Music Theory I 24 lessons

An overview of what you’ll learn in Theory I

45min.

Learn the basic elements of music before we delve deeper into them: pitch (including melody and harmony), texture, meter, rhythm, form, timbre, and dynamics.

1hr. 10min.

What is meter? How do composers create and organize the various overlapping background pulses of music?

2hrs. 27min.

What is rhythm? How do we notate durations of sound and silence in music? We’ll also learn how to count in simple meter.

2hrs 1min.

More in-depth coverage of meter and rhythm, including simple vs. compound meter, time signatures, and how to count in compound meter.

1hr. 35min.

We’ll delve deeper into advanced topics in rhythm and meter, including triplets and other tuplets, polyrhythms, asymmetrical meter, and uncommon time signatures.

1hr. 35min.

We’ll learn how composers use abbreviations and symbols to indicate the degree of and alterations in loudness, along with notational tools to adjust the sound envelope.

1hr. 35min.

We’ll now move into our next element of music: pitch. Here, we’ll learn what pitch is and how to name the white keys on the piano.

1hr. 35min.

We’ll delve further into pitch, including learning how to notate pitch on the staff, different clefs, ledger lines, and tricks to read notes faster on the staff.

1hr. 35min.

We’ll wrap up our intro to pitch by learning about accidentals, enharmonics, and the basics of the harmonic series.

1hr. 35min.

We’ll learn about the historical ancestor to scales: the modes of the Medieval and Renaissance eras.

1hr. 35min.

We’ll learn how modes evolved into scales and how to construct major and chromatic scales.

1hr. 35min.

We’ll learn about intervals, the distances between notes, and their two-part naming system. We’ll also learn how to quickly name common unisons, seconds, and thirds.

1hr. 35min.

We’ll learn about the three types of minor scales and the key difference between major and minor scales.

1hr. 35min.

We’ll learn what a key is, and how we can indicate major and minor keys using key signatures. We’ll learn how to quickly read and write key signatures for all of the major and minor keys, and how we can use these to quickly find our major and minor scales.

1hr. 35min.

We’ll conclude our coverage of intervals, learning how to read and write all of the intervals and how to use intervallic inversion to make quicker work of it.

1hr. 35min.

We’ve all heard of chords, but what exactly are they? We’ll also learn about the four basic types of triads and the basics of how to read fake books.

1hr. 35min.

Let’s take to our piano keyboards and learn how to quickly find and play the four types of triads, and patterns to help you quickly find and play major and harmonic minor scales.

1hr. 35min.

In our first foray into harmonic analysis, we’ll look at the diatonic triads in major and minor keys, and how we can make use of a powerful analytic tool called Roman Numeral Analysis (RNA).

1hr. 35min.

Here, we’ll expand past simple triads into four-note chords. We’ll learn how to name them in both a classical system and in fake book.

1hr. 35min.

Much as modern musicians use fake book to indicate chords and allow for improvisation, musicians in the Baroque used a system called Figured Bass.  We’ll learn the basics of that here and see how we use symbols from figured bass to show inversion in Roman Numeral Analysis.

1hr. 35min.

We’ll delve deeper into Roman Numeral Analysis, including tips for figuring out what key you’re in and how to indicate different things in your Roman Numeral Analysis.

1hr. 35min.

In a preview of what’s to come in Theory II, we’ll take a first look at writing in a four-voice SATB (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) texture, and we’ll consider how to resolve V or V7 chords to tonic chords, or deceptively to the submediant chord.

1hr. 35min.

Here, we’ll recap what we’ve learned in Theory I.

1hr. 35min.