good at it is they actually learn howto code.They learn the language by doing.But at the end, they are now a software engineer.And so that doesn't mean that the language, therefore, is meaningless.It actually means the opposite.

3:57 Is that in order to engage with something that's coding for you and you need to learn thespecialized language that governs the thing in which you're working, it's the same thingwith music.Of, it's a lot easier to have a coworker, to have a musician that you're playing with.If you both know what you're talking about, so you're not just speaking in learned byear, certainly can work, but it's a lot slower.

4:25 Anybody that's played in bands will tell you if you are working with somebody that doesn'tknow the name of the cord.What I'm saying is not that you have to know the name of the cord.I'm just saying that by knowing the name of the cord, it's a lot easier to transmityour idea to others by speaking the same language.And to see that arise in this new industry of people that get into it, thinking like,

4:49 I can just tell AI what to do and make me Facebook, boom, I make a million dollars.It's like, yeah, well, in order to get from A to B, you're going to actually have to becomea software engineer.In order to get from A to B in terms of being like a side person musician, somebody that isable to jump in at a moment's notice, play any genre in any band and be able to pull that

5:10 off within 48 hours, you're probably going to need to know some music theory.Those are shortcuts.And that's wrapping all the way back up to the technical jargon.Technical jargon is a shortcut way of communicating something very complicated.I see that with like, finance people that will throw out these words, a bit, a bit, I don'tknow.

5:35 They will throw out these acronyms in these words to speed up conversations where if you'retalking to somebody that doesn't know what they're talking about, obviously, you'regoing to have to explain all of these new nouns, but if you're talking to somebody thatknows what they're talking about, you can just throw out a bunch of stuff.You don't even have to finish your sentence.They will know where you're going.

5:55 Same idea with music.If you understand the tendencies of music, it's a lot easier for you to learn a song andnotice that I say tendencies, not rules, because that's where a lot of the bad reputationof music theory comes from is that it's the box that you have to inhabit.It's really is like learning grammar, like think about like English class.When you learn grammar, reading gets a lot easier.

6:20 You can start to read more complicated things, college level, textbooks, scientific papers,strange literature.

6:29 I actually think literature is a great example of what knowing the rules so you can breakthem means, like think about the post-moderns, or even somebody that's more popular, likein Cormac McCarthy, there's an element of you understand the expectation of literarylanguage so you can break it, or you can lean into it.Not everything has to be Fitzgerald.Not everything has to be beautiful prose in the classical sense.

6:59 Not everything has to be that way in music.Not everything has to resolve in a pretty way.And even considering all of that, I think it's silly to talk about post-1920s, like post-jazz where you have a art form that is built on Western music theory, but in a deeply tension-filled,

7:24 idiosyncratic and different kind of way, showing that you can put different shapes on topof the foundations of 12 note harmony.What I'm trying to say is that we already have all of these examples from serialism,20th century music, to jazz, to free jazz of, you can use the putty that is presentedby music theory in all sorts of weird ways.

7:55 The beauty of pop music is that we are not trying to subvert for the sake of subvertingmost of the time.We're not trying to do the serialism of like we're going to make a math-based piece orsomething that is truly atonal.We're trying to make something you're going to sing along to and dance to.So you have to understand the tendencies, so you don't lose people.And that's a good thing.

8:18 You want to know that the three chord usually goes to the four chord.Why?I could explain for a long time.But really, it's because that's the way it usually goes.And just by knowing that, you know, okay, like, what am I going to do when I'm on thischord?Because that's where the melody took me.There's a lot of chord writing is from the melody rather than the melody from the chords.

8:41 It goes both ways, but a lot of times the melody is dictating where you want the chordsto go.So you're singing a note and there are only certain chords that sound good under thatnote, especially in pop music.Jazz is a little bit different because you have a lot more kind of colors at your disposaland pop.Usually, the note that you're singing is inside of the chord.So you're following the vocalist lead.

9:01 You're supporting them with your harmony.And you don't want to do something that distracts from the vocal.Unless there's a moment that you want to highlight.And little known fact, a lot of what music theory actually is is how to deal with tension.It's not about how to deal with the normal basic stuff because then that would be supereasy.

9:23 I could tell you every chord that goes to every other chord, it'd be super boring, butthat's more than 101, 101.That is like first two weeks of music theory class, we could cover that.The music theory that people get doctorates in is not the music theory of normal tonalities.Normal expectedness, it's how to deal with chaos, it's how to sprinkle in tension.

9:49 And a lot of that is based along around tension and resolution.But as you get higher and higher in this food chain, it's like, how do I build new shapes?How do I use what we have for complexity?Or how do I resolve in the most elegant and satisfying way so that you can make theseartistic decisions, but then know how to stick the landing.

10:11 That's ultimately what I feel the most excited about with music theory is that I'll havea creative compulsion, something that does not originate from the theoretical.This purely, I want to do this crazy chord voiced in a crazy way.Or you feel the energy of my melody wants to take a left turn.How do I support it?How do I stick the landing?How do I get that creative bit of chaos into a pop song?

10:40 So that people don't turn it off, because it's my favorite part of the song.It's the whole reason why I'm doing all of this is for those little moments of just wheredid that come from.And music theory allows you to keep them, stick the landing, and keep the listener engaged.It's like framing the picture.I think a lot about what is the inspiration versus what is the craft.

11:07 It's like 80, 90% craft of the painter that knows how to mix their paints or pick theircanvas, pick their frames, pick their lighting, understand their environment.Then you have that 20 to 10% that's actually the painting itself.Music theory helps you with both, but mostly what it does is it's the craft.

11:35 If you enjoyed this podcast, I'd love to invite you to check out my music that sometimesdoes cool music theory things.I don't know.I think it's cool.Scoobert Doobert is my musical name.You can hear my stuff at scoobertdoobert.pizza.Hope you subscribe to the podcast.We've got a great guest coming up next week, and I look forward to talking to you then.See ya.