BY SAM WURDEMANN
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF IN TRAINING

When you’re not up for it, music as a concept can be a pretty daunting task. It’s formed as math and works like a science. Every brain processes it in a different way. It takes all sorts of forms for all sorts of people. 

There are some professionals who spend way too much time thinking about this stuff and have devoted their lives to deciphering the building blocks that make music tick. The truth of the matter is, if it were an easy-to-define concept, we wouldn’t be wasting all this time trying to figure it out. However, in the chance that you find yourself willing to look into the theory of music, and are interested enough to learn about the pieces so that you might be able to use them yourself, consider this article to be an Introduction course from someone who took those musical puzzle pieces and put them together in the weirdest way possible. 

All music theory stems from the most basic unit of good-vibe sound: the notes. They’re the letters that form words and the numbers that form equations. You can walk over to a piano or pick up a guitar, and with a little help from the internet, you can locate any note ranging A through G. Between these notes, there’s also sharps and flats, which are like the half-step between two full notes. These can get confusing if you don’t know where they stem from, but the long and short of it is that some frequencies get to be letters and some get to be letters with a hashtag (that’s a sharp) or some other symbol (a flat), so we could easily find them all on a piano (hence the black keys; those are your sharps and flats. They’re arranged unevenly so every note might be easily located). 

The words these note letters form are called chords, and like words, they get progressively more complicated, and you make them by adding letter after letter until it sounds correct. The chord C Major is the simplest one you’ll ever be taught. If the C is the one of the chord, think of the E note as a three, and the G note as a five. One with three with five equals… a C Major Chord!  

Music Theory is all about analyzing chords. We look into which ones a composer will use, the order they use them, how they arrange them, and the effect they have musically. You could keep adding thirds onto that C Major, for example. Say you throw in a Bflat. This would be the seven of the chord. One plus three plus five plus seven equals C Major 7! Add the nine, C Major 9! Etc., etc., etc. 

Different variations of which numbers you put together lead to some very weird chords, just like there’s weird words– for every jentacular there’s an A#susdim11/C. Not all of them sound very good on their own, but in theory, anything can sound poignant with the right execution. 

Is any of this starting to make any sense? If you’d like to take a step further on your Music Theory journey, this playlist is a pretty good place to start. Hope I’ve put my brain into yours a little, and good luck makin’ them musics!