Musical theory is a funny thing. It’s basically the how-to guide of how everything works in music, but only maybe a third to half of musicians actually care about understanding it. This is a little ironic since playing an instrument at all necessitates some understanding of music. But what people usually mean is that they don’t really want to learn to read music notation and don’t care about understanding why it is that what they are learning practically works in the first place. You have to learn all the road rules when driving a car, but not necessarily all the music rules when learning to play a song, right?
Well, no. Because lives actually hang in the balance, we have laws that require people to learn the road rules, with mandated practice amounts and formal testing and licensing procedures in order to legally drive a car on the road. But you don’t actually need any of that to perform the physical act of driving. With an auto, you only really need to know how to turn it on, release the brake, shift it into drive, accelerate and steer. Sure, maybe you crash within 20 seconds, but all that means is that for 20 seconds, you were driving.
Most of the rules and practice and licensing ultimately comes down to preventing people from crashing. As a society, we have a vested interest in preventing car crashes. They’re costly. They cost us cars and infrastructure and, most importantly, lives. Perhaps because music doesn’t have the same sorts of externalities, because failing doesn’t have those sorts of dangerous stakes, we default to trial-and-error sequences in the name of creativity, until we can successfully fail upwards.
In other words, yes, it’s possible with very little understanding of the rules to successfully write a song; just as it’s possible with little understanding of the road-rules to drive from location A to location B on the road, especially if it’s empty of other cars; just as it’s still possible to use email or google with very little understanding of how to use a computer.
You don’t need to know how to build a car or how to build a computer to operate either well, but you do need to understand what it’s capable of, be well-practiced in its use, having thoroughly-trained “default” responses to a whole bunch of regular protocols, which will generally take years of experience. It’s the same with music. You don’t need to know how to build a guitar or piano to play it well, but you do need to be well-practiced with a bunch of muscle-memory default actions in place.
So you can be a pretty amazing musician without any real formal training in musical theory. But if you were really paying attention to the analogies, all we’ve done is distinguish the act of operating from the act of building/assembling.
Can you know how to assemble a car without actually knowing how to drive it? Sure. Can you know how to assemble a computer without being able to use one? Of course. Can you know how to build a guitar without actually being able to play one? Yeah, if you know woodwork. Can you build a song without being able to play one?
Actually, yes. Yes, you can. There’s enough rules and formulae to music that you can write a song on paper quite easily without hearing or playing it if you know what you’re doing. Doesn’t mean it’ll actually be any good, though.
But aren’t all of those things better when you can do both?
A great violin maker will also be a great player, so that they can fine-tune their skills with each successive violin. They will play their newly minted instrument and note what worked really well and what could be improved upon, and make a better one next time. A great computer maker will do the same with each new series of computers, and a great car maker will do the same with cars. To do this, they need experts in the use of computers or cars to identify faults, flaws, problem areas, etc. to be improved upon next time.
Likewise, one who understands all the rules of writing a song but can never actually play it and hear it what it sounds like will never be able to practically improve their songwriting. But that’s almost nobody. As we’ve already established, we tend to have the opposite problem: people who can play well, but have almost zero idea how the rules actually work when writing their own songs.
But because of the trial-and-error playback model, they can still get better and better at writing songs, because they’re learning by their own experience what works as they go. It’s like if, instead of regulating our cars with legalities and licensing, the government had decided minimize crashes by going down the bumper car route, where everyone actually drove a bigger version of bumper cars on the road. You wouldn’t really need any formal road rules, but your vehicle was speed-capped at 10 miles per hour and had a bunch of rubber shock absorber round the outside to prevent vehicular and infrastructural damage.
Basically anyone would be able to drive, and with experience, you’d probably get pretty good at avoiding crashes altogether. You might even be the smoothest driver in the whole world, but you’d still be speed-capped.
This is exactly the case with some of the greatest songwriters in the contemporary era. Paul McCartney doesn’t read music or even know most of the rules, consciously. But almost 60 years of experience have taught him a lot about it. He intuitively understands things about harmony and melody and rhythm that make him a brilliant songwriter. But you could still learn more about it in 6 months of intensive study than he has in 60 years.
Likewise, any well-practiced musician will pick up a lot of the conventions of music-making and songwriting as they learn to play more and more songs. Once you learn to play enough songs, it’s pretty easy to see the template for what it is and write your own material. But why would you willingly go through the trial-and-error process for years (and even decades) when hundreds of years of musicians before you have already boiled things down to a whole bunch of learnable rules for you to follow?
It’s not like learning the rules paints you into a corner and stifles all creativity. The process of building anything is inherently creative. It requires design. It requires innovation. It requires troubleshooting. People are still coming up with better ways to make cars and computers and musical instruments, and people are going keep coming up with better songs.
But do you really think it’s going to be the ones who have spent their careers re-learning lessons that so many other people have learned before them and could have told them?
There’s this stereotype or cliche that there are two main types of children: the kids who have to touch the stove themselves to realize that it’s hot, and the ones who will learn by you telling them. The insinuation is that kids who need to learn for themselves are generally dumber than those who don’t, but it’s simply not true.
The kids who have learned to listen instead of getting burned, have done so because they’ve already made mistakes in other areas. They understand what it is to fall over and bump your head or scrape your knee, and they understand that their parents are trying to prevent them getting hurt when warning them about the dangers of the stove. They’ve already experienced the trial-and-error process and can appreciate the wisdom in freely accepting information from someone reliable who’s been there first. They understand that there are rules at play in every part of our lives, and that learning the rules to live by helps you to avoid pain and succeed sooner.
Similarly, learning the rules to music and songwriting will help you succeed sooner in your songwriting. Some of the best students I’ve had at my songwriting workshops and masterclasses have been those that have been playing their instrument for a few years and unconsciously understand a lot of what I’m teaching them. They just haven’t heard anyone say it outright before. It’s like the whole workshop is just a-ha moment after a-ha moment for them. Like a fluent English speaker learning about word-building (etymology, prefixes, suffixes, Greek and Latin roots, etc.) for the first time. Submarine, subpar, subsequent, subconscious, subscribe… of course! It makes so much sense. It’s seeing the order in the apparent chaos.
So, where does that leave us then in terms of songwriting? Do you actually need to know musical theory to write a song?
Well, yes. Anything you know about music at all can in some sense be called musical theory. And you can’t really write a song without. Even if you had some elaborate system of throwing darts at a cork-board plastered with post-it notes of different words and chords and pitches and rhythms, you’d still need someone who knows something about music to both write out all the post-it notes you need in the first place and then assemble it all into music later. And it would probably sound horrible, unless they designed a really clever set of limitations based upon rules of music theory.
When I was 15, we were able to get the musical notation computer program Sibelius on our computer at home at a great discount because my mother was a teacher. I barely knew any piano, but I was able to select a key and a time signature, and then select different notes and assign different pitches in a way that sounded pleasing to me, throwing it all together in this complicated 7-minute piano piece that I’ll never be good enough to play, because, frankly, it’s ridiculous.
As little music theory as I knew then, my ears were still able to fill in the blanks and create something impressive-sounding, because even though I didn’t consciously know the theory, my ears sure did. They could tell when things sounded wrong, and I would change it until it sounded right. I was following a whole bunch of rules I couldn’t have told you, that I knew unconsciously by ear from years and years of listening to music and some lessons on voice and guitar.
But I was operating within a framework created by people who knew all the rules! And I was still following all the rules myself! My ears knew how it was supposed to work, just like how a 5-year-old native English speaker can know the rules of English enough to practically construct perfect sentences even though nobody has ever actually told them how or why. Music only works in the first place because pitch is built upon a mathematical model of vibration and frequency. There are rules inherent in the very nature of sound. In one sense, it is not me that wrote that song at all. It is the self-existent rules of music.
So am I a better English speaker, reader and writer for knowing the rules? Yes, I am.
And am I better composer/songwriter for knowing the rules of musical theory? You’d better believe it.
Can you actually write a song without knowing musical theory? Decidedly, no. Seriously. No. You’re using the rules, even if you’ve never learned them. They’re part and parcel with music itself. And to actively create something outside of our rule system altogether, you’d still need to know what the rules are in the first place in order to scrupulously avoid them. And even then, you’d be creating something that almost nobody is going to like or even know how to mentally process.
But here, I suppose is the real question in all this: Should I learn musical theory? Is learning music theory worth it? Will learning established musical theory make me a better songwriter than if I figured it out myself along the way as a fun part of the overall musical journey?
I think the definitive answer at this point is, “well, duh.”
But my opinion isn’t going to make you learn anything. So, what do you think? If you could learn all of the musical theory Paul McCartney has picked up over 60 years (and more) in only 6 months of focused learning, would it be worth it?
Do you think it would make you a better songwriter? A better musician? A better bandmate? A better performer? A better singer? A better listener?
(Hint: The answer to all of these is yes.)
John C Maxwell said: It is said that a wise person learns from his mistakes. A wiser one learns from others’ mistakes. But the wisest person of all learns from others’ successes.
Musical theory is just the rules about how music actually works. Yes, there are some variations between classical and jazz and contemporary, but those differences come down to genre conventions and terminology. It’s all the same basic stuff, and the more you know about theory, the more you know about songwriting.
So, whatever stage of the game you’re in, learn a little more theory today. There’s resources out there for every available level. I still learn stuff all the time.
