MUSIC THEORY MADE EASY!

It’s not as scary as you think – follow our guide and you’ll be writing better tunes in no time

If there’s one thing guaranteed to polarise a room full of computer musicians, it’s music theory. With just one mention of a dominant seventh or a double flat, the MIDI keyboards come out, and the two sides line up against each other and proceed to fight to the death until just one remains, gasping for breath in a heap of piano wire.

OK, so it’s not quite that bad, but there’s definitely a divide nonetheless. Some musicians preach the importance of theory but never get any tracks finished, while the other side shun the lexicon and knuckle down – but their tracks don’t always sound quite… ‘right’.

Here at , we’re firmly in the middle. It’s the emotion that counts, but we know that a dose of useful knowledge can inspire a truly unique track. Music theory is just that:

theory. It explains why certain notes work together, but they still work together if you don’t know why they do. That’s why we believe that you should develop your theory skills while actually making music – after all, it’s too easy to use your lack of knowledge as an excuse for lack of output. It’s important that you don’t get lost down the theory rabbit hole, and instead actually get around to making some kick-ass music, equipped with good oldfashioned learning to back it all up.

So what are we going to do about it? Well, over the next 14 pages, we’re going to distil music theory down to the elements we think are most important in the trackbuilding process. And we’re going to put our money where our mouths are by showing you how these crucial elements come into play while building an actual track. We’ll start with a skeleton ‘sketch’, with no harmonic content, that you can go grab from the Tutorial Files folder and use in any DAW. Using this basic starting point, we’ll then demonstrate real-world uses of the most crucial theory techniques as we build and develop the track.

This feature and its accompanying videos will focus on the practical basics of theory, but if you want to get up to speed with the topic in more detail, check out a few choice Computer Music back issues. 234’s Producer’s

Guide to Chords and Scales will teach you everything you need to know about those fundamental building blocks of music; learn how to craft attention-grabbing melodies in

240’s How To Write Perfect Hooks; and grasp the rules of different styles in 246’s Genre-Busting Music Theory.