Tools to learn music theory?

For years I made the error of learning music theory without enough ear training. You have to hear and feel the theory, it's not only intellectual.

Then I found 2 exercises are all I needed for playing and composing music by ear:

- Functional intervals / scale degrees: https://tonesavvy.com/music-practice-exercise/220/functional.... If you start tone deaf like me checked "Fixed Key", learn all the intervals, then restart with basic intervals without fixed key.

- Melodic dictation: the advanced version of the exercise above once you are comfortable with each interval: https://tonesavvy.com/music-practice-exercise/222/melodic-di...

Once you can do melodic dictation you will be able to easily decode anything you hear, and map it to theory.

Edit: chord identification (https://tonesavvy.com/music-practice-exercise/216/chord-iden...) is obviously important but by then identifying basic chords should be easy, so it's for a more advanced level.

I grew up in a family of classical musicians, got a degree in music, and was briefly a professional classical musician myself. So my advice may be very out of touch with the experience of someone learning for the first time, but my experiences learning beyond European classical music theory left me feeling insulted.

The basics of music theory are presented as though they are the foundations upon which all subsequent music is derived. In fact, teaching scales and chords is like teaching that the electron orbits the nucleus - a 'simplification'. There _are_ real psychoacoustic truths, alongside equally fascinating historical forces, that underpin music theory.

Learn the language and idioms of music theory, by all means, but don't think of it as being in any way true. Its a syncretist cargo cult of hacks and rules of thumb handed down by centuries of men with dubious motives.

I recommend Adam Neely on YouTube, he illustrates music theory concepts clearly, engagingly, and with an appropriate skepticism for received wisdom.

Here's his discussion of some more political criticisms of music theory: https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA

I recommend Sethares' _Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale_ to anyone interested in the underpinnings of why some notes sound good together and others don't.

[2]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287019948_Tuning_ti...

Here's a few tips from a self-taught musician who couldn't read sheet music if you paid me to:

- Analyze songs that you like. While reading sheet music (as other's have mentioned) is certainly a good approach, take time to find songs you actually enjoy listening to. If the song is guitar driven (as many are in today's popular music), you can find "tabs" online. They're a little weird to decipher at first, but you'll be able to extract the notes, and transpose it to piano.

- Then take a melody, for example, and play it back. What scale degrees are they playing? Did they start on something other than the I (or i)? What part of the melody did you like, specifically? How did the melody change over the course of the song? Lots of little lessons to be learned. You can apply this to chords as well.

- Next, pay attention to the rhythm. I find this part left out of a lot of discussions surrounding music theory. When you play a note is as important, or often times, more important than the note itself. There's a seemingly infinite number of ways to play even the simplest set of notes.

- Finally, just play. Take whatever small lesson you learned, and improvise something. Over time, you'll commit all the little things you like to memory, and the music will just flow out of you (sorry if that sounds corny).

Two books I'll throw in here: Foundations of Diatonic Theory [0] which gives the simplest, modern, math-based explanations of how notes and chords relate. It's a college workbook that you write-in for the exercises. Really terrific.

Also, not a theory book but the most important music learning book I've read: The Perfect Wrong Note [1]. Reading this permanently changed the way I approach learning the piano (or synth. in my case) and I my playing has vastly improved over the last couple of years because of it.

[0] https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780810862333/Foundations-of-Diatoni...

[1] https://www.halleonard.com/product/331733/the-perfect-wrong-...

Practice reading sheet music, which does not mean playing what is on the page but reading the page and understanding the harmonic structure in both the vertical and the horizontal. Starting out this means sitting down with some sheet music and a pencil and marking up the pages. This will also help you learn the notes and more importantly the intervals. And play those scales, circles of fifths, triads, arpeggios through the 7ths, etc. Sing the note names as you play them, it will really beat it into your head both the staff position and the sound even if you are not good at singing them at proper pitch.

Flash cards are not great here since you loose context, you want to study both the vertical harmonic structure of chords and how that evolves through time in the horizontal structure. Just download a bunch of sheet music and print it out or buy a notebook/pad of staff paper and write it out.

This is a bit of a less traditional way to learn, but I'm big on learning from chords. Find a song you love on Ultimate Guitar Tabs and learn to play the chords – play them in different inversions and experiment with tweaks (adding a 7 or 2). Over time as you get comfortable with those chords and their inversion start to fill in the gaps following your ear. Personally I find this style of playing new songs more motivating as I can play a variety of pop songs and I can play them quickly and make them my own. An unfortunate side effect – I'm not great at sight reading

You might want to give Rick Beato a try: https://rickbeato.com/

He does interesting YouTube videos on music topics, but also sells theory and ear-training courses online.

I started piano about the same time too. I was a non-reading player of other instruments before though, and I wanted to use piano as the instrument to properly guide me along my musical theory path.

Yes, it's a slow journey. Repetition is key. And even though I still considered myself a slow learner, my teacher has been quite hands off these days whenever I am given a new piece. He would still put in the fingering, but he no longer put in what the notes are, like he would when I first started.

And the discussions also changed a lot, from the beginning, when I was struggling to even identify what the notes in different triad are, to now about how much tension different chord progression and how to resolve them properly.

I still have plenty to learn, but generally sticking with the ABRSM standards. Already on theory equivalent to grade 5 now.

Yes, I did try other learning tools, like flashcard, or even asking ChatGPT to come out with pneumonics. But I find repetition is still better. And plenty of rest.

The priority as an adult learner would never be about trying to be the next prodigy. Internalise the learning process and take it slow. Sometimes you need to slow down to move fast.

Depends why you want to learn the theory. If you play an instrument enough, you'll pick up lots of theory, probably enough for an average amateur, naturally, just by learning lots of pieces. Piano is better for this than most I believe as its easy to see what's going on and play chords (vs say, wind instrument that plays just 1 note at a time). If you wanna be a really good amateur (presumably not a pro, as people normally has to start as a kid to do that), or, want some knowledge to help with jazz improv, then I'd say aim for ABRSM Grade 5 theory, possibly do grade 3 or 4 first. If you google My Music theory, there's a ton of free stuff on that website. you can do ABRSM exams online. Good way of checking your knowledge and getting a certificate of proof :). I know some people say you don't need to study theory for jazz improv. Personally, cos I don't play piano or guitar, I found studying theory helps fill in gaps of knowledge eg on chords

Without knowing any context, I would recommend getting a textbook. I have The Musician's Guide to Theory and Analysis (by Clendinning, Marvin). The book is well-structured, reasonably clear, and comprehensive. The main risks when you go self-taught are that you have gaps in your knowledge or that you learn things in an order which makes it harder to learn. Textbooks are great—they give you an order to learn things in, where each piece builds on previous pieces.

That said, it’s hard to give more specific advice without understanding your goals more. Are you trying to understand songs? Are you trying to write songs? Are you interested in specific genres?

I will give a few other tips:

- Don’t think too hard about the rules.

- Don’t get too distracted by modes and scales. Major and minor will carry you far.

- Many books cover counterpoint. You can skip it. Think of counterpoint as a learning exercise that gives you a set of techniques for dealing with multiple voices when composing music. The rules are there to teach you those techniques.

> What is your experience? What process or tool would you recommend to learn music theory?

I play the piano since nearly 50 years and was working for some time as a professional musician and also composer/producer.

To just learn the piano and play classical literature from scores you don't actually need music theory; it's a nice to know, but not a need to know.

Some music theory is helpful if you want to compose music or to improvise on the piano. But then there is the question: what kind of music theory is helpful for you? There are indeed different kinds of music theory. In general different theories apply to classical, folk, jazz or pop/rock music. And a lot is just hot air packed into a framework that tries to be intellectual and sufficiently complicated to justify studying music. At its core, however, it is mostly about scales and harmonies.

I recommend you try to find out which style of music you want to delve into and then refine your search.

What are you hoping to get from knowing music theory? It seems like many of the commenters are assuming a specific goal from this (etc being able to more easily understand/memorize what you are supposed to play or being easily able to transpose music). Perhaps that is not your goal. And I would offer that music theory might not be the magic bullet for being able to read music much faster (eg better sight reading).

I taught instrument playing to a number of people, and I would say that associating the written note to a logical note and then associating a logical note to finger movements to play can be done with little to no formal music theory. These two things are orthogonal, and at least for younger learners, I find that the former (going from written notes on a score to which tone it is) is the most difficult part. That is, if I were to simply call out the notes in turn, the student could play at a much faster rate than if they had to read it themselves and decide what note it was. I found that mobile apps and websites that present notes to you and ask you what they are, helps tremendously for making this process faster. That is, speeding up the whole process is nothing more than repetitive practice. Once single notes are easily and quickly decoded in the mind, multiple simultaneously notes actually come faster because you decide one note at first and then can figure out the others by looking at the relative distance. Music theory can help here by providing some heuristic shortcuts but honestly, I don't find it is necessary or that helpful.

Don't worry, the whole process takes time. I would say that if you were already a competent pianist, but one who struggles with reading scores for sight reading, it would probably take months to years to see satisfactory progress, focusing on sight reading alone. That was consistent with my personal experience as well. I would stay away from trying to transpose music, unless you have absolute pitch, in which case transposing music would be easier than reading it in the first place.

I've really enjoyed reading the Hooktheory interactive textbook and using their Hookpad tool for composition.

https://www.hooktheory.com/

I think a great tool for learning music theory is a stringed instrument. By having an instrument _you_ tune you get your ear in tune as well, and you can hear the difference different temperments make.

But ultimately it's about making the music that's inside you, and not everyone needs music theory to do that.

A problem I've seen with pianists and theory is they can get stuck because each key has different fingering, unlike stringed instruments.

I started learning music as an adult too a few years ago in the local community college. Especially initially I couldn't trust myself at all with playing, rhythm or anything, so I ended up hacking on some exercises, as new concepts appeared. See if you can find them helpful. They turned out pretty useful with students and teachers in my college.

Some are simple intervals and stuff that other more polished apps do better, but some are more advanced and I've not seen anywhere else.

E.g. ear training for more complex chords (9, sus, 6/9) https://www.onlinemusictools.com/chords/

Or interval "strands", a regular interval training but with three notes, which looks like it should be simple but is a big jump from 2-note intervals: https://www.onlinemusictools.com/strands/

A great tool is, believe it or not, Ocaml/Rescript!!

I was tired not remembering how to name intervals, construct chords, my arpeggios and scales and what not. So I coded it to help me figure all of that out. I also wanted a frontend to visualize all of this because notes on the guitar are all mixed up and it's hard to reason about when you have a terrible memory like I do:

- Theory.res: https://github.com/tbinetruy/solfeggio-calculator/blob/maste... - Frontend: https://tbinetruy.github.io/solfeggio-calculator/

I also have some notes on that repo that have helped me a lot where I can summarize my findings. But this exercise has been enlightening. Both from the coding and musical perspectives. Because Ocaml really forces you to model music and thus ensure that you understand the concepts which helps you remember them.

I can finally start soloing over chord progressions using arpeggios now! It's essentially comes down to playing a scale in thirds starting on the chord root note on chord changes! And I can finally understand my fretboard without having to look at my frontend's chord diagrams anymore. I still don't know the notes, but I understand their relations with each other.

I've also started learning jazz because it's a lot more theory based than pop/rock since you have a lot more exotic chords and solos are guided by the underlying progression. I really like Jens Larsen's YT channel. It's very hard to get into at first because he goes quite fast, but has some very accessible videos such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q2LB45ts0M.

Hope this helps :)

Not a Tipp about music theory, but as a general Tipp make sure that you practice hands separately https://fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io/chapte...

Lots of people suggesting great ways to get around reading sheet music!

But what's a way of getting fast at reading sheet music? I picked up the piano again after quitting several years ago, and one thing I'm really struggling with is glancing at sheet music and being able to play a phrase—I need to step out one note at a time. And I'm hopeless with ledger lines, I have to stick my face close and count the lines to see what note I'm playing. Sightreading exercises haven't helped because they're either too easy (I can easily follow notes across small intervals, from my music theory training) or too hard to make meaningful improvement on (I start doing the pause-and-name-each-note thing).

I would avoid flash cards. A few tangible steps you could take:

- Play and read lots of sheet music. Especially by sight. It will come, I promise :)

- Complete Ear Trainer is hands down the best aural training aid out there. Be warned, it is difficult (I got it while studying for my later instrumental grades and it was initially very tough) but I’ve never come across a tool as good. Think of it as being a bit like aural flash cards with harmonic context

- Transcription is a good idea. I’ll also suggest transposition; my main instrument is horn, and for grades (at least in the UK) you had to do sight transposition as well as sight reading. Once you’re comfortable sight reading, try doing the same thing but playing it up a fourth, or down a third, etc.

I very much learn by getting my hands dirty, so if I were you I would find a project. Either write a a simple song and put in on paper, or incorporate concept you learn about music theory into a song or riff on the instrument of your choice. I honestly don't think reading music is 100% essential depending on what your goal is for learning theory.

I take piano lessons over Zoom (a byproduct of COVID, but I work remote so it's convenient to sign off of work and migrate over to my keyboard in my office for my lesson). I needed an excuse to practice more scales and expand my own knowledge of theory and be able to more intuitively find a key while playing or build cords. I ended up building this rudimentary scale-generator in Rust.

I did so because I primarily wanted to learn Rust but also wanted a tool to practice and memorize more diatonic major and minor scales.

This CLI tool is far from perfect or what I would call done, but I'm sharing in case you may find some use out of it or just as an example of what I did to expand my knowledge. In writing this I learned a lot about how diatonic scales are structured, and how Western musical notation was designed in such a way to make intervals easier to play on instruments such as the piano. It really forced me to understand how the major and minor scales are structured in order to be able to model it in the code.

https://github.com/tlegnard/scale-generator

I made my own tools, which has been both fun and useful. I haven't put too much work in making them easy to use for others, but maybe they can help? The two that are polished enough to at least share are:

https://johanneshoff.com/sheet/ is for getting faster at recognizing note values in sheet music. I used this for about five minutes a day for some time and it really improved my reading. A musician friend of mine said it had limited use, since notes are always in context, and here it's just random notes. I think this is a good start, though, but the journey from there is probably some other tool.

https://johanneshoff.com/intervals/ to practice intervals. For this one I recommend a MIDI-keyboard and the 'meander' mode. Start out with just a few intervals and take it from there. I found it absolutely crucial to pick some songs that represent the interval. See for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhDIm_2qS5s

There's GNU Solfege [0], but I have not really used it (I was a casual piano player that realized theory just gets in the way of fun for me). It has ear training for music patterns and has some music theory practice in it. Not sure if it has a mobile version, but it's been around for a long time.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/solfege/

Make sure your teacher(s) if there is/are at least one are actually teaching you theory along the way.

I had 2 piano teachers, and neither one really had much interest in teaching music theory much at all, especially in a practical way as it applied to what you were playing.

I think it may be a weakness with some piano training/curriculum that teachers fall into because Piano has such a strong reliance on "play the sheet music that is put in front of you."

In like 3 years of lessons I don't think any of them ever talked about what scales were in a chord or what the progression was in a song I, V, vi, IV, etc.. or talked about what the melody was doing versus that.

By contrast when I started guitar... that stuff is/was talked about constantly, different tradition. I had more than one guitar teacher too and they were all pretty heavy on it.

It sticks in your head far more when you sit there and practice something and are conscious of the theory behind it than if you practice pieces and then study a book/app/website in a disconnected way.

I guess what I'm saying is if you're trying to use tools the tools should be integrated where you learn a piece with an explanation of it's theory, and you practice that for a while. Versus a tool where you just plow through theory in a disconnected way.

I don't really play piano at all anymore, but the stuff I learned in guitar still carried over to the point I can figure out what's going on in a way I couldn't when I was taking piano lessons & practicing piano every day. Back then I could not construct a chord I didn't have memorized, now I can/could.

Best way to get fast at reading music is transcription. Listen to melodies and try to write them down, either with or without the help of an instrument

Le logiciel gratuit et open source Pure Data permet de consolider ton apprentissage. C'est tout approprié pour comprendre comment et pourquoi les notes ont telle ou telle hauteur, tu pourras facilement recréer n'importe quelle gamme, notamment les gammes microtonales. Pure data est aussi intéressant pour comprendre et composer de la musique sérielle. Aussi, pure data étant une véritable appli audio , il pourra tout aussi bien gérer la sortie audio et midi de tes instruments, et t'accompagner dans tes compos et impros. L'interface est très déroutante, mais compte tenu du ratio 'potentiel du logiciel/prix', ça mérite le détour. Le seul bémol au regard de ton post original est que pure data ne suffit absolument pas a lui seul à appréhender ce qui fait l'essence de la musique. Sur youtube et autres plateformes tu pourras trouver des sons, des effets et des preuves de concepts proprement hallucinantes réalisées avec pure data, mais les compositions musicales estampillée 100% puredata sont souvent assez fades et décevantes à mon goût.

> What I seem to be a slow learner at is reading notes fast (treble and bass clef), and remembering the theory and logic behind the tones.

I recommend taking it slow. Reading music is not different from reading text. You have to get used to it. Don't be afraid to read absurdly slow, and also play that slow. You'll learn double fast!

Also try discovering chords and intervals by yourself. Sit and have fun exploring than in different keys. After that when you get bored do a chord with the left and improvise with the right playing only the belonging to the chord, that's how I started improvising and it's great!

What I mean is that some time you have to experiment yourself with music to be able to relate and really grasp the theory. They /key/ is to have fun and be curious.

Music theory is great and academic pieces are very important but I recommend you to print music you really like that is below your level so you can play a lot of music to enjoy and give you time to have fun and discover your instrument beyond formal practice.

If you are mostly wanting to play written classical music, you might consider just not learning "theory" per se. Much of what you might learn studying theory directly has little application for musicians early in their practice.

My experience (as a practicing musician who works in several generas) is that theory is great when it's explaining things you already kind of understand, and that gaining understanding comes from a lot of playing and performing things other folks have written.

That is, first we learn the music by ear or eye, then we have a feeling for what sounds "right" in some situations, then we find a theoretical explanation for that feeling so we can replicate it quickly.

If you're just wanting to get to where you read faster, more reading is the answer, and lots of sight reading easy material. The more you do this, the more patterns you'll see and the logic of what you're seeing will be easier to understand.

To your question, though, a jump start on "learning theory" can be had by learning to play songs off lead sheets (like the Real Book or (better) the Great Gig Book). This Django book is an example of what I mean:

https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/jazz_band/sheet/fakebook...

It may seem daunting and it might seem like if you're just wanting to read faster or learn theory that it's a bad path.

However, the process of learning the chords in a tune, figuring out which inversions work for the progressions, having to figure out a bass line that work, and being able to play with ornamentation can be an excellent playground for generating the kinds of questions that music theory can help answer.

You might like Scaler 2 https://www.scalerplugin.com/

It isn't really for learning theory but more for wielding it to write chords.

I use it as a VST in Ableton but you can use it standalone.

I also started learning piano as an adult around 6 years ago and have mostly been trying to use it to understand the theory to compose and improvise rather than perform. The more theory I learnt the more bits of Scaler made sense and I think half recognising concepts from Scaler as my piano teacher was explaining them at the piano was a help.

Also one other thing that I want to stress as I see it - some of theory is based on fundamental truths to do with clashing frequencies but also some of it is just trying to put a framework around what we already know sounds good, and the ultimate rule for music I think is, if it sounds good, it is good. Good luck!

I learnt music theory informally from 19-21 so have a "mature student" perspective

I'm not a musician but can happily converse with musicians, play basic piano and bass, as well as use any DAW

For properly learning music theory the best approach IMO is learning to grok the Piano

The layout of 88 keys and adaptability of the piano will probably always be the best way to truly understand most western music theory concepts

You can explore every major aspect of music theory (rhythm, melody and harmony) in a very deep but approachable way

Beyond sight reading I'd pick up a fake book of basic lead sheets (I personally love The Real Book)

The biggest breakthrough for me was practicing as many extended chord voicings (inverting chords that have more than three notes) so you can begin to feel what music theory concepts work in different musical contexts

Music theory are tools for the toolbox, you can augment them and create truly novel works over time

The generally accepted way to learn music reading is to use the mnemonics like FACE and Every Good Boy Does Fine for the treble clef. So, basically, you need memorization with drilling to get you to associate the lines and spaces with notes.

But there is an alternate method [1] in which you learn a small number of reference lines and spaces, and learn the remainder as being separated by so many steps up or down from the references. You'll still need to drill and practice, but maybe this will feel more natural to you. Anecdotally, I can tell you that I used the mnemonics for a very long time and still made occasional dumb mistakes, but then I used the reference notes method and noticeably improved my sight reading.

[1] https://musophone.com/read-music-fast/

https://www.chordieapp.com/, you may need https://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/loopmidi.html as companion.

Highly recommend Michael New on Youtube for explanations of music theory basics that actually make sense without having to already know music theory.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNBiLBQrKrnvwcVRD5fS8aA

I am surprised nobody has mentioned Language Transfer. I haven't listened to the Music Theory course, only the Spanish one, but I can highly recommend it: https://www.languagetransfer.org/music

I’ve been curating a list of music resources on GitHub for quite a while: https://github.com/ad-si/awesome-music-production This should be very helpful on your quest!

It sounds like when you say "theory" what you mean is sight-reading. I'm not aware of any tools but there must be lots of options online. I learned from books and it's just a matter of practice.

There are lot of music theory books that I can recommend, but it sounds like your class has you covered. Sight reading is like learning to read a spoken language. You just need to do it every single day and it will come with time.

If anyone else is interested in books that I would recommend for theory:

- Elementary Rudiments of Music by Barbara Wharram (a good intro book)

- The Jazz Theory Book by Mark Levine (this is my "theory bible" and, despite the title, is not limited at all to only jazz music)

Other than just "playing", two super important things to practice are ear training and transcribing. They both reinforce each other and improve every aspect of your musical abilities, including understanding of theory.

For ear training (eg intervals), I use the Perfect Ear app. [1]

For transcribing, I use software called "Transcribe!" [2]. You can repeat specific parts of a song, and also slow it down without altering the pitch (known as "time stretching").

You can also use Audacity for transcription but Transcribe! does tend to be a bit easier to use.

  - [1] https://www.perfectear.app/
  - [2] https://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/overview.html

I’m in a similar situation to you. I could never keep my chords types straight, so I built https://www.learnyourchords.com

I would recommend using something like tonedear.com and practicing ear training mostly. I played a lot of classical music when I was 14-15, my biggest regret is not focusing more on ear training :)

I made a (bad) video about interval recognition and how you can map to songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DILEEOybFQI

In addition to https://tonedear.com, I have used the functional ear trainer app and seen good results.

I enjoyed https://www.lightnote.co/

I wish it could connect to a midi keyboard which I believe is a browser api that exist today.

For adults, the best way to learn to play piano and understand music theory is just to do it with a children’s piano book. I have a few friends that do this, and you learn everything at once, the way you’re supposed to learn it. Read music, train your finger muscles, understand basic theory introduced gradually, and for an adult you can get through the children’s books pretty quickly because you can learn a lot of these concepts more easily.

Rick Beato sells lots of great training materials. https://rickbeato.com/

For a traditional approach to common-practice music theory, I’d very much recommend the lessons at https://www.musictheory.net/lessons

It basically goes over what you’d expect to learn in the first few semesters of university-level music theory (though, that might’ve changed since my time…).

I’m using Pianote.com to learn Piano on my own and I love it. Bite sized lessons slowly building up skill and theory at the same time.

The first thing I would say is that music theory is a very broad topic. You're going to have much better results if you study aspects of theory that you then practically apply in your musical life. So if you tend to play a certain style of music, learn the theory that applies to that first.

Eg say you play rock/blues piano (or generally play pop music). You might want to start with learning pentatonic and blues scales, first in the keys of the pieces you play a lot, then in all keys.

Say you like a certain player, you may want to look at a song they wrote/played, try to figure it out, try to understand how it works. So you could for example take apart the chord progression. Try to understand it harmonically, say there's a bit of the song that you like. Try to find other songs with a similiar progression. Then look at the voicings they use. Try to put those voicings into practise in your playing. Look at places you can use similar voicings for different chords.

Since you go to a class make yourself an exercise between classes to find in your normal music examples of the things you did in class.

There are very specific times when things like flashcards are going to be useful. For example, I made myself a deck of flashcards with different one-crotchet rhythmic snippets on them and used to deal myself out random bars of rhythms and then tap them out to improve my rhythm recognition for sight reading.

For theory in the mainstream/classical tradition, I would highly recommend getting the ABRSM guide to music theory by Eric Taylor. It comes in two books, and you can get "workbooks" of examples to just go through. It's a pretty solid intro to the basics and by the time you have done both books you are at the standard of "grade 8" in music theory.

From there, the traditional way to progress is to work on analyzing Bach Chorales (ie get that book which is just all the chorales) and then analyzing other major works from subsequent periods. Studying the chorales is a really excellent intro to most of the harmony that you will encounter until you get to the romantic period, and what I personally did is just work on Jazz harmony after that given that covers Romantic style harmony as well as the things that later 20/21C music does (eg if you can understand Miles you can understand Hindemith pretty much). For Jazz there are two books I would recommend, which are the Jazz Piano book and the Jazz Theory book both by Mark Levine.

https://openmusictheory.github.io/

I posted a comment a little while ago [1] where I explained how I started to understand scales etc.

While this might only cover a small part of the spectrum, it might make something "click". #FingersCrossed

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31213765

The Beato Book ! https://beatobook.com/

Duolingo are working on something in this space, though who knows when it might launch https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/20/duolingo-for-music-app/

https://muted.io/

While I suppose there are tools (as in software) to support learning music theory; and I’ve seen a few pop up here periodically, I would recommend a graded course in theory. The RCM (Royal Conservatory of Music) course used here in Canada is excellent. The books and adjacent materials are widely available. It starts with very rudimentary concepts but by the upper levels ~ 9-10 gets into more advanced harmony and analysis.

I’m a professional collaborative pianist and do some teaching and coaching. There are comments about artist x, y or z not being able to read music, let alone understand theory. True? Plausible, but in some fields of music it’s not optional. There’s evidence that pianists with better theory knowledge are more accurate sight readers. Why? Because it provides information on probabilities about what _should_ come next.

In any case, when I’ve taught theory at this level, I’ve used the RCM materials.

> What I seem to be a slow learner at is reading notes fast (treble and bass clef)

I made this a couple of months ago to help with learning to read notes:

https://www.babeloop.com/

Hope it helps! ;-)

I liked the book "Edly's Music Theory for Practical People". It has silly cartoons, and I think it explains things well. But I'd look at a preview or something of it to see if it is your kind of thing.

https://eev.ee/blog/2016/09/15/music-theory-for-nerds/

Read: Harry Partch - Genesis of a Music. Or: Meyer - The Musician’s Arithmetic.

They explain music based on fundamental acoustic/aural/sonic principles, instead of all the accumulated cruft of western music theory. You first have to understand that the ratio of 3:2 is, after the octave, the maximum consonance that two tones can have, before you can treat it as a "perfect fifth" which is so-and-so many steps on the piano keyboard. They explain that "modulation" is the process of treating identical tones in different senses to go from a context in which one sense is dominant, to a context in which the other sense is dominant.

This is the kind of stuff that you'll probably pick up anyway from standard western music theory, but putting the aural logic front and center is what really made things click for me.

Michael Newmann on Youtube has high-quality content. Very helpful if you're an aural/visual learner.

https://youtube.com/@MichaelNew

There was this thread from a few months back, which I found useful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34090486

My friends Yue and Vlad run https://spacenotes.app/ - give them a shot.

I would imagine the terminology is much the same, actually. Most vocabulary related to music in English is borrowed from Italian, French and German.

Good luck!

teoria.net is an older resource but has a great tool for interval ear training (listen to 2 notes, determine the number of steps between them), it's quite fun to use

https://www.teoria.com/en/exercises/ie.php

Tenuto app is my favourite for this. I'm also a new adult learner.

You don't have to learn theory to make music. Nobody uses (publically known)theory to make music. Learn to improvise.

Color music theory stickers

I like musictheory.net

Is there any more universal theory of music that has scientific basis?

They call it theory but it looks to me more like a written music dialect.