In my time of playing music I’ve learned to draw some parallels in other areas of life, a big one is in drawing. While I personally can’t draw, I apply some fundamentals that transfer well over to music (in my mind at least). For example, a tree in its most core shape is a rectangle, pointing up, the details of the trunk get more defined and that hides the basic rectangle within the tree itself and you see a tree instead of a collection of shapes. The shape gets definition as you try to mold it into the image you want. The same principle is applied in a song written in a specific key (which we will be getting into later in another post), if you know the “shape” of the key that’s forming the song you can recognize it like a rectangle in a tree, but its details are what define it as a specific song or image.
There are as many songs that use an E major scale as drawings that use a square. In the end you don’t see too many pictures with a single shape, a single square is a bit abstract to leave just that as it is, the artist molds the shape, there can be adjustments like making a couple of the corners rounded instead of the sharp edges and that’s just starting off points to adding more shapes as your goal image is being formed. As you get more comfortable drawing you won’t rely on the concept of the image on a shape-by-shape basis, instead opting for some free-hand drawing since you’ve gained the ability to skip the geometric visualization and into the real result you want. You know what a perfect square is, but you don’t want a perfect square in your drawing, it’s just reference shape to get you where you want to go to. When you’re working with music theory, you could get a base understanding of a single scale, going through multiple octaves, and create your freehand music that’s not going for a simple run through the “basic” shape (rectangle in drawing, E Major in music) but manipulation to create your art. In scales there are complementary shapes like E major and G minor, you might not see it but the more learned will. Do you Have to learn to use music theory? Absolutely not, for some the “right” notes just come logical without understanding, but learning it will help you develop your writing ideas when you’ve exhausted your trunk of ideas. If you don’t recognize that the tree you drew had a rectangle implied, that’s not a big deal, but the understanding of what is in your image helps you plan your future drawings/art.
Right here is, in my opinion, a fantastic video to get you introduced to how one can use what they’ve learned well enough to make the theory secondary to the song itself.
Bodacious Music 