Music Theory is Just a Theory

*Producer Sandunes applies her rich traditional musicianship to synthesizers, Digital Audio Workstations, and other new avenues for creativity.*

Music theory, as taught in K-12 and higher education, is a brilliant system, but its rules were built around physical instruments, one per person. Strings stretched over fine woods, drums built to grumble through literal skin and bone, and reeds carefully carved to emit sound—all tuned to the same 12-note grid.

That system carried us far, but it is also a very small, privileged musical perspective that leaves a lot of people and genres out. Those acoustic bodies still resonate in grand halls, but our favorite artists don’t need the backing of hundreds of musicians anymore. Why? Because as technology allowed us to shift the dimensions in which we control sound, those artists opted to change their point of reference. To evolve it, no longer narrowed to a single set of rules for an orchestra.

All musicians today should be doing this–from the band rehearsal to the arena backstage. The truth is, the most meaningful way to make music today is to be able to embrace the traditional music theory as well as the new ones without names yet. The theories of playing with timbres, breathing new life into found materials, and digitally manipulating sound. Music theory does not tell you how to turn a kick drum into a bassline, morph noise into harmony, or sculpt near-silence into rhythm. It does not teach us how to turn a piece of software into our bandmate on stage.

In today’s YPG Blog we’ll explore just that, stepping beyond the narrow focus of traditional music theory by centering the studio as its own, non-acoustic instrument through the lenses of hip hop, pop and EDM.

The Studio as an Instrument

*YPG students in the studio making music.*

Music theory as we know it took inspiration from countless traditions in ancient human history to arrive at this arbitrary set of rules in Western Europe, to later spread throughout the world. But it’s time to redefine that music theory as just one of many different maps to bring your ideas to sound. With a laptop and a DAW, sound is no longer fixed, and you don’t need a band in front of you to explore the possibilities of blending unique timbres together.

There is a huge gap between the notes on the page and the way the sound actually hits on the record. Having control of the sound itself, to be able to sculpt the audio that your listener actually hears, opens up entire worlds of possibility and avenues for creativity inconceivable before the dawn of recorded music.

Take the 1997 classic “Breathe” by UK legends The Prodigy. Here is the song notated in MIDI. And here’s the song as it appeared on the landmark album “Fat of the Land". Both examples are of the same song, but the MIDI sounds pale in comparison to the impact of Liam Howlett’s masterful production. There is no way to completely capture the sound of kung-fu movie sword samples, rumbling sub bass, or Keith Flint’s distorted East London vocals with notation alone. Ambient music like the work of Brian Eno exists outside of traditional temporal understandings of music and noise musicians like Merzbow shred the whole thing and light it on fire. With a DAW, the whole concept of music itself is drawn into question. Check out this post on Instagram where we explore where the line is between music and noise (spoiler alert: there is no line!).

Today, musicians work with Digital Audio Workstations that function like meta-instruments, allowing them to play every instrument at once. Each time the playhead moves, the software performs the music by sending MIDI to instruments and reading through clips of audio. There are deep new systems for understanding the creative and technical processes at work in software like Ableton Live, Pro Tools, FL Studio, etc. Young Producers Group is just one of many creators making content to help people make the music they love.

Modern tools to master alongside the traditions

Below are the first electric tools that you should learn to utilize and put into dialogue with reeds, strings and skins:

Synthesizers generate waveforms with oscillators and provide infinite paths for manipulating sounds, greatly expanding the palette of sounds available to a composer, producer, or songwriter.
Samplers capture small elements of existing audio files to repurpose it in some way. Today you can reuse samples as an entirely new, playable instrument!
Digital Signal Processing transforms audio in ways that go far beyond extended techniques. In a DAW, you can add effects ranging from simple reverbs and delays all the way up to spectral denoisers and complex pitch and time correction tools.
Recording brings the physical world into the digital one. Recordings can be layered to create choruses of voices and instruments.
Editing audio and MIDI can open up whole new worlds of generating and manipulating musical material, getting you as close to or far from perfection as you’d like.

The traditional marks of musicianship focus on ones’ performance on an instrument, ability to hear what’s written on the staff, knowledge of key signatures and scales, etc.—none of the items listed above. The NAfME standards have four pillars: creating, performing, responding, and connecting. Performing gets the lionshare of the attention in schools. Creating is an equal part of the pie, but requires entirely different skills and tools. See below for two diagrams that show how traditional band, orchestra, and choir skills are still central to more modern forms of music literacy, but fundamentally different from those needed to be an engineer or a producer.

Learning the rules, to question them

The United States College Board has one set of music curricula approved for high school students to acquire university credit, which you can surely guess, is titled Music Theory. Compare this to five separate courses under the broad label of art programs and of course many more in English, sciences, history, mathematics and so on. The skills built within this course can set up a student for a successful start to a music-related undergraduate program, building a rigorous combination of visual, auditory, and performance foundations.

And yet, the College Board themselves describe this course with quite the absolute tone, that a student will “advance understanding of how music works by listening to a wide variety of music, reading musical scores, writing music, and singing.” We encourage students to note an important omission here, that music theory’s valuable lessons can teach us how some music works. Without this, we invalidate all music which does not fall into the category. We risk the skepticism or the writing off of emerging genres, which most often are rooted in elitism, sexism and racism.

Youtuber Adam Neely’s opening monologue here reflects a number of reasons why we use the term we use: shorthanding or overcrediting a select group of influential music movements, and who simply had the power to define terms in the first place. Once you understand the building blocks taught in that AP course, think about how you can take this further. What can a synth do that a cello can’t? How can I think of timbres in the way I think about notes in harmony? What sound I push to unrecognizable points, and how and when will I break it?

Looking for some artist recommendations to hear the studio as an instrument? Check out the most recent album by Salami Rose Joe Louis or anything by Holly Herndon, the latter of which referred to their laptop as “the most intimate instrument.”

EDM: Sound design & new hooks

*Skrillex in the studio where he pushes sound design to new heights.*

Let’s look at one of three key genre examples: EDM, which through ever-clever digital tooling pushes sound design to the front. Producers begin with the most basic of waveforms and noise before shaping them into drops, leads, and basslines.

Skrillex and other dubstep artists turned distorted growls into rhythmic hooks, challenging our expectation of a hook being highly melodic or tied to lyrics. Through non-physical instruments, the same euphoria of the listener can be reached.

But remember: we aren’t replacing theory, just blooming from it. This writer remembers the first time witnessing Big Gigantic’s take on this and thinking, we can do that? The acoustic elements of jazz and hip hop can meet EDM? More recently, this has been done in sometimes even peculiar ways with folk instrumentation. Estonia’s OOPUS and Italy’s Gaia Mobilij are literally up there with bagpipes, accordions and instruments most of us don’t know the name of, all under the EDM umbrella.

Hip Hop: Sampling & shifting tides

*J Dilla at the AKAI MPC, a sampler that he played with all of the finesse and virtuosity of the world’s greatest instrumentalists.*

We brought up hip hop’s early use of sampling, now something every producer should have in their tool kit. Sampling is now synonymous with music production, all thanks to early hip hop producers. They had a vision, finding ways to remove sonic fragments from records—often things like drum breaks, soul vocal licks or microseconds of a solo—and breathing new life into them. In a DAW, this tradition can be applied in exponential and new ways. Your knowledge of music theory can inform your approach, but not directly teach you how you set up a drum rack with all different kinds of samples, tuned to work with each other.

Hip hop as a genre has, however, always been about some form of transformation and representation. J Dilla was famous for his production and use of hardware samplers, but also for challenging our very assumptions of rhythm. He popularized and normalized dragging a rhythm section, intentionally placing rhythmic timbres slightly behind the beat. At first what can be unsettling becomes addicting, and can now be heard across every genre we’re listing today, such as Miley Cyrus’ new single “Something Beautiful.”

Pop: Sculpting Sound Beyond the Page

*Billie Eilish and Finneas making irresistible pop music that you want to listen to over and over again.*

Pop is most often looked at as an equation. It’s a machine, ready-made to produce hit after hit, which sound different enough from the last but are consistent enough to appeal to the masses. Yet it also thrives on reinvention. In the past, it relied on traditional harmony and hooks. Today, pop producers use new music theories to constantly surprise us. Switched on Pop is a resource worth checking out to connect pop music around the world to high-level music theory–showing that even though the genre can be eye-rolling or predictable at times, there’s often something deeper hiding for us to find.

Think of Billie Eilish and Finneas, whose whisper-like, restrained vocals layered with experimental textures captured a craving of listeners that we didn’t know existed. That level of intimacy and depth of mix couldn’t exist on staff paper alone, and is the result of thinking beyond one music theory.

Music as a practice of being ever-questioning

This generation of young producers isn’t limited to the staff, and their work would floor any 18th-century European composer. By arming ourselves with tools to bend sound into forms that a band cannot, we can normalize the joy that is questioning the rules. There is one popularized music theory, but we also want to hear your theories.

We hope wherever you learn, you learn to think outside the box, because Marilyn Monroe famously put it, "if I'd observed all the rules, I'd never have got anywhere."