Music Theory

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A place to discuss and answer questions about music theory. All instruments are welcome, no question is stupid!

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Practicing vs. learning stuff by heart (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi folks, I wanted to ask you something I have been dealing with for as long as I have learned music theory: when is the point that you simply learn stuff by heart?

For example: I could not imagine writing out all keys in order to learn which notes a contained in them. But I learned all notes in all diatonic 7th chords by simply using flashcards. How am I to „practices“ my way into knowing what notes makes up a Dminor7?

Whats your experience with that? Where do you draw the line?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I mostly use a piano to learn my chords. I'm not sure if you have a piano, but since you mentioned practice, I'm going to asume that you do.

I first started learning about chords when my piano teacher taught me what they were and what's a major and a minor. They taught me the intervals, but I wasn't too sure what they meant at the time.Then they told me to go find the chords of some songs and to play along.

After that I kinda understood what the intervals in the chords meant, so I looked up what were the intervals of some other chords. I learned by heart what they were so that I could play them on the piano.

The catch is I'm not able to tell what notes are in a chord without a piano though. I can try to visualise it in my head, but I wouldn't be able to say immediatly what notes are there without playing it.

Since I mostly compose with a piano, or at least had a keyboard on screen, I never really had to think about it, so yeah that's about it for me.

As for the diatonic chords, the way I would do it is to learn and remember what types of 7th chords are in a major and minor scale so that I could find them in these types of scales.

TLDR: I would just remember the typical structures of diatonic chords in major and minor scales and find the notes once I play them on piano.