The official mad-at-theory thread

[SandChannel]

the boring answer to that question is that it depends. But I’ll be a little specific

Melodic improviser - Lester Young, Stan Getz, art pepper - soloing is about varying and paraphrasing the melody. May require little or no theory - ‘don’t tell me the changes’ (Lester Young) otoh this seems more the domain of horn players. That said all the good players seem to be good at doing this. Peter Bernstein advocates this as a way to work on improv.

Licks player - most of the second gen boppers tbh - cops a large amount of vocab from other player’s solos by ear. Theory required - I think you have to know the context of the phrase at least a little bit. In bop this had traditionally been done through the use of ii V licks. So, if a lick happens over a Dm7 G7 you do it over other instances of that progression. Otoh transposing ideas is also important. On the guitar this might not require much theory, might go along with grip.

Soloing out of shapes - the Charlie christian/herb Ellis approach. There are lines that are clearly just broken or embellished chord shapes. In this case it can be down right out of the grips. The more grips the player knows for a given chord the more they have to play. Very guitaristic! Theory? Probs not a lot. You have to know chords.

CST/Pattern based - Post Trane, Kurt Rsoenwinkel etc etc - learning lots of fancy modal patterns and applying to chords. Theory? A fair bit. You either have to know a lot of scales or be very good at applying a small number of scales to a lot of situations. You’ll probably be au fait with chord scales etc.

sure there’s more I’ve missed.

no one has to swear allegiance to just one approach.

Where would a player like Allan Holdsworth fall into this discussion? He clearly knows theory but has his own way of approaching it based his own personal experimentation/understanding.

[Christian Miller]

Where would a player like Allan Holdsworth fall into this discussion? He clearly knows theory but has his own way of approaching it based his own personal experimentation/understanding.

More like the last category

[Christian Miller]

I was actually suggesting that for only the self taught by ear folks, and not that they already know it but that the application of a relationship among existing structures was all that is missing. I was trying to make the distinction between learning from external references (lessons, methods) and learning by ear (self teaching). Both ways result in the appearance of new ideas/structures within oneself. The difference is that learning theory produces novel structures (unfamiliar, unconnected, requiring translation) awaiting adopting their place within a relationship structure (which may not be developed yet). Self learning by ear produces relationships among native structures that already exit (familiar, connected, direct) in the relationship structure.

These structures are not "little particles of musical substance" a la phrenology, nor stored passages of verbal/logic text, but general abstractions capable of supporting audition, vision, accounting, cosmology, and conversation with someone - we have all been absolutely full of these abstractions our whole lives.

When we learn external material we build new ones without connections, so we hunt for them because their identity is vague, have trouble remembering them because their location/categorization is vague, and don't know how to apply them because their relationships are yet to be established. They are like a new kids in the neighborhood that haven't made any friends yet.

When we self learn by ear producing internal relationships among exiting structures, we enjoy the connections, identities, locations, categorizations, relationships, and applications that already exist. These learned things are like a new perspective on familiar scenes.

I think I get your drift, but a specific example would really help me understand.

[Bobby Timmons]

It would be best to follow the learning process of some famous artist and ask him about the importance of theory in his jazz playing.
Was the theory used at the beginning of his musical education and then it lost its relevance.
Or the creative process allowed him to forget about theory in the next stages of his career as a jazz musician.
After all, a musician has certain habits, imagination and hearing.
Perhaps theory in the case of a jazz musician is important at the level of primary education.
You can often find jazz clinics where artists talk about jazz theory and listeners are beginner musicians.
But I messed up.

My teacher, one of the best jazz organists in the world, says he's always used theory but works it until he can play intuitively in performance. I also asked him if he thought most of his peers use theory and he said yes.

[Bobby Timmons]

Single notes represent several pitches, so perhaps you meant
to write, "if they don't call a single pitch by several note names"

No, I'm not trying to break down logic using semantics to push a dishonest narrative like you are.

[Christian Miller]

I'm not exactly familiar with AH's work.
But maybe it would be good to know his early interest in music. Who was his idol role model in his young age etc...?
What was he inspired by?

Allan is kind of a funny one. His main musical influences were afaik Coltrane and Debussy, but he name checked Jimmy Raney and when he started off he looked at some Charlie Christian solos. Completely self taught but with a dad who was a jazz musican.

As for his own playing… it doesn’t look like bop style jazz language in the usual sense - oh here’s an enclosure, here’s a triad, that type of thing. He developed his own approach and it’s all built around scales and symmetrical Slonimsky things…

[Bobby Timmons]

Where would a player like Allan Holdsworth fall into this discussion? He clearly knows theory but has his own way of approaching it based his own personal experimentation/understanding.

Holdsworth is theory to the extreme. But not exclusion of ear/intuition/musicality. Everyone likes to push the idea that they're exclusive of each other. They operate in parallel. Have you watched his lesson? He uses a crap load of altered scales to get his outside sound. But he also emphasizes being artistic and just going for it. Afaik, he made up his approach. He could have been influenced, but I'm not aware of anyone with that kind of harmonic approach.

[Christian Miller]

Everyone likes to push the idea that they're exclusive of each other

Who specifically on the forum has ever said this?

[Bobby Timmons]

If noone is pushing that anymore then great.

[kris]

This is very optimistic.

[Bobby Timmons]

He's 63 and has almost 50 years experience on jazz organ. He says he still works the theory in practice, it doesn't go away, but that he wants to be able to play intuitively in performance without thinking about the theory. He also says everyone wants to be able to play music that is more creative than just the theory.

[rpjazzguitar]

This note vs pitch thing confuses me. I can read, so I know that an F is also an E#, and a Gbb.

But, although I'm far from a great player, I managed to get this far without ever thinking about note vs pitch.

I flunked that quiz, but, somehow, I can still get through Out of Nowhere.

Did Wes think about that?

Is there any reason to accept that it's necessary?

I think the fundamental driver of this thread is the lack of a commonly accepted definition of "theory".

[kris]

This note vs pitch thing confuses me. I can read, so I know that an F is also an E#, and a Gbb.

But, although I'm far from a great player, I managed to get this far without ever thinking about note vs pitch.

I flunked that quiz, but, somehow, I can still get through Out of Nowhere.

Did Wes think about that?

Is there any reason to accept that it's necessary?

I think the fundamental driver of this thread is the lack of a commonly accepted definition of "theory".

jazz theory or theory?

[SandChannel]

Holdsworth is theory to the extreme. But not exclusion of ear/intuition/musicality. Everyone likes to push the idea that they're exclusive of each other. They operate in parallel. Have you watched his lesson? He uses a crap load of altered scales to get his outside sound. But he also emphasizes being artistic and just going for it. Afaik, he made up his approach. He could have been influenced, but I'm not aware of anyone with that kind of harmonic approach.

Yup! I have watched and studied a lot of Holdsworth's stuff. I was curious which group of players/theorists Christian would classify him as. He knows theory, but his understanding of it is from his own personal journey - it is not schooled in the traditional sense. If we can agree that theory is a type of language to explain music, AH has his own distinct dialect.

[pauln]

I think I get your drift, but a specific example would really help me understand.

Bob and Alice are in an external learning environment (school) doing their home work. In their physics class they were introduced to scalars (time, speed, mass) and vectors (velocity, acceleration, force). Bob has logged these new foreign conceptual structures in his mind hopefully awaiting understanding. He might barely pass the upcoming test but not have any insight into these things.

However, Alice immediately recognized these concepts as things she noticed a long time ago from playing soccer since a child. To her, these things always seemed simple because the score was like a location along a line, and the rest were all just locations of action in the plane of the soccer field or in space when the ball (or players) were airborne. She would do well on the test because she grasped the dimensional difference between scalars and vectors.

The next day at soccer practice, things start to sink in for Bob who notices that he has been using these new foreign concepts of time, speed, velocity, force, mass, and acceleration without formally knowing about them since he was a child. His sense of playing soccer had always been simply a focus on the score and the locations of the ball, the goal, himself, his team mates, and those of the opposing team. But now he grasped the dimensional nature that the score is like a location along a line and the rest all just locations of action in the plane of the soccer field or in space when the ball (or players) are airborne.

That evening studying Bob realizes that the scalars are like the score (one dimensional like the locations along a line), and realizes that the vectors are multidimensional like locations in a plane (2D), or in space (3D). Now his new concepts have familiar connected relationships, and he would answer even the difficult questions on the exam.

[Bobby Timmons]

This note vs pitch thing confuses me. I can read, so I know that an F is also an E#, and a Gbb.

But, although I'm far from a great player, I managed to get this far without ever thinking about note vs pitch.

I flunked that quiz, but, somehow, I can still get through Out of Nowhere.

Did Wes think about that?

Is there any reason to accept that it's necessary?

It's a red herring. All terms don't need to be specified to the n'th degree or it annuls the entire system. That's bs. That's like saying you don't play guitar if you don't call the e string the 1st string. Pure stupidity.

I think the fundamental driver of this thread is the lack of a commonly accepted definition of "theory".

Another red herring. Theory is explanation of music in language other than music. Who is so dense that they can't grasp something as basic as this?

[pauln]

This note vs pitch thing confuses me....Is there any reason to accept that it's necessary?

Anyone going the standard music theory route must get the standard music theory definitions of note and interval correct (this means learning to read music notation because the definitions come from that) or they will encounter trouble with the subsequent theory objects. This is a particular problem for guitarists who typically play first and look at theory later with the mistaken idea that they already know the correct definitions of note and interval. If you are starting theory, or have already started and hit the wall, go to page one, section one, part one... If your standard theory definitions are correct you don't need to know about ordinal and cardinal numbers, but if they aren't correct the difference between those kinds of numbers will make things incomprehensible.
But to play Jazz on the guitar, no; you can manage pretty far with the pitch based approaches, or go all the way by ear.

[rpjazzguitar]

Apparently, I can't define note and interval correctly, but, yet, I know a fair amount of theory. I have read and understood Levine and Nettles and Graf.

Where, when and how am I going to go awry?

As far as the definition of theory goes ... it's not using the word, it's defining who knows/uses theory and who doesn't. I probably wasn't clear enough about that.

So, to take my favorite example, Andres Varady said in a GP interview (he was on the cover) that he didn't know any theory whatsoever. He plays great. Somebody on here in a thread like this one said that he does know theory, even though he doesn't think so.

So, there's some question about the meaning of knowing theory.

[Bobby Timmons]

An example is EVH said screw the rules play what sounds good. So people like to say he knew no theory. Yet he studied music at Pasadena city college and is a distinguished grad lmao. Therefore he did know theory. Stuff like that. Not going to put words in people's mouth, you have to use inductive reasoning.

[ragman1]

An example is EVH said screw the rules play what sounds good. So people like to say he knew no theory..

Yes, well, it's precisely those who've been steeped in rules who say screw the rules!

[Bobby Timmons]

So, to take my favorite example, Andres Varady said in a GP interview (he was on the cover) that he didn't know any theory whatsoever. He plays great. Somebody on here in a thread like this one said that he does know theory, even though he doesn't think so.

I didn't know who he was so I looked him up on wikipedia. It says he's 25 and learned guitar from his dad starting at age 4. Those 2 facts alone are enough to suggest that he most likely knows theory. He grew up with the internet so he can absorb theoretical concepts extremely easily. And he was taught by his dad growing up. Unless his dad taught him through his whole upbringing, now put your fingers here and make sounds that go la la la, then he knows theory.

[pauln]

Apparently, I can't define note and interval correctly, but, yet, I know a fair amount of theory. I have read and understood Levine and Nettles and Graf.

Where, when and how am I going to go awry?

I don't know if your definitions are correct or not. Things can go awry when the lingo of the note and pitch worlds collide like so:

You tune your guitar in what people call "major thirds", but doing so you notice that it doesn't work because those people are using pitch based vs note based theory. The proper name for that tuning is "diminished fourths". The resulting pitches are enharmonic, but this is not just semantics - you will need an amazing electronic tuner and a very tight theory hat to keep track of major thirds rather than diminished fourths tuning...

Tuning in major thirds
E - G# - B# - D## - F### - A####
Tuning in diminished fourths
E - Ab - C - E - Ab - C <edit> correction: E - Ab - Dbb - Gbbb - Cbbb - Fbbbbb thanks to jazznylon!


The diminished seventh chord is stacked intervals of minor thirds
These resulting chords are enharmonic, but when stacking thirds it's important to actually be stacking intervals of thirds. This is not semantic, but essential for those hoping to use theory to examine or construct chords.

Stacking minor thirds using notes
C - Eb - Gb - Bbb (all these intervals are thirds)
Stacking minor thirds using pitch
C - Eb - Gb - A (that last interval is a diminished second, not a minor third or even a third of any kind)

[rpjazzguitar]

I don't know if your definitions are correct or not. Things can go awry when the lingo of the note and pitch worlds collide like so:

You tune your guitar in what people call "major thirds", but doing so you notice that it doesn't work because those people are using pitch based vs note based theory. The proper name for that tuning is "diminished fourths". The resulting pitches are enharmonic, but this is not just semantics - you will need an amazing electronic tuner and a very tight theory hat to keep track of major thirds rather than diminished fourths tuning...

Tuning in major thirds
E - G# - B# - D## - F### - A####
Tuning in diminished fourths
E - Ab - C - E - Ab - C


The diminished seventh chord is stacked intervals of minor thirds
These resulting chords are enharmonic, but when stacking thirds it's important to actually be stacking intervals of thirds. This is not semantic, but essential for those hoping to use theory to examine or construct chords.

Stacking minor thirds using notes
C - Eb - Gb - Bbb (all these intervals are thirds)
Stacking minor thirds using pitch
C - Eb - Gb - A (that last interval is a diminished second, not a minor third or even a third of any kind)

If I understand this, and I may not, it relates to the equal temperament scale, if I'm using that term correctly.

Most players are aware that the 12 tone scale involves some compromises to work in 12 keys. And, that perfect thirds sound sweeter than the usual on fretted instruments.

But, most jazz players live in a world of fretted guitars, (often) fretted basses, and keyboards. The vast majority of time is spent fully within that world, not near or beyond its edges. As a practical matter, I need to tune my guitar to the piano (or both to the same note electronically) and I do not need an "amazing" tuner to do that. If I tune it any other way for any other reason, it will be out of tune with the piano even more than usual.

If I were asked to tune in pure major thirds, I would encounter the same problems that caused the equal tempered scale to be adopted in the first place.

This material may be relevant to the theorist, or a string orchestra or some other context (dulcimer?), but it's peripheral to jazz guitar.

[pauln]

If I understand this, and I may not, it relates to the equal temperament scale, if I'm using that term correctly.

Most players are aware that the 12 tone scale involves some compromises to work in 12 keys. And, that perfect thirds sound sweeter than the usual on fretted instruments.

But, most jazz players live in a world of fretted guitars, (often) fretted basses, and keyboards. The vast majority of time is spent fully within that world, not near or beyond its edges. As a practical matter, I need to tune my guitar to the piano (or both to the same note electronically) and I do not need an "amazing" tuner to do that. If I tune it any other way for any other reason, it will be out of tune with the piano even more than usual.

If I were asked to tune in pure major thirds, I would encounter the same problems that caused the equal tempered scale to be adopted in the first place.

This material may be relevant to the theorist, or a string orchestra or some other context (dulcimer?), but it's peripheral to jazz guitar.

I'm going to write kinda long and then give this thread a rest for a while; I've two exciting new musical projects getting started this April.

OK, it has nothing to do with equal temperament; I mentioned that the two versions of tuning and the two ways to write the chords were enharmonic - they are all using the same pitches (frequencies) of equal temperament. The difference is between how notes and intervals are defined in standard music theory and how they are thought of informally within the general guitar playing community.

Standard music theory defines notes as the letter names of the space and line positions in the staff. It does not define them by pitch because those notes are not pitches, but subject to representing up to five different pitches if you limit the key signature to double accidentals. Notes are not pitches, they are staff location position names. The note does not change when accidentals are applied. All of Gbb Gb G G# and G## are G notes, or just "G", because they all reside for instance on the second line up from the bottom of the G cleff staff.

Standard music theory defines intervals as the distance between notes, so intervals are the distance between position locations in the staff, not pitch distances, because the notes can represent different pitches without changing position in the staff, therefore the difference in pitch distance can vary, but the distance between notes (staff positions) does not. This why the interval of C to G is a fifth, but so is Cb to G# and so is C# to Gb... as long as the notes (letter names of the staff positions) are five lines/spaces apart, and despite accidentals that change the pitch distance, the note distance remains the same and the interval is still a fifth (which will include a quality term to account for the pitch distance variance).

A guitarist that has been playing a while will have formed a keen sense of the pitch perspective of what is going on (the distinct pitches of the chromatic scale and the distinct pitch differences counted as semitone distance between pitches of the chromatic scale), but when he looks at theory he's liable to feel dizzy because his definitions of the basic things (pitches and pitch differences) are now mismatches to the theory's definitions of notes and intervals (which are not based on pitch and pitch distance) so the standard theory constructs won't make sense. Standard theory will present a completely different connected dimensionality that appears incoherent, paradoxical, and irrational - things won't make sense applying the pitch based definitions).

Some will say so what? Guitarists for practical reasons will use pitch based methods anyway and say it is all semantics. I myself don't use the standard theory definitions of note and interval whatsoever to play, compose, practice, perform, or do studio sessions - I don't use any named things at all.

But like you suggested, "theory" as in a Jazz sub-forum named "Theory" must certainly mean standard music theory, but within which it looks like the people here don't seem to be discussing that theory, or even the same other theory among themselves. I've mentioned before, many who claim they use theory aren't referring to the standard theory with the peculiar definitions of note and interval...

Recall that chord tones are 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 based on stacked thirds of notes, not pitches. The quality of chords comes from changing their pitches by applying accidentals to the notes which themselves do not change because they aren't pitches, they're staff locations. This preserves the stacked thirds interval structure across various chord types.

Similarly for diatonic scales that mysteriously always have each of the seven note names, none missing, none duplicated, that is a product of the concept of interval that ensures linear scale degrees in order to make diatonic scales form straight lines without the two half-step kinks on the staff in all keys (enforcing this with the application of key signatures). That is based on the note system of sequential lines and spaces, adjusted in pitch by the key signature.

Hope this all makes sense. The standard music theory is really profoundly coherent, amazing, and intellectually beautiful.

[kris]

An example is EVH said screw the rules play what sounds good. So people like to say he knew no theory. Yet he studied music at Pasadena city college and is a distinguished grad lmao. Therefore he did know theory. Stuff like that. Not going to put words in people's mouth, you have to use inductive reasoning.

EVH knew the theory but didn't use it.
I mean, he got his theoretical knowledge while studying at school, then he doesn't mess with his head.
Simply brilliant.