My hot take: HN is probably one of the worst places to ask for advice on music theory, because it has a fairly high concentration of people who reject tradition

My hot take: HN is probably one of the worst places to ask for advice on music theory, because it has a fairly high concentration of people who reject traditional music theory and want to come up with their own system. In general, these people haven’t gotten very far in making up their own system, so their advice is pretty worthless! My other hot take is that the existing system of musical notation and terminology that we have is actually pretty good, and it’s hard to figure out ways to improve it. Music theory is a pretty broad subject and there are a ton of pathways through music theory that take you to different parts of it. I would start by trying to figure out a “map” of the different parts you are interested in. Almost any course will start with major/minor diatonic scales, then intervals, and then chords. If you combine notes with rhythm, you get a melody. If you combine chords together, you get harmony. Figuring out how harmony works usually starts with “functional harmony” which is where you learn about tonic/dominant/subdominant chords and cadences. The main gotcha here is that there are a couple competing systems for writing names of chords, and you should at least be aware of them so you’re not surprised by a “V6 chord” because that name means two different things depending on which system you use. This gives you a pretty good foundation for understanding music or writing your own. It’s also not too hard to get this far on your own. Music will still seem mysterious and weird, but that’s normal. From there you can go in a bunch of directions—there’s atonal music, jazz, traditional counterpoint, nonfunctional harmony, modes, alternative scales, alternative tunings, etc. I recommend the book The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis. Personally, I would go through the first chapters until it introduces strict counterpoint, and then consider the rest of the book as a “menu” that you can read in any order (kind of). For the second edition, that means doing chapters 1-8, and then you can feel free to skip around chapters 9+. Don’t just follow the book with pencil and paper, actually play the exercises on a real instrument and train your ear (and get an ear training app, if you think it will help). Finally, I recommend buying a stack of staff paper from the local stationary store. It shouldn’t be hard to find. Alternatively, you can use a computer program to write music, but the choices are a bit intimidating. I’m using Dorico these days but it’s $100. Don’t rely on tabs if you want to improve theory. Tabs are cheat sheets for performance, they make theory and analysis harder.