4 ms·

Some people's ears are better than their theory. Plenty of examples.

• ksaj 3y ago
  There are different types of understanding, and self taught musicianship is not excluded from this. In fact, they involve exactly the same type of effort as learning theory in the standard fashion. They rarely even deviate from it. The old blues masters might not be able to name the chords and scales, but they're pretty strict about the blues and pentatonic scales, turnarounds, and how to start and end riffs on the correct underlying chords, when and how to throw in a 7th chord (or even what a 7th chord is, and major or minor or diminished, for that matter), etc... which means they absolutely know the theory even if they don't verbalize it well in a classical manner. Simply copying someone and saying theory isn't needed is akin to using Dall-E to generate a drawing and calling yourself an artist for having done so. And that's the distinction being made here.